God & Hell: God or Hungry Ghosts

This is the second part of a four-part series addressing the question, “Is the idea of hell – an eternity of suffering apart from God – compatible with the idea of an all-good and loving God?” Yesterday, the focus was on the fact that we have an infinite craving for the good, and that everything we do is in pursuit of the good. Today, I want to consider a consequence of that fact:

II. God or Hungry Ghosts

Perhaps everything I said yesterday sounds depressing: we go through life constantly craving the good, and yet none of the goods of this life satisfy that craving. And you’re right. If atheists are right, and this is all that there is, reality really does seem to be a sick joke. The closest analog is perhaps that of the “hungry ghost” (“preta”) in Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese mythology. These are the souls of the damned, often depicted with enormous stomachs and pinhole-sized mouths. The idea is, as the 4th-century B.C. Tibetan Petavatthu explains:

Suffering hunger and thirst in another world, the petas for a long time lament, since they are in torment. Because they have done deeds of grievous consequence, they receive suffering as their bitter fruits; For momentary are wealth and property; fleeting is the life here on earth ; knowing transience from the transient, let the wise man prepare an island of refuge.

The disproportion between their mouths and stomachs illustrates that they can never be satisfied. There’s a similar theme in the punishment of Erysichthon in Greek mythology (this is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses):

Grim Famine hastened to obey the will of Ceres, though their deeds are opposite, and rapidly through ether heights was borne to Erysichthon’s home. When she arrived at midnight, slumber was upon the wretch, and as she folded him in her two wings, she breathed her pestilential poison through his mouth and throat and breast, and spread the curse of utmost hunger in his aching veins. [….]

In a dreamful feast he worked his jaws in vain, and ground his teeth, and swallowed air as his imagined food; till wearied with the effort he awoke to hunger scorching as a fire, which burned his entrails and compelled his raging jaws, so he, demanding all the foods of sea and earth and air, raged of his hunger, while the tables groaned with heaps before him spread; he, banqueting, sought banquets for more food, and as he gorged he always wanted more. The food of cities and a nation failed to satisfy the cravings of one man. The more his stomach gets, the more it needs—even as the ocean takes the streams of earth, although it swallows up great rivers drawn from lands remote, it never can be filled nor satisfied. And as devouring fire its fuel refuses never, but consumes unnumbered beams of wood, and burns for more the more ’tis fed, and from abundance gains increasing famine, so the raving jaws of wretched Erysichthon, ever craved all food in him, was only cause of food, and what he ate made only room for more.

Our hearts seem to be a bit like this: despite our constant craving, we can never be fully satisfied, and the very act of trying to satiate the hunger just seems to make the cravings more intense. This ends up destroying us in the end, as it did Erysichthon. The Buddhist response (like the Stoic one) is to try to stop craving, by detaching ourselves from all desire. That’s one response, but it’s ultimately a doomed one: even the decision to attempt that, like all decisions, is rooted in pursuit of the good. So we can never fully realize freedom from desire, no matter how much we may desire it.

A second response is to simply distract or delude ourselves. If you’re hungry, and know you can’t eat for a few more hours, what do you do? Try to focus on something else, or try to tell yourself that you’re not really hungry. And so much of modern culture is built upon creating a “culture of distraction,” as Google Ventures’ Joe Kraus put it back in 2012 (before these things got even worse):

Look at how internet access has changed since smart phones came into being (and this data is a year old, so I’m certain it’s even more in this direction). In the pre-smartphone era we accessed the internet roughly five times per day, in longer chunks. Today, with smartphones, we’re accessing it 27 times a day. The effect of all of this is that we’re increasingly distracted. Less and less able to pay attention to anything for what used to be reasonable length of times.

The funny part about distraction is that it’s a worsening condition. The more distracted we are, the more likely we are to get distracted.Some people call switching our attention between things that vie for it “multi-tasking”. Like we’re a computer with dual cores running two simultaneous processes.

Except that we’re not. Numerous brain imaging studies have shown that what we call “multi-tasking” in humans, is not multi-tasking at all. Your brain is merely trying to rapidly switch it’s attention between two tasks. Back and forth, as quickly as it can. It’s shown not only that we’re dumber when we do this (an average of 10 IQ points dumber – that’s the same as pulling an all-nighter), but that we’re also 40% less efficient at whatever it is we’re doing.

Of course, this doesn’t really solve the problem: it just ignores it. But what if there’s a third possibility… some good actually capable of satisfying that infinite chasm?

Tomorrow: Why to believe in God as the infinite and perfect Good, who alone can fill the chasm of our hearts.