Fridge Horror/Oral Tradition

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  • The traditional understanding of Hell is pretty much straight-up horror, often stated to be so horrible that what's actually in it beggars all description. The real Fridge Horror comes in understanding the philosophy and theology that justifies this. Basically, Hell is Laser-Guided Karma for the entire human race. What we could have done to deserve this is not the right question; the categories and consequences of the sins committed are irrelevant. What justifies Hell is what we are. Infamous tyrants such as Hitler and Stalin, for all their notoriety, would have been relatively petty and unknown sinners had others not given them massive influence and power over the lives of millions and freed them from the majority of the adverse social consequences of their evil deeds.The vast majority of even the most benign and benevolent people you know, in the same position, would commit the very same kinds of atrocities they did. Given an eternity to develop human nature, we hypothetically might be able to develop a Hell all by ourselves.
    • Combined with a point made in the Karma Houdini's Oral Tradition section, this also adds a certain kind of fridge horror to salvation: some of your fellow monstrosities, including some you've wronged and some who've wronged you, are going to escape this fate you and they all so richly deserved. How are you going to be able to get along with each other?
  • The thought of any eternity (even including Heaven) is Fridge Horror to some, as explained at length in many examinations of "Who Wants to Live Forever?" In eternity, this is no longer merely a hypothetical question. By many accounts, you cannot cease to exist there. If you had nothing you could think to do there, boredom by itself would be a terrible and inescapable torment. This has been the basis for not only many theological treatises, but many not-so-traditional depictions of Hell in fiction, such as the Ironic Hell and the Self-Inflicted Hell.
    • You could make the argument that if you were in actual heaven, it by nature will not allow or have room for one to become bored, and when I say "not allow" I don't mean unwillingly.
    • That is really a big if. one would have to have about no artistic imagination or socail skill whats so ever to find themself in that kind of situation. just considering the amount people in heaven and that there are next to no limits to the things a person can do. wrost case scenario it would no more boring than ever day life on earth. hell on the other hand was meant to be that way.
      • Just because you can do anything doesn't mean you might not become extremely bored by your own decisions. The only afterlife that might be tolerable is a Mundane Afterlife (not too good, not too bad), if and only if, if you do get bored, you can leave and be reincarnated or something.
      • That would really depend on what version of heaven one is referring too. and as mention before it also depends on the creativity the person(some religion even depict human can even creating their own worlds as well as being able to visited others and as well being able to see happens around the whole universe)and if that’s the case it's really a Self-Inflicted Hell . Many religions even say that heaven isn't for eternity like Christianity for example. And is not really likely reincarnation would really solve the problem without opening up a whole nother can of worms
  • Just to round out the possibilities, however, the Cessation of Existence is also thoroughly horrible to contemplate: what does anything you do matter if someday you will no longer be around to appreciate any of the consequences of it? Why should anyone refuse to pursue all of his cruelest and most destructive desires if good and evil and everything in between all face the same ultimate reward? The majority of humans aren't Nietzsche, it's understandable they'd rather choose a shallow description of eternity.
  • In the Bible, Jesus casts the demons out of a man who calls himself Legion, because there are many demons in his body, driving him insane. When the demons are cast out, they possess a herd of pigs and force them to drown themselves. This passage is disturbing enough on its own, and gets more disturbing when you remember there were an estimated two thousand pigs in that herd. Assuming (by a conservative estimate, yet!) there was just one demon for each pig, Legion had two thousand demons in his body. The townspeople were understandably terrified at the spectacle alone, not to mention the economic loss, and might have been more frightened still if they'd understood what caused it.
  • At the very beginning of The Old Testament, Adam and Eve are the first humans (if you don't believe Lilith existed). They had sexual intercourse and had children. Now think about this: If Adam, Eve, and their children are the only humans in existence, then how did later humans come to be? Logic dictates that the only available humans must have had intercourse with each other. The answer: Incest. Lots and lots of incest.
    • It doesn't stop with them. Supposedly, in the story of Noah and The Ark, Noah and his family were the only ones not wiped out by the flood. Here we go again...
      • Noah cursed his son Ham for "seeing his father's nakedness" as Noah had fallen in drunken stupor in his tent. The fridge horror is, of course, that "seeing someone's nakedness" is a Hebrew euphemism for sexual intercourse... Ham had effectively raped his pig-drunken father in the tent.
      • Nitpick: Noah didn't curse Ham. He cursed Canaan.
    • This assumes incest was always a bad thing. If Adam and Eve, being the first humans, were considered by God to be "very good" (morally/genetically perfect?) as created, what is wrong with their having sexual relations? Assuming neither God nor anyone else had any moral qualms against it, their genes were perfect, and the Westermarck Effect didn't exist, one can produce no logical objection to the earliest generations having sex with their siblings, only an emotional reaction born of modern concerns.
    • Actually, that's not far from reality. Everyone outside of Africa has descended from one group of people who left Africa. Current estimates say that the group might have been as few as 150 people. Most of us come from one tribe
      • Actually, reading the Bible will show that the children of Adam and Eve had wives. It's entirely possible that pre-banishment God created more humans in the Garden of Eden. It's never directly stated that God created Adam and Eve, then left it there.
        • Many Abrahamic derived sources claim that Adam and Eve had three sons (Able, Cain, and Seth) and something like 16 daughters. However, until Cain finds his wife after Able's death, there was no mention that he had ever met them; their wives were, most likely, their sisters. That said, the statute of Jews not marrying their siblings was not put into effect much later.
  • The concept of predestination in the Calvinist denominations. It states that God will know His own, and has selected them to Heaven and nothing can change that selection. But that also implies that God has also pre-selected those who are bound to Hell, and there is nothing anyone can do to avoid that fate. So salvation is basically a grand lottery, and majority of the humankind is destined to Hell anyway. The purpose of life is to produce fuel in Hell.
  • Christians believe that the only way to get into heaven is through Jesus. That the one and ONLY way to get into heaven is by accepting Jesus into your life and following his teachings. What about the people who came before Jesus? Or the ones who've never even heard of him? What becomes of them? Poor Buddha!
    • Tradition states that those Jews pre-Jesus who were faithful to God were ascended at the Resurrection of Christ. Also, Catholic Orthodoxy states that good non-Christians go to Limbo, where there are merely sighs, not torments. Although, Limbo isn't a real dogma of the Catholic church (but it isn't contrary to the Catholic churth either).
      • Limbo is somewhat of a Nightmare Retardant. Hell is a bad place to go, and Heaven has its problems. Limbo is neither a place of torment or a Crap Saccharine World, and you won't get bored from paradise.
      • Limbo was never a part of Catholic orthodoxy to begin with. While Paradise Lost was adapted by the papacy as Word of God, the Divine Comedy, including Purgatorio(aka Limbo) was adapted as, well...
      • Nope, Purgatory is a Catholic doctrine way earlier than Dante.
      • Purgatory is different from Limbo. Purgatory is the canon (official doctrine) place where souls are purified before heaven. Everyone who will go to heaven spends time in Purgatory. It is believed that prayers of the living can shorten the length of time spent in Purgatory. Limbo was a theory of where the souls who couldn't come to heaven and didn't deserve hell went. Limbo is only one possibility and was never canon.
    • In Romans 2, Paul writes about gentiles who were ignorant of the law but nonetheless were faithful to it through their actions. Many Christians believe this also applies to those ignorant of Christ, as in a person who does not intellectually know of Jesus, but nonetheless seeks God in his heart and seeks and does what is right will be shown mercy.
  • Much of one's understanding of the above depends on how one interprets various parts of Scripture such as (particularly) Genesis and Revelation. How something should be interpreted depends on how it is written. History is history. Parable is parable. Vision is vision. Visions can be hard to understand, particularly on first glance. If, say, the apostle John saw the modern world in his vision, how on earth would he describe it? Most of what we have didn't even exist at the time in any way shape or form, and the future is only going to get weirder from his perspective.
  • Greek Mythology: The premise behind the story of King Midas. A rare example of canonical Fridge Horror. It's like, "OK, everything you touch will turn to gold... but what happens when you try to eat?"
    • Here's some non-internal Fridge Horror: by turning everything he touches into gold, he is gradually devaluing the price of gold. Eventually, he could create so much gold as to make it worthless, so Midas' power would not only make him unable to eat if he survived that long, but he also would turn everything he touched into worthless baubles.
  • Norse Mythology: The earth was apparently made from the corpse of Ymir, the first frost giant (soil from his flesh, rocks from his teeth, grass from his stubble, etc). This means that Ymir was at least as big as the planet, and probably bigger.
    • And clouds from his brain, according to some versions. You decide if the fact that such a being apparently had water vapor for brain lessens or increases the horror.
  • Think about the Christian God for a second. It is an all-knowing, all-powerful, self-paradoxical, incomprehensibly inconceivable entity that exists at every point in space and time, literally existed before the beginning of time and is eternal being the beginning and the end of all time and all of history, plus on top of that he never changes and is the same yesterday, today, and forever despite changing his ideas every chapter and then, and beyond all human reason, indeed our very reason is powerless before Him. It likely will never die, and could likely claim that it had been around since the dawn of eternity, and created the universe and us for who-knows-what-purpose", and predetermines your very fate. Any single thought of deviance? Your achievements, no matter how good or bad, no matter how grand or small or of any value whatsoever, doesn't matter, you get And I Must Scream in eternal hellfire for all eternity, but then again, doing the other thing gets you nothing more than "Who Wants to Live Forever?". The Holy Books that describe him and his appearances in A Form You Are Comfortable With still inspire self-contradictory madness and terror on both sides. Yup, George Orwell meets H.P. Lovecraft.
    • Your Mileage May Vary very much. For one thing, many religions and people have their own definitions of who God is and what he does that do not entirely agree with the description above.
    • So, basically life is a "Saw" movie, only much larger in scope and more horrifying. Same goes for the gods of Judaism and Islam, by the way.
  • Most of you are probably familiar with the free will argument - that humans must have free will to do evil lest we be mindless drones or somesuch. Now, remember how in Revelation, God's supposed to come down to Earth and rule it forever and ever in a new Jerusalem? Houston, we have three problems:
    • Yahweh maintains peace forever by removing everyone's free will to sin, which negates the free will argument altogether or...
    • Yahweh leaves free will intact but removes the desire to sin, something he could have done a long time ago to spare untold billion from endless torture, or...
    • There's nothing to keep people from launching another rebellion against Yahweh. After endless years of existence doing the same thing over and over (that is, praising Yahweh), you might be one of the rebels.
      • For the first problem, sin exists apart from free will as human nature/instinct. The second problem is accurate, but shows a lack of understanding; God chose not to reverse sin immediately to prove that humans need him, and wasn't necessarily obligated to fix our ancestors' mistakes. The third problem is part inaccurate, part legitimate Fridge Horror. On one hand, Christians don't believe they'll be doing the same thing over and over. On the other hand, according to the Millenialist interpretation of Revelation, humans will join Satan and rebel against God after a thousand years of paradise. However, God would have no need to let inherited sin perpetuate itself a second time and would instead kill the rebels immediately; although that might relieve the unborn, it would make the Fridge Horror for the potential rebels arguably worse.

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