48 | Marq de Villiers on Hell and Damnation

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.7 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2019

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you're bad, we are taught, you go to Hell. Who in the world came up with that idea? Some will answer God, but for the purpose of today's podcast discussion we'll put that possibility aside and look into the human origins and history of the idea of Hell. Marq de Villiers is a writer and journalist who has authored a series of non-fiction books, many on science and the environment. In Hell & Damnation, he takes a detour to examine the manifold ways in which societies have imagined the afterlife. The idea of eternal punishment is widespread, but not quite universal; we might learn something about ourselves by asking where it came from. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Marq de Villiers was born in South Africa and now lives in Canada. He has worked as a reporter in a number of locations, from Cape Town to London to Moscow to Toronto. His books cover a variety of topics, many on history and ecology. He has been named a Member of the Order of Canada and awarded an honorary degree from Dalhousie University, among other accolades. Web site Amazon page Wikipedia Talk on the state of the world's water

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:02.6	I'm your host Sean Carroll and today we are going to hell.
0:06.8	I'm sure that some listeners or at least some people who know about the podcast have
0:10.2	long been convinced that I personally am going to hell, but today we'll take a slightly
0:14.4	more academic or at least scholarly look at the idea of what hell is, where it came
0:20.4	from, why it came to be, what's supposed to be going on there, what people think about
0:25.2	it right now.
0:26.2	Today's guest, Mark DeVillier, is a Canadian writer.
0:29.9	He's written nonfiction books about many different things, about history, about politics,
0:34.4	about the environment, about ecology, and for whatever reason, he decided to become interested
0:39.8	in the idea of hell.
0:41.9	Now, maybe very, very clear, because I know we have a broad audience.
0:46.1	This is a conversation between two people who are completely convinced that hell is not
0:50.4	real, okay?
0:51.8	We're not actually sitting down and wondering whether or not hell might really exist.
0:56.6	We both kind of take for granted that it doesn't.
0:58.3	And I know that not everyone agrees with that.
1:00.2	So apologies if we're not speaking to you about this issue, but from this point of view
1:05.0	of someone who doesn't believe in hell, the fact that so many people do is fascinating,
1:10.5	right?
1:11.5	Why did we invent this?
1:12.5	Like what was it about human nature that made us think that there should be a place where
	...

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