How and why churches use fear in opposing the right to die.

Most Christian authorities tell us that suicide is wrong. The Catholic Church has long referred to suicide as the ultimate sin for the simple fact that once you’re dead you’re no longer able to ask for forgiveness. Specifically, you’re no longer able to ask for forgiveness from someone authorized to give absolution, such as a priest. Protestants have largely done away with confession and absolution as practiced by Catholics, but the premise remains.

Few people, however, stop to ask, “Forgiveness for what, exactly?” For the answer to that question, we must go back to a time when a person’s station in life was determined by the circumstances of one’s birth.

At the top of the heap was royalty. If you were born into a royal family, you had at least some chance of one day becoming the ultimate ruler of your country or tribe. At the very least, you didn’t want for much because most of your daily needs were met by others.

In the feudal system of medieval Europe, one step down from royalty was the nobility. The king gave land to certain men in exchange for their promise to fight in defense of the kingdom. These “noble” men typically had the title of lord. His estate was called a manor, and the owner was thus lord of the manor.

At the bottom of the social structure were serfs, who worked and lived on land owned by the lord of the manor. Some were free, but most were considered property. To kill a serf was to steal from the lord, even if the person doing the killing was also the victim. A crime against a noble was by extension a crime against the king – in other words, a crime against the state.

On an episode of the TV series Boston Legal, the lawyer played by James Spader argued about “the state’s interest” in keeping someone alive who wanted to die. What, exactly, is the “state’s interest” in whether someone lives or dies?

Answer: Dead people don’t pay taxes.

In most countries, there is no separation of church and state. In addition to paying taxes to the king or noble, each person was required to donate ten percent of their labor or produce to the church. (This is where the term “tithe” comes from, which means tenth.) In order to maintain the taxation levels that supported the church, clergy supported the illegality of suicide. The more people there are to pay taxes, the better the lifestyle of the clergy.

Kings, emperors, nobles, presidents, senators, governors – indeed, all government officials and the associated bureaucracies – depend on taxation for their survival. Many people willingly pay their taxes because they appreciate the services those taxes fund, such as police and roads. But for those who don’t pay their taxes willingly, government can forcibly seize them, using violence if necessary. It is the threat of that violence that lies behind the coercive power of government.

One of the unique characteristics of the United States at its founding was the separation of church and state. Since the government does not directly fund churches, clergy must depend on voluntary donations for their survival. (One could argue that the government provides financial support through taxpayer-subsidized “faith-based” grants, school vouchers, and tax breaks available only to churches.)

Without the coercive power of government to enforce voluntary donations, church authorities must find other means to encourage generous giving by its members. One way it does that is through the fear of spending eternity in hell.

For centuries, the church has used fear of eternal damnation to convince believers that ending one’s own suffering will result in torture beyond comprehension for the rest of time. But what is the biblical basis for an eternal damnation of fire and brimstone?

There is no such basis. The notion of a fiery afterlife full of torture was not a core teaching of Christianity until the fifth century after Jesus’ crucifixion. Tertullian introduced the idea in the third century but Augustine greatly expanded it. Both were theologians in Roman North Africa. Together, they misinterpreted and conflated several Hebrew and Greek words, most notably the Hebrew word sheol and the Greek words Gehenna, Hades, and aion.

Sheol was originally understood in the Hebrew scriptures as “a dark place where the dead went.” In the Old Testament, Gehenna was a place just south of Jerusalem where the kings of Judah sacrificed children to the Canaanite god Molech. In Jesus’ time, it was essentially Jerusalem’s municipal garbage dump, where fires burned continually to consume whatever was discarded there.

Jesus never spoke of an eternal hell, and he would have no reason to think of the soul as being separate from the body. That concept was not part of the Judaic tradition, rather it was borrowed from Greek philosophers, especially Plato. Both Tertullian and Augustine studied Plato and began to merge Greek philosophy and mythology into Christian doctrine. Ironically, Augustine openly admitted struggling to understanding Greek (he said he hated it), but that didn’t stop him from teaching Neoplatonism.

The Greek aion (from which we get “eon”) is most accurately translated as “age,” as in the Age of Aquarius or the Information Age. There is no record of it being translated as “eternity” in Greek works outside the letters that became the New Testament. The concept of an eternal soul was not part of Jewish scriptures or Jesus’ teachings.

In Greek mythology, Hades was the god of the dead and king of the underworld. Jesus likely knew at least conversational Greek since it was the common language throughout the Middle East during his life, but there is no record of him speaking about Hades.

In 400 AD, the priest commonly known as Jerome translated scripture into the Latin Vulgate. Heavily influenced by the works of Augustine and Tertullian, the Vulgate became the definitive and most influential text in Western Europe for a millennium. It was the only version of the Bible known to most Western Christians throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The phraseology and wording of Jerome’s Vulgate became widespread among English speakers thanks to James I of England commissioning his “authorized” translation, commonly known as the King James Bible.

Another mistranslation became a central part of Protestant teachings. The Greek pisteos Christou can mean either “faith in Christ” or “faith(fulness) of Christ” due to an ambiguity in Greek syntax. Martin Luther removed that ambiguity by using the German phrase den Glauben an Jesus Christus, which can only mean faith or belief in Jesus Christ. If the original Greek had been universally translated as “faith of Christ,” Christianity might not exist as a separate religion. After all, the faith of Jesus was Judaism. Curiously, pisteos Abraam has been consistently translated as “faith of Abraham.”

In the resulting Latin and English translations, sheol, Gehenna, and Hades where all mistakenly translated as hell, and aion as forever or eternal. And because of Martin Luther, the way to avoid hell changed — at least for Protestants — from doing good deeds to merely believing in Jesus as savior from that fate.

That’s how an eternal hell of fiery torment became part of church doctrine. But it doesn’t speak directly to why.

It’s quite simple, really. The church uses the fear of hell for the same reason that suicide was illegal:

Dead people don’t pay taxes and they don’t give money to the church.

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P.S. Another common misconception perpetrated by the church is that Jesus was poor, and therefore his followers should be poor (so give more money to the church). There are at least four reasons to think otherwise.
1) According to the Gospel of John, Jesus’ tunic was woven in one piece, without a seam. A seamless robe was expensive to make.
2) He is often thought of as a “simple carpenter,” but the Greek word tekton traditionally translated as carpenter also connotes builder. He was not stuck in Joseph’s home shop relegated to making tables, as is often depicted in art, but was most likely involved in major construction projects. As such, he was likely in the 90th percentile of income.
3) Jesus’ ministry was at least partly financed by Mary Magdalene, who was from one of the wealthiest families in the region.
4) His entourage had enough money for one of his disciples to be designated as treasurer. It could be argued that one person was designated to keep the money in order to avoid squandering what little they had. If so, the logical choice would be the person with unquestionable loyalty. It was Judas.