HELL: OUR FEAR AND FASCINATION

The title of last night's episode of 20/20 was HELL: OUR FEAR AND FASCINATION. I don't think it was a coincidence that it aired on Friday the 13'th. It was quite the eclectic show, including a brief interview with Marilyn Manson who said when asked if he thought he was going to hell, "I'm going to say it would probably be a more comfortable place for me because everyone I know would be there and I wouldn't really be allowed to do anything in heaven that would be any fun." This will probably show both my age and my naivete but what's up with his eyes anyway? He must surely wear some kind of special contacts. Nobody has eyes that weird.

There was a very brief interview with Miriam Van Scott, author of The Encyclopedia of Hell who thinks we are moving away from a belief in hell since there have been so many horrific humanitarian disasters that it is hard to imagine there could be anything worse.

Matthew Dove told of his near death experiences...BOTH of them. Once when he almost drowned as a child and again, decades later, when he was tired of addictions and living and wished to return to the euphoric place (heaven) he visited briefly as a child. He ended up in what he deems "hell" although, interestingly, there was no fire or torture. Perhaps a more empathetic experience than anything else, in that he distinctly felt the pain and suffering his suicide caused both in the "present" and in the future when he saw his daughter on the floor, contemplating suicide because of the pain his own suicide caused her. He woke up the next morning in his own bed with no memory of how he'd gotten there, and after that experience he radically changed his life .

There was also a segment called the Face of Evil. It dealt with many of the names and faces associated with evil (Dahmer, Charles Manson, Bundy, etc.) and a new face, the face of Ulysses Handy III. A former boy scout and altar boy who is the ultimate Bad Seed . Anyone remember that movie? He expressed no remorse whatsoever for the crime of killing three people because one of them implicated him in the theft of an expensive jacket. His sobbing mother begged the families of the victims for forgiveness but Ulysses taunted them in court telling them to "get over it."

There were also interviews with 3 people who endured hell on earth:

Sister Diane Ortiz says she was brutally raped and tortured in Guatemala 20 years ago after being mistakenly suspected of supporting rebel fighters. Ishmael Beah, a child soldier in Sierra Leone, was forced to murder his own countrymen during a brutal civil war and Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor.

There was also an interview with Carlton Pearson. Most people know that Carlton was the extremely popular charismatic preacher, endorsed by Oral Roberts, who came upon the truth of UR in the scriptures. He told his congregation of thousands his new belief thinking that they would welcome his revelations. People fled in droves and left him with a congregation of several hundred. He continues to preach his message of inclusion at a rented church. His congregation is small, but growing. I have so much respect for a man who can walk away from all that fame (although he readily admits that if he had known what was coming he might have had second thoughts of sharing this message) I find my beliefs line up with his quite a bit. Even where he differs from my more conservative universalist brothers, I find his beliefs more closely coincide with mine. But I am a liberal....ever erring on the side of the path less traveled. No wonder I like Carlton so much.