From a relatively outside view (my upbringing was semi-secular Jewish), belief in heaven and hell is really strong stuff for some proportion of people—I’m not sure how high the proportion is, but people can make themselves acutely miserable from fear of hell and/or fear of not getting into heaven.
To be fair to Mormons, they don’t have the concept of an eternal hell like most Christian fundamentalists. There is something called “outer darkness”, but you’d have to work really, really hard to get there—like, harder than Hitler.
To be fair, some people can also make themselves acutely miserable from fear of not being asked to the prom. It’s hard to overestimate people’s ability to make ourselves acutely miserable; it’s not entirely clear to me that the causes we attribute that misery to are at all causal to it.
From a relatively outside view (my upbringing was semi-secular Jewish), belief in heaven and hell is really strong stuff for some proportion of people—I’m not sure how high the proportion is, but people can make themselves acutely miserable from fear of hell and/or fear of not getting into heaven.
To be fair to Mormons, they don’t have the concept of an eternal hell like most Christian fundamentalists. There is something called “outer darkness”, but you’d have to work really, really hard to get there—like, harder than Hitler.
To be fair, some people can also make themselves acutely miserable from fear of not being asked to the prom. It’s hard to overestimate people’s ability to make ourselves acutely miserable; it’s not entirely clear to me that the causes we attribute that misery to are at all causal to it.