"Hell is where everyone is doing his own thing. Paradise is where everyone is doing God's thing"
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Hell, in Thomas Howard's framing, isn't fire and pitchforks so much as a room full of self-curated playlists no one can hear but themselves. The line lands because it flips a familiar modern virtue - "do your own thing" - into a diagnosis. Autonomy, sold as liberation, becomes a spiritual solitary confinement. Everyone gets exactly what they want: the self as sovereign, preference as law, desire as compass. The punishment is built into the premise: a world of unshared purposes is a world with no common music.
Howard's second sentence risks sounding like propaganda until you notice the rhetorical move: "God's thing" isn't pitched as an external imposition but as a shared orientation that makes communion possible. Paradise, here, isn't individual bliss multiplied; it's coordination, consent, and harmony around a center that isn't any one person's ego. The subtext is anti-therapeutic in the contemporary sense: fulfillment doesn't come from intensifying the self but from being re-ordered, even diminished, in service of something transcendent.
As a Christian writer, Howard is also quietly arguing against the late-20th-century drift toward expressive individualism, where identity is treated as a private project and meaning as a personal brand. He compresses a whole theology of sin into a single social image: hell as radical independence, heaven as chosen dependence. It's an intentionally abrasive contrast, meant to make the reader feel how thin "freedom" can become when it has no telos beyond itself.
Howard's second sentence risks sounding like propaganda until you notice the rhetorical move: "God's thing" isn't pitched as an external imposition but as a shared orientation that makes communion possible. Paradise, here, isn't individual bliss multiplied; it's coordination, consent, and harmony around a center that isn't any one person's ego. The subtext is anti-therapeutic in the contemporary sense: fulfillment doesn't come from intensifying the self but from being re-ordered, even diminished, in service of something transcendent.
As a Christian writer, Howard is also quietly arguing against the late-20th-century drift toward expressive individualism, where identity is treated as a private project and meaning as a personal brand. He compresses a whole theology of sin into a single social image: hell as radical independence, heaven as chosen dependence. It's an intentionally abrasive contrast, meant to make the reader feel how thin "freedom" can become when it has no telos beyond itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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