Stephen Colbert on Hell

Today I was thinking about an interview I heard with Stephen Colbert on NPR's Fresh Air where he talked about his religious beliefs, and I thought it would make a good post here. LINK

This is my own transcript of the interview.

TERRY GROSS: You satirize religious extremes so much on your show that a lot of people assume that you’re not religious, but of course you’re a Catholic, you go to church, you’re raising your children in the faith – What do you tell them about God? Like, what do you tell them God is?

STEPHEN COLBERT: Um, Hmm… That’s interesting. I don’t know if any of them have asked me what God is. I’ve taught a couple years of CCD, it’s Sunday School in Catholicism, and I think the answer that God is love is pretty good for a child, because children understand love. And, you know, I don’t want to get too much more complex than that with a second grader.

TG: Yeah, but then there’s like the plagues and stuff…

SC: (laughs) Well… Well… There is the plagues! There is the plagues and stuff! My son asked me one day, “Dad, what’s Hell?” At first I asked “Why do you want to know?” , because I wanted to know whether somebody had condemned him to Hell. And he goes... He had heard the term, and he wanted to know what Hell was.

And so I said, “Well, you know, if God is love, then Hell is the absence of God’s love. And, you know, can you imagine how great it is to be loved? Can you imagine how great it is to be loved fully? To be loved totally? To be loved, you know, beyond your ability to imagine it? And imagine that you knew that that was a possibility. And then that was taken from you, and you knew that you would never be loved. Well that’s Hell. To be alone and know what you’ve lost.