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I take the idea that we’re already in hell, or some hell-like shithole planet, pretty seriously. I don’t have a list of verses to this effect but you see this kind of thinking all over scripture; “the world” is “in darkness,” “they know not,” “you will die like men, and fall like the princes,” “spiritual wickedness in high places,” “how thou art fallen from heaven, lucifer, cast down to earth!” and so on and so on. These insinuations that Earth is basically hell, or the domain of the devil, or whatever you want to call it, is replete in scripture. It’s something you see over and over again, permutations of it.

And that’s only touching the scripture that Orthodoxy recognizes. If you’re willing to get into things like the various Gnostic texts or the Mormon scriptures, whoooo boy, that idea gets pounded home even harder. I feel like the early church was really putting in a lot of effort to keep a lid on this idea, and what we see in the “canonized” texts are things that slipped through the cracks.