The second circle of hell. We have made it past the pagans and into the real torture, I guess. According to the summary that I read, the second circle is the result of carnal sin. Since carnal sin is love, albeit misguided it barely qualifies the worst of things a person could do according to Dante.

I suppose the thing that I don’t totally understand is what exactly is ‘carnal sin’. Before I went looking for a definition, I would understand it to be wanton infidelity. Or, I could have speculated that it was a premarital or an extramarital sexual relationship. All I could really find was the definition of carnal being passion, of the body and that kind of stuff. What I am saying is that I really don’t understand what you have to do to get to the second level of hell.

Interestingly enough there were a few recognizable names here. The first and biggest was Cleopatra. As far as I have heard, she was a was a woman of ‘passion’. That being said, I didn’t know her to be a woman of ill repute. One of the other people that was there was a person named Dido. She was apparently married but fell in love with someone else. She killed herself when he was sentenced to death (actually suicide is a much more severe sin, not sure why she got level 2).

Even if it is simply lust as on another analysis I read, it is not our place question. Do you remember “Thou shalt not covet another man’s wife”? In the most basest of interpretations, coveting another’s wife is a synonym for lusting after another person in the sexual sense, wife or not. But then again, there are lots of things that we consider crimes based on morality. For instance, drugs. However, taking/using drugs had no consideration from Moses in the Ten Commandments.

What I am getting at is that I get it at face value. Carnal sin is worthy of damnation by our morality standards. By the same token, Carnal sin is very subjectively and ambiguously defined. For that reason, I think we should obey the commandments but we should also follow our heart. After all, I don’t believe that God wants us to be miserable. We just have to do it the right way.

I was imagining in this series that I would take a level of hell and relate it to a current event and persons in the public eye. We all know people that fit the definition and maybe we will see them in level 2 of the hell. Bill Clinton comes to mind but probably not Jeffrey Epstein here, maybe Ghislaine Maxwell? I have been doing some thinking though. If a relationship was consenting, is this really a sin? After all there were plenty of polygamist in the Old Testament. I did some quick research on the subject and you find the usual subjects.

The puritanical approach says that polygamy was a means to an end. It was accepted until the new covenant (the coming of Jesus). Just like at the other ritualistic trappings of Judaism, the veil and sacrifice and such, none of that means anything at this point according to Christianity. Arguments are made that the transition from many to one in Judaism is now one on one in Christianity. Therefore the other related bible versus two becoming one or Adam and Eve for instance are pointing to the justification that only one committed relationship is the way to go.

The more that I study psychology and human behavior, I side with the data that supports that the richest, healthiest and most rewarding relationships are one on one. This also conforms with my moral beliefs. However, I cannot succinctly say that what I (and Dante) believe are actually defined as sin. This of course excludes non-consenting adultery as mentioned in the Ten Commandments.

End Your Programming Routine: Truthfully, I didn’t think that I would end up here before I started writing this. I suppose that this puts me more on a philosophical plane rather than a Christian one. If an action hurts another, it is probably worthy of evaluation. But, these are complicated matters that are hard to solve in a single page. Was it consenting and now it is not? What if your heart changes, should two people be bound to a reciprocal, loveless marriage? I am pretty sure that this level is not for the deviant crowd but the consenting one. I am not sure I can get behind that.