Of course we can only laugh about that: In Romania and Poland they still believe in hell.
According to a survey conducted by the World Values Survey between 2017 and 2020, more than fifty percent of respondents in both countries said they believed the existence of an inferno to be certain.
For this they reap the expected ridicule in our learned circles.
A casual London-based lawyer and twitterer commented on the survey result with a mischievous devil's face.
A public-facing German sociologist ironically tweeted that the two countries were "the only realists in the EU."
For this he was rewarded by his crowd with grinning faces and drops of sweat.
That is the cheap smile of the arrogant, who want to be particularly witty even in bad times.
This is the relaxed sweating of the sensible people who only believe in the Enlightenment, if at all, because it gave them a navigation system.
The conceit of those who have lost all understanding of a transcendent worldview speaks from the emojis.
The newly ignited love for Poland has its limits.
And they are hard and militantly secured where it is about God's work and the devil's contribution.
Irony with a bitter aftertaste
You don't have to sentimentally exaggerate the belief in the people of Eastern Europe to realize that the survey once again highlights the iron curtain of values that separates Eastern and Western Europe.
It seems self-evident that in a region where members are running away from the Christian churches, the imagination for a place of eternal punishment for sin is lacking - in Germany, for example, only a good 15 percent of those questioned believe in hell.
Only the condescending irony towards the metaphysical simplicity of our European neighbors gets a bitter aftertaste when one reads, for example, the Ukrainian playwright Anastasiia Kosodii, who just in the “Tagesspiegel” confessed without a wink, looking at the charred corpses of tortured Ukrainian soldiers: “My atheism ended on February 24th,
So far, the Russian war crime has only affected us politically and economically, elsewhere it has also shaken the very foundations.
For us, the concept of sin is just an abstract religious hypothesis, for the vast majority a downright silly notion.
On the other hand, closer to the cruel events of the war, one feels doubts as to whether the excesses of violence on Ukrainian soil might not also have something to do with the fact that too many have lost their fear of a soul-threatening fall from grace.
Suddenly, Hannah Arendt's thesis that the worst violent crimes of the twentieth century would not have happened "if people had still believed in hell" makes sense again.