This concept functions as a powerful engine of group affiliation using a combination of threat and reward. It is like a company offering permanent safety and support if you sign a lifetime membership, agree to promote the brand, and guarantee not to deal with competing companies. But the same company would also threaten to ruin you permanently if you broke the deal. There would be frightening rules in the contract, such that the act of challenging company policy would be branded with words like “heresy” or “apostasy,” discouraging anyone from questioning the status quo.
Such a system is in contradiction to the spirit of fairness, grace, and justice—the striving toward mature morality—present in religious doctrines at their best. An infinite punishment for a finite set of crimes does not make sense. And the idea of punishing someone not for a crime, but for having an idea, belief, or thought that does not conform to a prescribed norm, is contrary to most people’s concept of a healthy society, and contrary to the “bill of rights” ideals that many of us—religious or not—value highly.
In the world, on average, roughly two people die every second—about 7,200 deaths per hour, and on the order of five million per month. Only a fraction of these people follow any one particular religious belief system. Therefore, if one holds a strict doctrine of Hell tied to a strict interpretation of “correct belief,” it would follow that thousands of people every hour—including many who lived gentle, kind, generous lives—would be banished into eternal punitive suffering because they did not endorse the right beliefs. Conversely, many who behaved cruelly all their lives could receive an infinite reward if they endorsed the correct beliefs at the last moment.
If one truly believes this is the fate of countless people, one would be forced into a grim psychological choice: either adopt indifference to unimaginable suffering, adopt a horrific view of how reality works, or devote one’s life to converting as many people as possible so as to save them from hell. It would not make sense to devote one’s life to rescuing people on a smaller scale (being a firefighter, a physician, a therapist, a humanitarian worker), since this would distract from the colossal task of saving people from an infinitely worse fate than any earthly accident, illness, or war could impose. Proselytizing would seem to be the only fully rational altruistic activity. And if you wanted to “save the most people efficiently,” you would focus your efforts on those with shorter life expectancy, since their impending eternal suffering would arrive sooner. If one’s own friend or child strayed from the perceived correct religious involvement, it would be understandable—within this belief system—to view this as the most horrifying contingency imaginable, perhaps even more devastating than losing them to illness, assault, or accident, because the imagined suffering would be permanent.
This is one reason the Heaven-and-Hell framework is so morally destabilizing. It incentivizes fear, coercion, and tribal control, while undermining the best ethical themes that religions also sometimes teach: compassion, humility, grace, and love.
There is a sentiment sometimes attributed to Mother Teresa that I find ethically beautiful: that if Hell existed, the truly loving response would not be triumph or indifference, but a willingness to comfort those who suffer there. I think we should all strive towards such transcendence of character.
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