Not all religions teach that there is a place of eternal suffering for those who fail to maintain their moral or religious obligations. And even for religions that generally do, there are sects that do not. But there are very popular religions, and dominant sects within those religions, who believe that those who are not righteous in the eyes of their god will suffer for it endlessly.
Let’s examine for a moment what hell is. Hell is infinite suffering. Suffering beyond what the human mind can begin to comprehend. You can compare it to any finite suffering, and it dwarfs it, by an infinite amount, as is the nature of finite numbers versus infinities.
Try to imagine, as best you can, the entirety of the suffering of the human race since we became self aware. Billions of people, each with their own history of suffering. Everyone who slowly starved to death. Every painful disease. Every time someone stubbed their toe. Every hardship suffered by men during battle. Everyone’s first teenage breakup. Every person eaten alive by a wild animal. Everyone who worked a job they hated all their lives. Everyone who was sad that everyone forgot their birthday. Every pain, every heartbreak, every toil, every sadness. The combined suffering of billions of lifetimes. Try to comprehend the enormity of that.
That suffering, that you just tried to imagine, is infinitely small compared to the suffering that those who believe in hell is inflicted upon every individual who fails their god’s test. Imagine that suffering times a thousand. A million. A billion. It is still infinitely small, incomprehensibly small, compared to the idea of eternal suffering. The entirety of human suffering is the tiniest pinprick compared to hell.
And yet some significant fraction of humanity - probably the majority - believes that some significant other portion of humanity will undergo this fate.
And not only do they fail to go insane from the belief that billions of people are suffering to such a great extent that it’s incomprehensible to the human mind, there are many people who actually revel in this. It’s not a horrible drawback of their religious beliefs, but a perk. People will take satisfaction from the idea that those who have wronged them in some way will one day get their comeuppance and suffer eternally. People will wish other people to “go to hell” - and I don’t mean in a flippant, colloquial way, but a genuine desire to have that person suffer that fate.
No person who ever lived could possibly be sufficiently evil as to justify eternal torment. Not even close. Whatever wrongs and evils those people inflicted, they were finite, and could not possibly justify infinite punishment.
Ironically, the most evil thing you could do would be to cause another person to go to hell. Since we’ve established that it would trump the entirety of human suffering, then causing someone to falter, or failing to save someone, that resulted in them going to hell, would be more evil than personally inflicting any finite amount of suffering. You could murder a million babies with your bare hands (assuming they get some sort of reprieve from hell), and it wouldn’t be as bad as causing one person to commit some minor sin that ultimately made them fail their god’s test and have them sent to hell. Forever is incomprehensibly bigger than anything you could do in your lifetime, even if it was your goal to inflict as much suffering as you possibly could during it.
Imagine a mother who loved their child as much as anyone has ever loved anyone else. That person is willing to sacrifice everything for their child, to do anything to try to improve that child’s life. And that child, somewhere in adulthood, or whatever you consider to be the age of reason, dies. And the mother either knows that the child failed god’s test - perhaps by not belonging to her religion at all - or suspects it’s possible. That mother would’ve given up anything to save that child - she would’ve thrown herself in front of a bear if need be - and now that person that she so completely loved could potentially be suffering in a way beyond anything he could on Earth, and there would never be an end to it. This woman should be driven immediately insane. Unable to function at all. Completely overcome by anxiety and grief. It should break her.
We can all understand the great bond and love between a parent and their child, so I used that analogy to resonate emotionally. But that anyone should suffer that fate, let alone a significant portion of the billions of people have ever lived, should deeply disturb anyone. Most people don’t have the stomach to watch someone else being tortured for even a few minutes. And yet so many people are content with the idea that not only are so many people suffering far greater fates now, but many or most of those living currently and who will ever live will join them. And that suffering will never end. In anything but the most callous sociopath, this should instill, at the very least, a deep unease, possibly a complete mental break.
If there are people who truly believe that this is the result of failing their god’s test, they should spend the entirety of their lives not only following every possible rule they feel that god is testing them with, but spending every waking moment trying to cause other people to do the same.
It’s ironic that people will praise moderately religious people, the ones who keep to themselves and don’t bother you. But the reality is - if you believe that unless saved, every human suffers this fate, your overriding goal should be spending your entire lives saving people. Those who preach the hardest are the only decent people. Every person you save is someone spared from infinite punishment.
The people who believe their religion but don’t push it on you are doing you the most grave disservice possible. They are cavalier about the possibility of you suffering infinite punishment. They are, at best, callous sociopaths, with such disregard for humanity that they passively allow people to undergo this fate.
Similarly, in their own affairs, it is utterly insane to give in to any sort of mortal temptation. Your short trial in life, measured in the minuscule time frame of a human lifetime, is utterly inconsequential compared to your fate in eternity. If you told someone that if they cheated on their wife, they’d be caught and subjected to a year of horrible physical torture, it would probably discourage them from even thinking about it. But when they’re faced with an omnipotent and omnipresent god, who they know they can’t fool, and there’s no chance they get away with it without being caught, with a punishment more than a trillion trillion trillion times greater than a year of horrible torture, they still often cave in to temptation. If someone was sitting there with a car battery to your nuts saying “don’t touch that cupcake”, you wouldn’t touch that cupcake. And yet faced with an infinitely greater punishment with a guarantee that you would be caught, people succumb.
If you truly believe that failing your god’s test will result in this fate, you would live your life in a dedication of god and his rules that rival any monk’s. You would, if you were a decent person, live your life trying to desperately save anyone else you could from this fate, because if you could save just one person, you would prevent more suffering than you could ever comprehend. And yet people don’t.
Why? These are the potential conclusions:
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People are so callous to the suffering of others that they can function in light of the fact that they believe many of them will suffer this fate, and many are so evil that they would actually take satisfaction that this fate is inflicted upon those who they judge unworthy. This is so casual, and yet so much more evil than anything inflicted by anyone who ever lived.
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People are so compartmentalized that they don’t really form a psyche in a complete whole. They can take these beliefs - these beliefs that are so important that they should dictate every waking thought, and guide their every action - and simply ignore them when convenient.
“Haven’t really thought about it” is not a valid excuse here. Whether or not you pass god’s test, and whether you could help others do the same, is the only thing that could matter in your mortal life, everything else is trivial in comparison. If this, logically, should be by far your most pressing concern, and yet during your whole life you never bothered to think about it, your psyche is not a complete whole.
The actions and thoughts of these people simply don’t make sense. You cannot simultaneously believe “eating that cupcake gets me eternal punishment” and “I think I’m going to eat that cupcake” - so if you do indeed hold those beliefs, your personality is essentially a mish mash of conflicting ideas that don’t interact with each other.
- People don’t really believe this shit. I think to some degree compartmentalization plays a role in this. They essentially only believe it enough to scratch whatever psychological itch they need scratched. They pick and choose which of their god’s rules really count based on their own biases and willingness to sacrifice. They realize on some level that this makes their beliefs bullshit, but they never have the fortitude to admit it. It’s too easy socially and psychologically to maintain the belief that, on some level, they realize is bullshit. And so they choose to tell themselves they believe it - and when it’s psychologically convenient, perhaps they think they really do.
And yes, I know you can say “oh, my religion doesn’t believe in hell” or something like that. It doesn’t matter. The fact is that there are lots of people who do, and those are the people we’re discussing. Such anecdotes are irrelevant to the discussion.
