No, I think the ‘proper’ rituals of faith must be taught in order to distinguish those who are of the correct faith from those who are not.
But faith (belief, superstition) seems endemic to the human condition.
Wasn’t there a Seinfeld episode that explores this? Elaine discovers her new boyfriend is religious and then gets annoyed that he doesn’t try to save her.
‘The’, it’s an important word sometimes.
So are, ‘For example,…’ 
Sure, but what does ‘making every effort’ really comprise? The OP is talking about ‘preaching hard’, which maybe involves a lot of effort, but if it’s counterproductive, it’s effort wasted - and effort spent in the wrong direction might well be considered a worse thing than effort not expended at all.
Also, for many religious people, the notion that they hold the fate of their peers entirely in their hand would be an idolatrous and prideful assumption. Nearly all of the fundamentalist Christians I have spoken to on this subject have said words to the effect that it’s God who saves, God who convinces and draws people in - and that their role is only a small part of a bigger plan - so again, the idea of leaping headlong and expending all their effort to make it happen is not necessarily the right thing to do. If you do truly believe you are working for a being that is infinitely powerful and wise, it’s not necessarily appropriate for you yourself to try to be infinitely industrious.
I’m sure it must. Many comfort themselves with the notion that no human really knows the state of another human’s mind and heart at death - for example, the Anglican tradition has a prayer that includes: “For all who have died in the communion of your Church, and those whose faith is known to you alone, that, with all the saints, they may have rest in that place where there is no pain or grief, but life eternal, we pray to you, O Lord.”
Good deeds and being morally upright, or the opposite, are not what determines whether or not a soul ends up in Heaven or in Hell.
It’s belief in God. If a person can truly say, or believe, that Jesus Christ, by his sacrifice, saved us from our sins, and that Jesus is God/the son of God, then they’re Christian and will be in Heaven when they die.
Hell is the “place” or state of being in which the soul of someone who has died, after not believing in God, goes. It’s eternal separation from God. The torment is knowing you will never be in His presence.
The “genocidal maniac”, who, on their deathbed, truly believes and says so, will be saved. That doesn’t mean this person would be free of earthly punishment. That deathbed may be the gurney used by the state for execution.
Please re-read the OP. What you are describing is not the version of “Hell” that is being discussed here.
I don’t reckon it much matters - as far as I understand it, the ‘eternal separation’ version of hell is usually described (by those who subscribe to it) as being worse than being deep fried in sulphur for all eternity anyway.
Also, the OP doesn’t actually seem to describe any specific version of hell, beyond ‘eternal torment’.
I was once listening to a Bible radio station. The radio evangelist was trying to emphasize how horrible Hell was. He went on about the fire, the sulphur, the worms, etc. He got more and more lurid.
He finally said (quote only approximate from memory) “It is worse than any human mind can imagine. It is worse than the sickest, most diseased, psychotic imaginings of any human madman.”
And…we’re supposed to admire the God who dreamed it all up? The poor preacher was giving one of the best possible arguments against religious worship!
I don’t think most people have a problem with the genocidal maniac facing eternal torment. (Emotionally, that is. Intellectually is a different matter). The notion that the same fate is waiting for a regular, everyday guy who just didn’t have a compelling enough reason to believe is what bothers people. At least, those people who don’t know for an absolute fact they’re going to heaven.
Well, eternal pain and torment is what I would call Hell. But if the OP wants me to be “cast out” I’ll go!
I’m surprised nobody so far has mentioned the Calvinist view on the subject.
You’re either going to Hell or you’re going to Heaven. You have no choice in the matter, and never did. God decided long long long ago, and neither faith nor good works nor parental pleading will change things one whit.
If you’re Saved, you could go out and rape and murder babies to your heart’s content, and still go to heaven. However, those who have been Saved will not choose to do this sort of thing - instead, they will naturally be drawn toward doing good.
If you’re Damned, you could be the best person in the whole world, save millions of people from starvation, end war, cure cancer - but when you die, it’s the eternal lake of fire for you!
Good times.
Hell is one of the main reasons why I’m not religious. It makes no sense and I would rather fight against such a cruel god than kowtow to his demands
People can’t really comprehend the infinite (as the OP acknowledges) so it’s not that big of a surprise that fear of hell doesn’t consume most people. We are finite beings. Even the things that do consume some people, like lakes of fire or demons with spears are still thought of analogically and in finite terms. It’s the same with God. I’m therefore unsure how religious people of the extremely narrow type described in the OP are supposed to react to something that is fundamentally incomprehensible, to the point where even “more than” or “worse than” are inadequate descriptors.
I agree that the other factors mentioned above that complicate the OP’s conclusion are useful to think about even if we don’t consider the diversity of religious thought that exists in the world. Many people who believe in an eternal and inhabited hell of suffering will also think that it is a free choice of the people in it, and/or it is not a fate one can determine of specific people before death, even if you can identify factors that might make it more likely, and/or that factors like human dignity/free will/predestination make it impossible or forbidden to ‘forcibly’ (however you define it) convert people, and/or that there are different strategies that one can do, with the assurance that one is in a community of believers rather than operating as one individual, to evangelize fully in the world.
From the point of view of policing personal conduct and that of others, a belief in an eternal hell allows for different conceptual reasons about why hell exists and how one ends up there. These affect how people view ‘sinful’ actions and what they do about them. These beliefs exist in dynamic tension with other beliefs, rationalizations, identities, loyalties, etc.
No one is free of callousness so it’s not surprising to think that believers outlined in the OP might be callous to some extent, at least to the point of not considering the bulk of humanity outside of their community, which might as well be infinite in many respects. I don’t know what someone with a whole psyche would be like, but I think it is something that cannot be acquired just through an intellectual assent to a value statement. I don’t see why dynamic complex people should be expected to be able to have what they “really believe” be some kind of consistent and comprehensive worldview with mutually compatible answers to all situations. Humility and compassion are popular religious values, reflecting a general acceptance of the inability of finite, localized beings (or collections of aggregates, if you prefer) to fully understand infinite, transcendent truth.
Is it worth reading beyond this? “Times infinity” belongs in the schoolyard.
Even if you aren’t capable of fully understanding the concept of infinity, you can still understand that it’s worse than any finite punishment you can imagine. It makes no sense to say that because it’s so bad, people are unable to understand that it’s bad.
If I said that we had a pain ray that would cause every pain receiving nerve in your body to fire at full force - essentially the most pain a human being could bee in - and that you’d endure it for an hour, you’d realize that’s horrific. If you had to suffer it for a month, it would probably shatter your psyche. It’s unlikely that you’d ever commit all but the most low risk, most lucrative crimes, and even then most people wouldn’t. What about a year under the pain ray, with no chance of early merciful death? A decade? A century? People can comprehend these finite things, even if they’re more horrific than anything a human being has experienced before. All they have to do is to understand that hell is worse than that.
To excuse them for not understanding that eternity suffering is bad is like saying that you could understand that an hour under the pain beam is bad, but a century isn’t, because who could comprehend a century of pain?
And people who commit crimes against society often think they won’t get caught. Or they’ll get off on some technicality. Or they can buy their way out. You can’t commit a crime against an omnipresent god and get away with it. And the punishment is as severe as anyone can imagine. Why would anyone risk even the most minor sin, if they truly believed that was on the table?
This is a low content post no better than obnoxious “TLDR” posts. What does that even mean? To examine what hell is, and the implications thereof, the fact that it is infinite and eternal are core concepts. That is literally what the popular conception of hell is. What does “belongs in the schoolyard” even mean in this context?
“Sure, there’s a Hell. There’s also a Heck. It’s not as severe, but we have Heck and Hell.”
-George Carlin
I get that the suffering is supposed be eternal and junk, but after a few thousand years (which is of course trivially insignificant compared to eternity and junk), wouldn’t you have completely forgotten the specifics of what you did during your few decades on Earth? Isn’t the purpose of punishment defeated when one can no longer remember what one is being punished for? After that it’s just sadism for the sake of sadism.
It’s slightly amazing how the OP is one big straw man, yet no one (prior to this) has seemed to mind.
Are you saying that there aren’t a lot of people that believe that there is a hell for those who fail some criteria as judged by god and that hell involves eternal torment? What part is a straw man?
If you don’t personally believe what the OP describes, are you somehow offended on behalf of those who do?