Hellfire under fire

I’m reposting some email I sent to a friend.

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1. One of the stock arguments that universalists deploy against eternal punishment is that an "infinite" punishment for "finite" sin is unjust.

But your juvie delinquents could use a similar argument to game the universalist system:

"However much remedial postmortem punishment God makes me suffer is just a drop in the bucket of eternity. I'll have my fill of sin in this life, pay my dues in hell, then go to heaven."

Do the crime, pay the time. Even in this life, crooks will take a calculated risk. If the benefit outweighs the risk. If they have more to gain than lose.

And that's despite the fact that spending 10-20 years in the pokey when you only got about 70 years to play with, give or take (minus childhood), makes it a high-stakes gamble. You may die in prison, or by the time you get out, you may be past your prime. 

In universalism, by contrast, no matter how long you spend in the purgatorial slammer, when you get out you'll be just as young as when you went in. And you won't have a measly 30 years of life left. You'll have the rest of eternity. 

In this life, if you go to prison at 20, and come out at 50, you've blown the best years of your life. You can never make up for the lost years. The lost opportunities. That's irrevocable. Not only are you passed your prime, but life has moved on. Time didn't stand still for the eligible girls you knew at 20.

But in universalism, the damned are like vampires. They come out the same age they went in. They're immortal going in, and immortal coming out. Eternally youthful.

So, in the long run, they have nothing to lose. They can make up for lost time, since they never run out of time. They always have time to burn. They can always pick up where they left off.

2. On a different, but related note: I think one problem some people have with everlasting punishment is that, in their mind, they assume punishment must be positive affliction, viz. “torture.”

But it’s easy for me to think of punishment in terms of lost opportunities.

Take a father who promises to take his two sons on a camping trip. But before they go, one son behaves very badly. As punishment, he’s left behind. He misses out while dad goes camping with the other son.

That’s everlasting punishment in the sense that that’s a lost opportunity. The delinquent son blew his chance.

Even if he will have other opportunities to go camping with his dad, that particular opportunity has come and gone. That’s unrepeatable. Now or never.

Or take two teenage boys who have a crush on the same girl. But one is shy, so he can’t screw up the courage to ask her out on a date.

As a result, the other boy moves in. They marry. Have kids. Live happily after ever.

Suppose the shy boy had asked her out on a date. They fell in love. Raised a family. Lived happily ever after.

Instead he marries a shrewish girl who’s no fun to be around. Always complaining about something. Instead of coming home after work, he goes to the bar to avoid her.

He missed out on his chance at domestic happiness in this life. And he can’t go back and make up for the lost years.

Even if he could go back in time and ask her out, the other boy would lose out.

That’s not the same thing as punishment. But it illustrates a principle. There are things of value we can lose forever. And that could be punitive. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.

In that respect, the punishment is endless, interminable. You always miss what you might have had.

Likewise, it’s possible to have something you cherish, then lose it for good. The punishment is endless because you can never recoup your loss. A permanent deprivation. 

3. To approach this from another angle, suppose we postulate that eternal punishment consists, not of positive, external pain and suffering, but types of sensory deprivation.

Suppose one circle of hell is absolutely dark, another circle of hell dead silent, and yet another circle in which the damned can't touch or be touched by anything or anyone.