Posthumous punishment

@RandalRauser

Historically, the most widely held theory of posthumous punishment within Christianity has been eternal conscious torment (ECT), the doctrine that people will be resurrected to face a punishment of unimaginable anguish that will never end. When assessing this idea, we must be accurate with our descriptions. And the first thing to recognize is that this is properly described as torture. After all, torture is, by definition, the infliction of severe mental and/or physical torment as a form of punishment. That's ECT. Thus, when a person says that ECT involves God torturing people forever, they are not indulging in a rhetorical uncharity. Rather, they are accurately describing the view. So the question is whether one ought to think that God would torture people forever. Is that the best view of posthumous punishment?

That's a slipshod characterization:

1. You can believe the damned experience unending punishment without supposing all the damned experience "torture". There can be gradations of misery or punitive suffering. 

2. For argument's sake, let's play along with "torment". Rauser fails to distinguish between three different propositions:

i) God torments the damned

ii) The damned torment each other

iii) The damned torment themselves

Suppose God puts all the brutal dictators on an island. They might well torture each other. That's different from God torturing them. 

Or, to take a less extreme example, suppose God puts mean people on an island. They will be mean to each other. But that's different from an external agent imposing misery on them. Rather, he simply puts some nasty people in a group, and they do the rest. That's collective self-inflicted misery.

In addition, we all know individuals who make themselves miserable. Hateful people are miserable. They aren't miserable because of how they are treated by others. Rather, their hateful disposition makes them miserable. That's individual self-inflicted misery.