204 What May Be Believed
torment after a trillion ages, or then a trillion trillion, or then a
trillion vigintillion, is in any meaningful sense the same agent
who contracted some measurable quantity of personal guilt
in that tiny, ever more vanishingly insubstantial gleam of an
instant that constituted his or her terrestrial life? And can we
do this even while realizing that, at that point, his or her suf-
ferings have in a sense only just begun, and in fact will always
have only just begun? What extraordinary violence we must
do both to our reason and to our moral intelligence (not to
mention simple good taste) to make this horrid notion seem
palatable to ourselves, and all because we have somehow, fool-
ishly, allowed ourselves to be convinced that this is what we
must believe. Really, could we truly believe it at all apart from
either profound personal fear or profound personal cruelty?
Which is why, again, I do not believe that most Christians
truly believe what they believe they believe. After the public
dissemination of my first lecture on these matters in 2015, one
of the more truculent assaults on my arguments came from
an ordained convert to Eastern Orthodoxy who several times
chided me online for failing to grasp that eternal damnation is
proper for finite transgressions because (as he tirelessly, oracu-
larly repeated) "time is the foundation of eternity." He was quite
unconscious that, far from offering a solution to the apparent
moral scandal in the traditional theology of hell, he was simply
reiterating it. After all, it would be a very curious architect in-
deed who would think an infinite edifice erected upon an ever
more infinitesimal foundation a well-conceived and duly pro-
portioned design, even if he had the power to bring it about.
And, if we cannot properly imagine that and really believe in
it, we certainly cannot properly imagine an eternity of misery
erected upon a temporal span that is, by comparison, scarcely
more than nothing, and then actually convince ourselves that