Doubting the Answers 45
of obedience and love, and so ... well, you can fill in the rest.
Then again, why bother? It is nonsense, after all. As before, we
are confronted by a claim that no one would seriously entertain
for a moment if not for the emotional pressure exerted by the
conviction that he or she must believe in an eternal hell that
is somehow the work of love and justice, rather than of mal-
ice. Any logical definition of penal justice requires a due pro-
portion between (in forensic terms) a mens rea and the actus
reus-between, on the one hand, the intentions, knowledge,
and powers of the malefactor and, on the other, the objective
wickedness of the transgression. Otherwise the very concept
of justice has been rendered entirely vacuous. But, of course,
absolutely no one could really then fulfill the requirements of
a justice that eventuates in eternal damnation, because no one
could actually achieve perfect culpability; therefore, such jus-
tice is no justice at all.
Another, even feebler attempt to make sense of eternal
retribution is the traditional claim that a soul cannot alter its
orientation after death. Sometimes this curious constraint is
presented as a simple fiat of the divine will: These, it seems,
are merely the inabrogable rules of the contest God has de-
vised for us, which make the stakes of our brief sojourn here
on earth so immense- so infinite, in fact. I am not sure quite
what the appeal of that argument is meant to be. Left to itself,
it makes the disproportion between the culpability of which
we are capable and the verdict to which we are subject all the
more grotesque in its arbitrariness. Everything has been re-
duced to a matter of luck, and then only for the sake of a kind
of game. Really, though, this is just one more entirely willful
claim, adduced on the fly to make the senseless seem sensible;
and frankly, if it were true, it would make existence itself the
cruelest imaginable misfortune, visited on us by a heartlessly