HELL, NON-CHRISTIAN CONCEPTIONS OF107authority, beauty, goodness, and the like,
one’s obligation to honor God is likewise
infinite. So again, to fail in one’s duty is
to incur a debt that is serious beyond
measure.
The misery of eternal hell is typically
said to include two dimensions: the pain
of sense and the pain of loss. The pain of
sense has traditionally been thought to
consist primarily of literal fire that would
cause intense agony. The pain of loss
refers to the anguish of losing out on the
great good of eternal life in relationship
to God. This loss produces bitter emo-
tions such as regret and remorse that
gnaw at the hearts of the damned. So
understood, hell has been construed as a
sort of supreme torture chamber in both
popular piety and the works of noted
classical theologians.
This picture of hell has come under
extensive criticism from both philoso-
phers and theologians. The primary
objection they have raised is the so-called
“proportionality problem” which holds
that finite beings can only do finite harm,
so infinite punishment is out of propor-
tion to any evil they might do. Eternal hell
cannot therefore be defended as a matter
of justice for sins committed in this life.
More recently defenders of hell have
appealed to human freedom rather than
to principles of retributive justice to make
sense of the doctrine. That is, they argue
that sinners can by their own free choice
reject God decisively and thereby con-
firm their characters in evil so thoroughly
that they would never want to repent.
So God respects their choice and leaves
them to their self-chosen misery. This
view emphasizes the pain of loss much
more than the pain of sense. As C. S. Lewis
famously characterized this view, “the
doors of hell are locked from the inside.”
It is not that God has chosen to lock
people into eternal misery, but they have
chosen it for themselves by locking God
out of their lives, and that is the essence
of hell.
Critics question this strategy for
defending eternal hell by challenging
the claim that anyone can choose evil so
decisively. Evil may be chosen in the short
run, they contend, but there is no intelli-
gible motive for choosing eternal misery
for oneself. The debate here hinges on
whether such a self-destructive choice
can make moral and psychological sense.HELL, NON-CHRISTIAN CONCEP-
TIONS OF. The belief in hell almost
always involves a place or time of suffer-
ing and punishment for sins or evils
committed in a previous life. As such,
Hinduism (although the earliest Hindus
did not believe in an afterlife in heaven or
hell but rather one in which we return to
the earth) holds that souls are punished
in nakara appropriately for the sins that
they had committed until they are puri-
fied through suffering and are reborn in
balance of their karma. The Bhagavad
Gita, along with other portions of the
Mahabharata, describes this idea of hell
and mentions ways in which it can be