In response primarily to Kristor and Bonald, we have:
“I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor heights, nor depths, nor any other thing in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39
First Corinthians 13 – possibly the most profound and beautiful passage anywhere, including all philosophy and all literature.
The story of the Prodigal Son. God as the Father who forgives the truly repentant son and welcomes him home. I remember identifying with the “good” son as a kid and feeling a bit resentful on his behalf.
I was lost but now I am found. (Luke)
Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.
To which we can add:
Matthew 18:21-35
21Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” 22Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
23″Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. 24As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. 25Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. 26″The servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ 27The servant’s master took pity on him, cancelled the debt and let him go. 28″But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded. 29″His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back. 30″But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. 31When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened. 32″Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. 33Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ 34In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. 35″This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.”
On pain of contradiction, given the injunction concerning forgiveness and avoiding hypocrisy on the topic, it cannot be God who casts you into hell forever and ever to be tormented for all eternity. Kristor’s position seems to be that we cast ourselves into that hell if we desire non-being. By doing this, we are seeking to avoid the love of God but have this love nonetheless thrust upon us. An eternal hatred of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful would seem to have man standing toe to toe with God with an infinite capacity for suffering. I take our finitude as axiomatic. On the other hand, I read of the “homeless” drug addicts of San Francisco – homeless because they choose to be as near as possible to their dealers – and because they have alienated all their friends and family. One wonders about the limits of their hedonism/masochism. I have no particular problem with a self-created hell, but one where if one asks to be rescued from it, that call will be answered.
There is a rather strange YouTube channel called Shaman Oaks. He interviews people who have had near death experiences. Around 30% of them go to hell. They are there for a very long time. There many of them are raped and otherwise maltreated. One woman found herself abducted in a kind of human trafficking; occupying a desolate house in a desertscape. She would be prostituted out to whoever turned up. In an act of defiance, she started singing either a hymn or a Christmas carol. She was told to stop immediately. Instead, she prayed to Jesus to rescue her and he did. Similar things happened to a man. Jesus took him in his arms and flew him to the Heavenly City. As he did so, he realized that Jesus loved him the most of any human being. But, he also realized that each one of us is also his favorite.
It seems to be a near universal that the key scenes of our life flash before us as we are about to die. Upon death, there is a life review where we are asked to judge ourselves, partly to learn from our mistakes. We experience things from the point of view of those we interacted with, which would be truly educational. It seems like any illusions one suffered from about the point of life and what kind of person one was would be removed.
At the core of a belief in God lies intuition. There are no arguments for the existence of God that can convince skeptical non-believers. It is not something that can be imposed upon anyone. That is generally true of argument in general. Arguments are only necessary if someone does not already agree with us and clearly other people are often impervious to our arguments as we are impervious to theirs. Since there are contradictions within the Bible one can only resolve them through intuition and argument. The injunction to forgive and the parable of the Prodigal Son are not consistent with a hell and eternal suffering imposed by God. Self-imposed, perhaps.
I know of no philosopher who simply adopts someone else’s point of view. One reads and studies and picks and chooses from the thoughts and advice that one reads. Maybe sometimes it is simply that one is not ready for a truth yet. The Bible is filled with different and conflicting ideas. Much of it must also be interpreted. The parables of Jesus in particular. In a Bible study group I led many decades ago, an old lady joined us for one meeting. Upon listening to us speculate about the meaning of a particular passage she said, “I don’t want to listen to you. I want the priest to provide us with the definitive meaning.” She didn’t seem to realize that he was just another man like the rest of us. Bring ten priests together and the chances are you will have ten varying interpretations. There is no literalism to be found. Christian fundamentalists claim to be literal but they pick and choose like the rest of us – or rather members of their denomination do and then claim it to be the infallible word of God.
According to this concordance, among the evangelists, it is Matthew that emphasizes eternal damnation. https://www.openbible.info/topics/eternal_damnation_in_hell
Revelation dwells on the topic a lot. But, Revelation is also the most florid, over-the-top and psychedelic of the Bible chapters. It barely squeaked in as part of a very human horse trading. Interestingly, Matthew is also the most florid among the evangelists. Mark, the driest and most minimalist. John the most beloved among intellectuals and the last gospel to be written. Luke is interesting as containing stories not found in the other gospels, I think specifically about Paul’s conversion and the martyrdom of St. Stephen.
The concordance has things like Romans – “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” John 3:6 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Mark 9:43 “And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.” I notice that a lot of the references to hellfire emphasize that the fire is unquenchable, which is not the same as the torment itself being eternal.
If the Scripture were reliable in some simple manner, it would not be possible for people to quote back and forth competing scriptural passages. I knew a former Anglican minister who had lost his faith. Jehovah’s Witnesses came to his door and they had a scripture battle on his doorstep.
Bonald writes, “Claims of inerrancy have been made both for Scripture and for the Church as custodian of Tradition, and one can see why. If we may pick and choose, we might as well throw out the whole thing altogether and cease to claim divine authority for our own imaginings.”
Instead, the Church picks and chooses for us. I do not claim divine authority. I come from five generations of Anglican ministers with degrees in philosophy and theology. I feel like one of those dogs who have been bred for a specific purpose like a pointer – pointing at the body of the animal the hunter has just killed, or a retriever. I seem to have exactly the same mental strengths and weaknesses as my father. If I have any talent, it is in philosophy. And regardless of ability, I also have an unquenchable curiosity and sense of wonder. I am happy to worship the same God as you but regard doctrine as a matter debate. Philosophers are inherently heretical. Theologians, less so. At one point, I thought I would study the theologians only to discover that they were very much second-rate philosophers and returned back to the study of philosophy.
My father wrote a book called, The Stephen Experience (available on Amazon!) It was a transcription of what an acquaintance said while in a series of trances spanning several years, supposedly channeling St. Stephen the First Christian Martyr. He regarded it as his life mission to publish it only to find that about one copy per month was sold. “St. Stephen” advised his listeners not to regard what he said as a matter of authority but to judge it yourself. If it is found to be of use keep it. If not, reject it.
I had a rather charming student last semester who asked, “Is it really necessary to do all this thinking?” The answer is no. Women, in particular, seem more inclined to allow themselves to be told what to think and to be happy not asking too many questions. And the student was indeed a woman. Evolutionary psychology suggests that women have evolved to be led – usually by men. They are, on average, more agreeable than men and thus more conformist. When conservatism is dominant, they tend to be ultra conservative. When the winds of history change and Woke progressivism is in the air, they tend to be the most unquestioningly woke and progressive. The Woke and progressive are infamously immune to accusations of contradicting themselves because thinking is not really what they are interested in doing. My own very intelligent mother could not care less about the ultimate nature of reality and most even intelligent women seem to share this disposition. A religiously minded sister is also anti-philosophical.
Roy Baumeister in an interview said that he knew many smart women scientists. Their presence was fine so long as male scientists set the tone. When men were asked whether a scientist’s goal should be truth, or avoiding pursuing topics that might have some detrimental impact on some group or other, or whether “It’s complicated,” most women scientists chose, “It’s complicated.” The men largely opted for truth. When too many scientists are women they abandon truth and start engaging in cancel culture. The main science journals like Science and Nature, the main medical journals The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine, have all been corrupted and compromised by political correctness in this manner.
Bonald is right that thinking for yourself is socially destructive. That is where Vico thinks the so-called Age of Men leads. He also points out that knowing this does nothing to obviate the problem. Naïve unquestioning of authority cannot be regained once it has been lost.
The Orthosphere 
One excellent argument for universalism, I think, is that hell as popularly imagined — a place of eternal torment — is incompatible with heaven as popularly imagined: a place of eternal bliss. One or the other could exist, but not both, not in the forms that most people suppose.
The reason for this is that for a given person to go to heaven, that person, however transformed, must still be somehow continuous and identifiable with his/her earthly self. Otherwise, the earthly person has not gone to heaven, or gone anywhere, but simply disappeared at death, perhaps replaced with some other entity but not the original “I/me.”
But, another condition of heaven is that it involves no sadness or anxiety. There mere fact that some were suffering eternal torment someplace else would certainly provoke sadness and anxiety in some of heaven’s residents, and much more so if any of those who were suffering were or might be among the people they loved or cared about in life. Perhaps they would be screened from seeing the torment, but if they were even slightly continuous with the people they were on earth, they would certainly want to know the eternal fates of their loved ones. (Conversely, if they had somehow forgotten or stopped caring about their loved ones, they wouldn’t really be close enough to their earthly selves to make it meaningful to speak of those selves as having “gone to heaven.” We are defined as the people we are in life very much by our close attachments to others.)
So either there’s nobody in hell, i.e. suffering eternal torment, or there’s nobody in heaven, i.e. no one still identifiable as his/her onetime earthly self. At worst, then, hell would have to be a reasonably comfortable place, one that those in heaven would consider it OK to have their loved ones sent to. Or, again, the other possibility would be that there’s no heaven that “you” can go to, because the entity that arrives in heaven as “you” would lack major features of what makes you “you.”
So, it’s either heaven or hell, as traditionally understood. You can’t have both.
Yes. It seems like something like that must be true. I have a son, for instance. Heaven would not be heaven for me if I knew he were in hell.
What is the purpose of earthly existence on this hypothesis? If our time on earth is not some sort of test or time of decision, all the suffering and hardship in life seem like gratuitous cruelty. They become especially cruel for those who have more than their fair share of suffering and hardship, since since it doesn’t matter if they show patience, fortitude, and good cheer. I do not look forward to hearing the groans of the damned rising from Hell, assuming I’m not there groaning myself, but universalism seems to suck all meaning out of this life.
I think your argument also exploits a childish notion that heaven is a place of eternal bliss. Is the blessed state just like heroin addiction without the downside? If we have any sort of psychological continuity with our present selves, which your hypothesis supposes, eternal bliss would soon become eternal boredom. Bliss is only bliss against a background of bleakness and banality. I personally have no notion what heaven is like, but do not see how it can be a place of exclusively rapturous emotions.
Earth as God’s final exam doesn’t make a lot of sense. Do we thwart God’s plan for measuring progress to theosis by eradicating rickets or cretinism? Is material success and psychological stability on Earth demerits in Heaven? Do we create children on Earth knowing there are at least even odds they’ll grow up and out of the faith? The pedophiliac murderer receiving Unction on his deathbed get’s a C+ but the devout Muslim who loves his family and practices the faith of his fathers flunks and goes into the Pit?