The obscenity of belief in an eternal hell

if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which. millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?” — William James My friends’ son is now old enough to grant me permission to tell this story, but it happened more than a dozen years ago, when he was only seven or eight. My conviction that there is such a hell to which one of us might go while the other enters into the Kingdom of God means that I must be willing to abandon him — indeed, abandon everyone — to a fate of total misery while yet continuing to assume that, having done so, I shall be able to enjoy perfect eternal bliss. The difficulty for many readers is that this part of the book’s argument relies upon a classical understanding of rational freedom — one that the common inheritance of both pagan antiquity and Christian tradition — that at one time was more or less universally presumed, and that still has no plausible alternative, but that modern persons rarely encounter. It turns out, on any careful consideration of the matter, that only God himself — the infinite and transcendent Being, Goodness, Truth, and Beauty that is the source and end of all reality — could be the true necessary “final cause” for any really free rational creature.