Instead of Heaven or Hell, Heaven or Non-Existence
Maybe there’s a religion like this already, but if not, someone should come up with a religion where if you’re good, you go to heaven when you die, but if you’re bad, instead of going to hell for eternity, you simply stop existing. Eternal horrendous torture is too extreme a punishment for anything anyone could possibly do on earth. The threat of non-existence, however, is enough to keep people in line without painting the entire universe as a hostile, nit-picky revenge-machine.
[Update, 5/15/09]: Unless people would rather exist and be tortured for eternity than stop existing entirely. That could explain why the heaven/hell dichotomy took hold, rather than heaven/non-existence theory. The threat of forever torture is bad, but at least it’s imaginable. Just take a bad day and stretch it out. But complete non-existence is impossible to imagine, since it’s impossible for those who exist to relate. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, in fact, has multiple levels of heaven, but only one hell. And that hell is called “The Outer Darkness,” and it also known as “soul death.” Even this hell isn’t considered complete non-existence, because you can still hear lonely shrieks and cries, but it’s the closest a religion has got to conflating non-existence and hell. And in religious circles, it’s roundly considered to be the worst hell on the books.
4 years ago