Suppose God exists and there is an afterlife the quality of which depends on how one behaves here below. Suppose that the justice which is largely absent here will be meted out there. And suppose we take as a moral axiom that the punishment must fit the crime. The question then arises: what crime or series of crimes would merit everlasting post-mortem punishment of the perpetrator? I earlier opined that no crime or series of crimes would merit such punishment. Thus it is offensive to my moral sense that a just God would punish everlastingly a human evildoer. (It may be otherwise with angelic evildoers such as Lucifer, so let's leave them out of the discussion.) But I added a qualification in my earlier post: unless the perpetrator wanted to maintain himself in a state of rebellion against God, in which case my moral sense would have no problem with God's granting the rebel his wish and maintaining him in a state of everlasting exclusion from the divine light and succor.
Suppose that, after death, Stalin sees the errors of his ways and desires to come into right relation with God. He must still be punished for his horrendous crimes. Surely justice demands that much. What I fail to grasp, however, is how justice could demand that Stalin be punished everlastingly or eternally (if you care to distinguish eternity from everlastingness) for a finite series of finite crimes.
Discussing my earlier post, Richard Hennessey raises an interesting counter-question: ". . . if justice demands an eternal or everlasting punishment for no finite sin or crime or finite set of finite sins or crimes, no matter how heinous, does justice demand an eternal or everlasting reward for no finite good deed or finite set of finite good deeds, no matter how virtuous?" I think what Hennessey is asking here is better put as follows. If justice rules out everlasting punishment for finite crimes, does it also rule out everlasting reward for finite good deeds?
To sharpen the challenge, let's translate the interrogative into a declarative: If no everlasting punishment is justified, then no everlasting reward is either. If that is the point, then I could respond by saying that the Beatific Vision is not a reward for good things we do here below, but the state intended for us all along. It is something like a birthright or an inheritance. One doesn't earn one's inheritance; it is a gift, not a reward. But one can lose it. Similarly with the Beatific Vision. One cannot earn it, and one does not deserve it. But one can lose it.
"But this is all speculation!" Indeed, but if a philosopher can't speculate, who can?
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