Dave Littler

How is the universe made a better place by having a sealed, inescapable environment in which people are tortured forever?

It doesn't seem to make a great deal of sense to me. Is it to teach them a lesson? To rehabilitate them? Neither seems to make sense to me, since they will never be released into the population anyway.

Is it to serve as an example? If so, it doesn't seem to work very well. I've read lengthy lists of the last words of people being executed for murder. Every single one who talks about religion with their last words talks about believing they're going to heaven. Plainly, fear of hell doesn't deter such people since they believe they won't go there.

So what's the function of hell? What good purpose does it serve? How is the universe a better place for having people who were born into the wrong religion being tortured forever? How would it be worse if they were not being tortured?

I do not require, in order for me to be happy, to know that my enemies are suffering. Why can't god rise to that same moral level?