I hesitate to write this post and may take it down depending on the response, but it’s important to touch on the consequences to not maturing spiritually and to not forging a connection with the transcendent (in whichever faith tradition you are from).

The mainstream Christian tradition has been for most of the Church’s history that “unbelievers”, as defined by their acceptance of Grace and/or their actions toward others, will suffer eternal torment. Essentially, if union with God is unending heavenly bliss, then rejection of/by God is hellfire and torment forever. I’ve already posted about the idea that everyone will be reconciled with God (a.k.a. Christian Universalism) eventually. But I also struggled with the question, “what’s the point” if everybody ends up in “heaven” anyway. If the Super-Reality is all that is, all that ever was, and all that ever will be, how does one remove themselves from that? Then I experienced something that led me to believe that separation from God results in… nothing. Literally. Just as the opposite of Love isn’t hate, it’s apathy, the opposite of the Super-Reality is complete nothingness, emptiness… The Void. Whether or not the unbeliever experiences The Void is hard to say. Given the absence of everything, including the perception of time, perhaps the unbeliever experiences “nothing” until they are reconciled with God, which in the Christian tradition is The Rapture. I briefly referenced a Near Death Experience (NDE) in this post, but in his book Life After Death, Deepak Chopra postulates that NDEs are evidence that people will experience the afterlife in the language of their faith; that is to say, a Christian might experience the Blessed Virgin Mary, or a Muslim houris and exotic fruits. As Chopra puts it, “Eternal life, it turns out, is very personal.” So for those that don’t think there’s anything after death, or that we are just “meat puppets” as a friend described it, there probably is nothing: A profound, inexplicable, and frightful void. After all, becoming part of nothing means annihilation. Whatever you are, is no more. That can’t be a joyful experience.

However, The Void is closer to Purgatory in the Christian tradition than it is to Hell. That is to say, it’s temporary, or as temporary as is possible with the absence of time. You see, every single believer should be wracked with agony at every waking moment by the thought that part of humanity, including one’s own loved ones, will suffer eternal torment. The idea that the righteous could love God so much that they wouldn’t feel compassion toward those burning in hell for all of eternity, is at best smug self-righteousness, or at worst a malicious callousness, and certainly not at all Christian. But if the righteous are just reconciled to God sooner (again, what “sooner” means without the experience of time I cannot say), and the unrighteous will eventually find their way there, one can empathise with and have compassion for those with no spiritual connection.