The afterlife …

… Damn It All. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The Penguin Book of Hell, edited by the Fordham history professor Scott Bruce, is an anthology of sadistic fantasies that for millions of people over many centuries laid a claim to sober truth. Not all people in all cultures have embraced such fantasies. Though the ancient Egyptians were obsessively focused on the afterlife, it was not suffering in the Kingdom of the Dead that most frightened them but rather ceasing altogether to exist. At the other extreme, in ancient Greece the Epicureans positively welcomed the idea that when it was over it was over: after death, the atoms that make up body and soul simply come apart, and there is nothing further either to fear or to crave. Epicurus was not alone in thinking that ethical behavior should not have to depend on threats and promises: Aristotle’s great Nicomachean Ethics investigates the sources of moral virtue, happiness, and justice without for a moment invoking the support of postmortem punishments or rewards.

Well, Jesus refers to the everlasting fire, which seems to me to give a hell a temporal dimension. Eternity is not time  going on forever. It is timelessness. So I think it reasonable to posit that Hell may only last until the end of time. The Abbé Mugnier famously said that he believed in Hell because it was a doctrine of the Church, but added that he didn't have to believe anyone was there.  While looking up the Abbé to check on this, I came upon a piece I wrote in which he figures. It has some bearing on all this, so here it is;
Look at the moon, not at the finger.