A DIFFERENT VIEW OF HELL

Many religious people believe in the damnation of Hell. It has been depicted throughout history and various cultures as being a place of fire, brimstone and eternal pain and punishment for moral sins.

Fro Gospel passages, followers overly have a literalistic view about hell.  Jesus Christ speaks about "eternal punishment" for sinners in the afterlife, so believers conjure visions of a cosmic torture chamber in which those who reject God or commit grave sins without repentance are subjected to endless torment as punishment for their transgressions. It is a ghastly analogue to equally crude and comical visions of heaven as a place where the righteous are rewarded with angels' wings and happiness forever.

For if sins are the moral failing of an individual, then it is the individual who must punish himself once he realizes he has missed out on the moral good.

Plato's Socrates stated that most people assume that when a person does something bad, he deserves retributive punishment in the form of inflicted suffering. "Hell" as it is depicted in the popular imagination is modeled on this view: It is where evildoers are sent to suffer punishment, deservedly, for their sins.

But Socrates implies that this view makes no sense. Doing the morally right thing must be good, intrinsically, for the moral person himself. (Otherwise, in what sense would it be good?) But that means that the opposite must be true as well: The person who fails to do the morally right thing suffers intrinsically by virtue of missing out on the good that comes from doing the right thing.

The implications of this position for how we think of punishment are quite radical. It implies, first, that people undergo punishment for their moral transgressions all on their own, without any additional infliction of suffering. The immoral person foolishly thinks she will benefit from her immoral deed. But she is mistaken and suffers from having cut herself off from the good.

As for those immoral people who don't sense any suffering or loss from having committed an immoral, sinful act, their proper punishment should be education in the error of their ways. They must be made to see their mistake. Once they do, they will begin to experience the pain that follows from the realization that they have denied themselves what is truly good.

All of this follows of necessity from the logic of morality itself. What makes no moral sense at all is the popular view of punishment embodied in the vision of hell as a place for the infliction of external torments. To say that an immoral person deserves to suffer for his sins is like insisting that a man with cancer deserves to have his legs broken. It's a prescription of additional suffering for someone who's already suffering.

Why is it nonetheless so common for people to think about punishment in this way? The Socratic view is that it flows from our own doubts about the goodness of morality. Part of us worries or suspects that the perpetrator of an immoral deed who isn't caught and made to suffer won't actually suffer anything at all. We fear she will have gotten away with her deed, as we say, scot-free. Which means that part of us doubts the intrinsic goodness of morality.

It is this viewpoint that begs the moral lapses (and lack of punishment) in LOST. The characters did heinous and criminal actions, but rarely if at all did those characters actually receive any punishment. In fact, several (including Kate) were given their freedom without serving any justice.

If the island was the education center where people who made immoral choices were to learn about their misdeed - - - and that self-awareness would cause them their own emotional pain and suffering - - - LOST does not fill that lesson learned either. If the sideways church was the "class reunion" of the morally deficient, only one person realized that he still had work to do (Ben). The rest of the churchgoers had no moral revelations that made them better souls.