Humanity is divided between those who make
a conscious effort to love God and neighbor and those who do not. The greater effort that we make to love, the closer to God we are. On the Spiritual Bell Curve, we tend to be moving toward the right, toward a little door we may picture at the bottom right-hand corner of the Spiritual Bell Curve.
Those who make no effort to love God and neighbor are in the middle of that same Spiritual Bell Curve. Those who have increasing amounts of hatred in their souls are moving toward the left. Again, we may picture a little door there that leads to a place where hatred reigns.
A basic question: “Why would anyone hate the God Who made them?” leads us into an exploration of suicidal, spiritual insanity. According to St. Ignatius, we should use the three powers of the soul, Memory, Understanding, and Will to draw ourselves nearer to God.
Those who choose to draw themselves farther from God have chosen to misuse the powers of their soul and draw themselves away from Him.
Why?
When we think of Pascal’s Wager, we realize that the inventor of probability theory quantified that the best bet is the one with the greatest reward. So, we have some mathematical certainty that bears out using the powers of the soul to draw closer to He Who will send our souls to the eternity He decides we deserve.
To ignore both faith and statistical probability is to choose everlasting pain over its opposite. From what place in the soul does the choice to prefer and pursue pain arise? It seems to come from souls suffering in pain that they feel may be assuaged by piling up lots of material goods and negative thoughts that are summed up with one sentence, “I’ll show them!”
We know that these programmed entities cannot be carried into Heaven, where there is absolutely no need of them. But, one can’t help but wonder if the lost souls are required to take their idols with them when they exit through the tiny door at the left-hand corner of the bell curve.
It’s not utterly unreasonable to suppose that the lost soul is forced to take his worshipped idols with him into Hell, and live with them forever. Those who worship idols have those same idols sent along with them, where they must spend eternity, jammed into a hoarder’s smelly paradise of meaningless junk.
All the idols are there. Rotting caviar, tarnishing metals, fading art, breaking statues, cars that no longer run, old wine forever seeping slowly from decaying corks, and expensive clocks and watches that probably keep on keeping perfect time as a reminder of what was lost. The richest lost souls may arrive in Hell with vast moving vans of mansions, castles, excess homes, land, buildings, jets, tarnishing gold, dim jewels, stock certificates for companies about to disappear, government bonds of collapsed nations, and yellowing pearls. We have but to think of any idol and consider that it becomes part of the moldering trappings of Hell within which the lost souls are ever more cramped. Each new arrival bringing his loads of idols is made painfully aware that he is bitterly hated for adding to the discomfort.
The truly vicious and angry, Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, and haters of neighbors don’t worship physical idols. Instead, they bring their sarcasm, hatred, pain, and bitterness that they adored on earth to their new neighbors.
All the idol worshippers, and all their idols, are there. There is no way for a single one of those poor, lost souls to escape battling viciously with each other forever in the wretched pit.
