Reading Stephen King's cosmic horror story Revival unexpectedly shifted my attitude towards people in general, not that my worldview itself was in error. I became persistently merciful, and not out of hope of manipulating non-rationalists for pragmatism or amusement. The end of the story shows a glimpse into an alleged afterlife called the Null that everyone, from babies to the elderly, goes to after death: a dimension where souls in supposedly undying new bodies are trapped in eternal servitude to anthropomorphic ant-like slavers who are in turn enslaved by immensely powerful beings that are almost godlike except that they might not be uncaused causes. One of these beings, Mother, can imprison or display the new, still-animated bodies of people within her own massive, spidery, projected body. Overwhelming lights illuminate the marching horde of humans that, according to Mother, will never receive death, light (of a non-threatening kind, since there are the aforementioned extreme lights in the Null), or rest.
If this kind of afterlife exists, which is entirely logically possible despite the evidence for Christianity with its eternal bliss or annihilation of the soul (John 3:16, Romans 6:23), people endure lifetimes of suffering only for death to awaken them to something far worse than any pain of this world. With sexual abuse, the pain cannot last longer than the abuser is alive. With murder, the pain of earthly existence, not the hypothetical pain of an afterlife, cannot outlast the deed that kills the victim. Not even the most severe tortures of this world, that far outclass murder in cruelty, would be anything more than a drop in an infinite ocean compared to ceaseless slavery and torment at the whims of immortal Lovecraftian beings. The Null is not about morality since it involves supposed endless pain and is the postmortem destination, as assumed by the protagonist, of everyone.
Though there is no evidence for an afterlife like this, there is a great deal of evidence for Christianity and by extension its very different, often unacknowledged hell of justice and death rather than endless torture of any kind. Yahweh's justice, not that eternal torment could be morally proportionate to the finite sins of a human life as it is, is the elimination of those who betray or refuse reconciliation to reality (Ezekiel 18:4, 2 Peter 2:6). They will neither suffer forever nor exist as a blemish on his creation. The last enemy to be destroyed, if Christianity is true, is death itself (1 Corinthians 15:26) and then pain itself will be no more (Revelation 21:4). There is no eternal suffering in Yahweh's hell. What the wicked come to is the second death (Matthew 10:28, Revelation 20:15).
Reading Revival, it is not as if I had never realized that not only is an afterlife logically possible because it does not contradict axioms, but also an afterlife that is very different from the Christian one is possible. A universalist heaven could be a popular idea on an emotional level, but a universalist, non-theological hell that has no purpose other than just to subjugate the human dead for the sake of the Great Ones is even worse in one sense that the irrational, unbiblical heresy of the evangelical hell. At least this unbiblical hell of eternal conscious torment is supposed to be about justice although that very fact is what makes it a logical contradiction, whereas the Null is presented as an unavoidable, permanent residence for all human souls (though other Stephen King books conflict with this and thus the Null as it is described is an illusion or the protagonist made assumptions).
Even now, many months after I read the novel, the irony being that I bought it right around when I became a rationalist nine years ago and happened to initially never read past the first 70 or so pages, the elements of the Null and the general idea of an inevitable and endlessly hellacious afterlife still receives my attention all the time. Intense flashes of color alongside live stage music remind me of the lights of the Null, where the colors seem alive and alien and like they are perceiving the terrified human inhabitants. I joke about how at any moment I might go to meet Mother and see her leg reach down for me with its decorations of screaming human faces. It is not that I had not thought about many of the relevant ideas without making any assumptions, but that I was never particularly terrified of just the fact that something like the Null is entirely logically possible, as utterly unlikely as it seems.
The plentiful evidence for Christianity would have to be an illusion, which would probably mean much more about the sensory plane is an illusion than just a few documents about the life and death of Christ. The uncaused cause would have to be amorally sadistic or apathetic, leaving dead humans to be treated cruelly without end by some other supernatural beings. Whatever hell might exist in this case would not be about proportionate justice with a finite ending or about eradicating evil by purging reality of unrepentant sinners. Like the Null, it would be about arbitrary suffering or the irrationalistic or pointless whims of an eldritch entity. This is far from the Christian hell, and since there is evidence for Christianity, it is improbable.
As I read the slow burn cosmic horror novel that presented this afterlife, I developed a terror of death that I had never before experienced, and it is not because the likely afterlife--the Biblical hell--is anywhere near as severe as the Null. Despite this, I simply no longer had the subjective desire to be permissably aggressive with non-rationalists or wish annihilation upon them. It cannot be irrational to wish nonexistence upon those who reject or ignore the only part of reality that cannot have been any other way in itself, logical axioms, and when it comes to Biblical morality, all unrepentant sin deserves death. Because of the power of non-religious cosmic horror, all the same, I lost my bent towards wishing for a much less awful and,ore importantly, deserved fate for people. A different kind of cosmic horror seized me: concern that other people might avoidably fade from existence altogether. This saddened me like never before, and I came to deeply prioritize mercy for others. Directly Lovecraftian horror shifted my attitude towards the Bible's own lesser cosmic horror.
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