The elaborate, grotesque, Biblically unjust torments of hell in the likes of literature like Dante's Inferno or video games like Agony are far from how the Bible presents hell. The lake of fire described in the Bible was intended for demonic beings, not even the fallen humans who fail to turn to God in repentance. Fallen angels would have been the sole inhabitants had the fall of humanity never occurred (Matthew 25:41). What details the Bible does provide about this lake of fire include, at least according to the language various passages use, that it involves fire (Matthew 18:8), the presence of Christ or God (Revelation 14:9-11), and, at least for humans other than those who submit to the "beast" of Revelation, cosmic death for sin (Matthew 10:28, Ezekiel 18:4). The fire is said to exist endlessly and yet reduce human bodies to ashes (2 Peter 2:6), their spirits ceasing to be as they are locked out of the eternal life reserved for the saved.
The Biblical afterlife has been greatly misunderstood by most throughout recorded church and secular history. Even if the aspects of hell as put forth by Jesus were to be experienced forever by all the unsaved, they would still not include some of the details in the hell of artistic stories like the aforementioned examples. All the same, it would be such a serious thing for eternal conscious torment to be the default punishment of God in hell that almost no Christians who believe in it have truly taken it as seriously as would be warranted. Jesus says of Judas that it would have been better for him not to have been born, as Judas kills himself without seeming to throw himself to God in a desperate plea for mercy. As Matthew 26:24 quotes Jesus, he says, "'The Son of Man will go just as is written about him. But wow to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born.'"
If evangelical and traditional ideas about the Christian hell are true, though--and it is absolutely clear from Biblical passages that not once is this actually taught in texts that most people associate with eternal conscious torment for all sinners--this is not the case only for Judas. It would indeed be better for anyone at all to have never come into existence than to be thrown into eternal suffering, both on a moral and a personal pragmatic level. To be damned to hell (with its eventual annihilation for general humanity as according to the actual teachings of the Bible), one must first sin without repentance, necessitating moral error and a lack of commitment to Christ beforehand. To suffer endlessly would be a fate far worse on the level of personal experience than anything else.
After a life of suffering, sheer nonexistence of consciousness would be in some ways a relief to many. The only thing that could be entirely better for the humans involved would be to experience an afterlife filled with the pleasure of basking in reason and its truths, God, morality, and relational connections with the fellow redeemed. The eternal life offered by the deity of Christianity is thankfully not a promise which has no evidence pointing to it, nor does it entail a trivial, dull, or objectively meaningless existence. This life is for both the spirit and the body, the two metaphysical components of humans. In this renewed unity of consciousness and the physical form it resides in, and there will be no more death, crying, mourning, or pain (Revelation 21:4). Outside of this New Jerusalem where God's eternal life is granted are the unsaved beings (Revelation 22:15), which are clearly said to at some point literally perish (John 3:16). It would certainly be better for them to have never come into being at all than to face the perpetual torments evangelicals and the irrationalistic majority of Christians have believed in.
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