If there is nothing to look forward to and if my future holds either torment or simply nonexistence, I might as w ell live it up now. It doesn t matter how we behave now. Death cancels all debts. For some, hell is the only passage there is. The possibility of perdition can act as a kind of stimulant to an already corrupt and decaying life if we believe that we live in a world where nothing matters in the end.
Life is cheap.
Life is fleeting. For many, there is no binding moral authority. Not long ago, the word soul was looked down on in intellectual circles and for mixed reasons. It was rightly thought that the tradition that had divorced the soul from the body had done a lot of harm to people over the centuries. But some went too far and dismissed altogether humanity s deep longings, which we associate with the word soul.