If Ghandi could deserve heaven...

...would Hitler deserve Hell?

A common argument for whether Heaven and Hell are justified is "well, do you think Ghandi is in Hell just because he didn't believe in Jesus?"

The argument has a strong appeal - Ghandi sacrificed himself for peace, putting his body on the line for his people. He tried to follow the principles of the Sermon on the Mount, even. Giving his cloak to someone who asked, turning his cheek to one who struck him, living as though the meek, humble, and lowly really would inherit the earth.

Hitler, on the other hand, was a demonstrably bad guy. The butchery of millions and millions - driving the world to war, and being a rather rotten human being.

Let's make a broad assumption and say that Ghandi saved 2 billion people - improving their lot, giving them hope, whatever. Let's make the opposite asumption of Hitler - that he destroyed, directly or indirectly, 2 billion lives though war, genocide, etc.

If the "default" afterlife is Hell, would saving 2 billion lives be enough to earn Ghandi a trip the other way? Eventually, wouldn't the bliss of Paradise accrue to the point where what he did in life would "balance" the book? Should he at that point be cast into Hell? Dealing with infinite things like the afterlife is a tricky thing for this reason.

The opposite is true of Heaven: if that is the "default," (as so many people would prefer to believe - just don't be bad enough in life to get kicked out) wouldn't eternal damnation be too much, even for Hitler? If every life he ruined were worth 1,000 years of torment, then his 2 billion ruined lives would nevertheless be paid for in 2 trillion years. Granted, this is a timeframe some 100 times longer than the current theoretical age of the universe... but it is still but a speck in the light of infinity.

The worst part of the argument that Ghandi deserves Heaven and Hitler deserves Hell is where to draw the dividing line. If we assume a statistically normal distribution of goodness across all the people of all time - some very good, some very bad, many more in between - then we will have to make a cut off between two people who are very similar, with a very small thing dividing them. Perhaps Mark and John are the people on either side of the line. They've done their share of good and bad in life, but John cut off one too many people in traffic, and that pushes him just below the cutoff.

Can we in good conscience say that, for all intents and purposes, that one act was enough to condemn John to eternal torment, while granting Mark eternal bliss? Even subdivided, with uber-Heaven, Boring-Heaven, not-too-bad-Hell and Terrible-Hell - you still have to put the lines somewhere in the distribution of man... and you are still making distinctions based on minute differences. distinctions that summed over eternity far outweigh the small choices that put them in category A, B, C, D, or whatever.

The only way I think this can be satisfactory is that everyone deserves heaven (including Hitler, Brutus, Judas, Osama Bin Laden, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush), or everyone deserves hell (including Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr, and Mikey from the Life Cereal commercials).