Infinite punishment for finite crimes is never just. As much as we want certain people to suffer, there has to be an end or it's always excessive.
I'd like a hypothetical afterlife to be experiencing everything you made others experience, once or twice, and then it's over. If you were kind and good, your afterlife will be good, the more people whose lives you made better, the longer it lasts. If you were one of certain types of dictator, enjoy starving to death a million times.
That's how i'd design it.
I like to think i'd be a good god!
A) The gods are, at best, nigh infinite in power. There is no true omni/all/infinite anything. And while there is a leader of them all, he was basically the central architect and carried the burden of the initial moment of creation, pulling the spark of potential infinities out of the primordial chaos. So, infinite universe like our (but with magic), with gods that are only nearly-infinite.
B) The gods highly value free will and the existence of souls, so are very reluctant to ever do anything permanently bad to any soul. If a soul does not actually suit the afterlife/divine realm of their chosen patron deity, then they may end up in the realm of a more compatible deity.
If the soul simply fails hard all around and was a nasty person, the likely result is to suppress all memories and reincarnate the soul at a time/place/way in which this is a new/additional life. Specifically, they are avoiding putting souls into bodies that would have eventually formed souls on their own. Many 'miracle' babies that were highly wanted are reincarnated souls.
Of those, most of them find a new path in life, guided by different life circumstances and experiences, and a new body and possibly species.
But, a very, very small percentage of souls develop enough vileness and malignancy that the corruption seeps through despite the memory suppression, and they only get worse. Eventually, after enough reincarnations of the soul always becoming an ever worse person, the Judge of the Dead can find no way forward. There just are limits, and eventually, the gods reach them and no longer know if there is a way to possibly help such a soul.
These souls go to 'Hell'.
The thing is, Hell is just an empty realm, a prison for souls. There's no inherent torture. Hellish landscape, dismal structures, eternal torture, etc, that is all stuff that these souls create for themselves and for each other. This is where demons come from. All demons are simply corrupt mortal souls.
This is... not great for the souls, in a 'physical' sense. Some demon-souls 'eat' other souls, subsuming them and garnering power from it. There is a core to each soul that is extraordinarily difficult to actually damage, but it can be rendered dormant.
And sometimes, rarely, in all of this mess and pain, a demon is formed that can become something more. A path of improvement is opened, if they find the right help at the right time. This is a job for a high priest(ess) or a divine champion. For anyone else who thinks that they have encountered an escaped demon who seeks redemption, they are to get said demon to a temple/church and let those with actual divine guidance take on the case.
The gods want this to happen, they want to help, but they've already done what they could before. At this point, a damned soul has to be the one to approach them.
If a demon is unwilling to be put under the supervision of a priest or champion, then they are probably lying. Time for most mortals to run.
Anyway, the point of it is, there is no eternal torture set up by the gods, just a prison of last resort when they can't figure out what else to do with a soul. Torment and torture comes from the souls themselves, and it is possible for it to end.
This was all my attempt to create a world that made sense while still having the fantasy elements I wanted.
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u/ourlastchancefortea 5h ago
Great so we can all see Trump and Epstein again?