Pain (continued)

If pain diminishes with time, then given enough time, even the greatest pain will diminish to something unnoticeable. If life goes on after death for eternity, then there is enough time, and any pain any of us go through in this life will 'soon' be forgotten in eternity.

A few years ago my son slipped on some sand while riding his bike and broke his wrist. At the time the injury was very painful, and he suffered for a few weeks in an uncomfortable cast. The injury healed, though, and today I'm sure he doesn't think of his wrist at all. I.m sure because a similar accident happened to me when I was twelve. I still have a distorted bone in my hand because of that accident, but don't think about it regularly at all. Any of us can think of experiences which were extremely painful at the time, maybe for a period of time, but now are not troubling to us at all. In many cases we look on those times as learning experiences.


But, we all also know there exist much much more painful and longer lasting hurts that many people have experienced and will experience in the future. I have a friend who had a stroke a few years ago and now is in a wheelchair and dependent almost totally on his sister for care. He will probably never get much better in this life. We've all read reports of far worse injustices and evils, such as the near extermination of the Jewish people in WWII and more recently the genocide in Rawanda. Tremendous natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina also show that there is great natural evil in the world.

But, if life goes on forever after death, then the effects of evil experienced by someone who was murdered on killed in a natural disaster, or tortured for many years, will also be forgotten eventually. To illustrate, if Hitler was 'only' made to suffer 1000 years of great pain (in fire, for example), for EACH SECOND of pain he caused to each of the MILLIONS of people harmed in any way by the Nazies before and during WWII, the time he would suffer would still be less than a drop in a teaspoon pulled from the ocean of eternity.