The basic axiom that governs the conception of heaven and hell, regardless of religion, can be boiled down to the idea that justice must be balanced. That is, for every act of evil or immorality, there must exist an act of punishment to countermand this act of evil, thereby negating it and hence creating a balance in the scales of justice. This idea is implemented earthly within the system of judiciary of the country, where every act is against the law is punished by the law. If such a balance of justice is achieved, we may call the system to be “fair”, for everyone receives their moral desert without favour. Here, I shall just elaborate on my thoughts regarding this conception of justice and how is may be philosophically justified in support of heaven and hell.

In all conceptions of heaven and hell, men who act immorally are eventually penalised for such acts. In the following examples, I will show, based on my understanding of them, how the different Abrahamic religions conceive of justice, so please correct me if I am mistaken. Judaism hell punishes according to infringement of the divine law, manifested in the Ten Commandments; Christianity punishes based on a criterion of belief in God and Christ, in which believers are sent to heaven and non-believers are sent to hell, where they suffer in degrees according to their earthly acts; Islam punishes based on the accumulated acts of evil, where believers may enjoy leniency in their punishment. Heaven and hell is not universal. In Indian religions like Jainism and Buddhism, the idea of karma detracts to quite a large extent from these Abrahamic conceptions, since karma is based on a conception of mortal life itself as suffering. To attain salvation, one must transcend earthly life, which can be generally done either by accumulating good karma (Buddhism), destroying all karma (Jainism), or breaking through the Maya of reality (Vedic). Hence, ideas regarding heaven and hell is more pertinent towards Abrahamic religions, though they are obviously not exclusive to these religions. As can be seen from the summary above, the common thread running through them all is the idea of balancing justice.

“Justice must be balanced” is a terribly loaded statement that demands to be inspected. There are two main issues within this concept itself: firstly, why should justice be balanced? and secondly, by what standards is justice to be balanced? The second question is more easily answered, and it is to that which I shall turn to first.

The balance of justice is something impossible to achieve by human means. What standards can you possibly use to determine if a punishment is deserved by a man? Legal systems necessarily fail because they are unable to objectively judge desert, not for the lack of effort to do so, but because of the very human problem of the lack of information, and the human inability to make perfect judgments. Perfect desert cannot be attained by human means, so it can only be attained by divine means. For divinity to achieve this balance of justice, God must necessarily be omniscient and omnipotent. Without these attributes, He will be lacking the requisite information, or lacking the requisite ability of judgment by which fairness may be attained. Only by postulating such a conception of God can there be established a consistent moral standard by which everyone can be evaluated on an equal and fair basis.

The next question, admittedly the tougher of the two, asks: why should justice be balanced? Indeed, the Indian religions, as I have summarised above, do not demand justice to be balanced, or at least not directly. For them, the earthly life seems very much akin to hell, and the only way to achieve salvation is through individualistc pursuits to transcend such a life. For such religions, they do not require justice to be served against practitioners of evil. Should he pursue this path, evil immerses the sinner deeper into the earthly life of suffering. This amounts to an indirect side-effect that can prevent him from achieving salvation within his lifetime, and is hence indirectly equivalent to punishment and a form of judiciary fairness, but this is a conception based entirely upon the intuitive proposition that “earthly life consists of suffering”. In Abrahamic religions, however, sins are directly punishable by suffering in hell, and such punishment demands a direct act of judgment by an agent, which is God. However, in addressing the question directly, it seems to me that there is no imperative that justice need be balanced at all. It is not axiomatic, that is, it is not a fundamentally intuitive moral proposition that such fairness must be the way the world works. The only reason why I can conceive that such a proposition must be made is drawn from the nature of God, namely, that God is good. If God is good, then He ought to have constructed the world such that evil is punished, and the good is rewarded, such that morality is actively rewarded. However, this begs the question of the very existence of evil itself, though that is a separate issue altogether.

Hence, it seems to me that the conception of heaven and hell are logically consequential only from the Abrahamic conception of God, and are otherwise non-intuitive ideas. It also seems to me that Western law derives their legal basis of state punishment directly from this transcendental idea of divine reward and punishment, historically personified in the divine right of kings. There have been identified differences in Western and Eastern conceptions of law and morality: westerners tend to see right and wrong as objectively determinable, while the east tend towards values inherent in persons as the primary distinction of moral actions. I believe I can claim with some validity that divine punishment of Abrahamic religions have a large part to play in this western conception, and this also shows that the very idea of objective morality are very likely non-universal constructs that can only be supported given that the Abrahamic God exists.
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