I. To Hell With It Coming from a religious background largely influenced by Buddhism in recent years, the concept of an eternal hell has been, for me, one of the most difficult to swallow during my recent return to my childhood Christian faith (albeit via the Eastern Orthodox Church, rather than the Catholic Church I grew up with). The Buddha propounded a reality divided into several different planes, none of which has the character of eternity attached to it, including the Buddhist hell. This is because of an essentially mechanistic metaphysic, inherited from its parent religion Hinduism (or more properly Sanātana Dharma), which depends on the workings of the law of karma for its understanding of human nature and its relationship to the rest of the cosmos. The metaphysics of karma essentially explain that a manifested being (in the provisional sense of an entirely conditioned, contingent existence with no essential nature specific to it) is the resultant vector, throughout all the various worlds of manifestation, of that being’s own past actions, and that karma can be both accumulated and exhausted much like money. Thus, given enough positive karma, one can end up a deva in one of the god-realms for
