"Why is it reasonable to believe in prisons, but not in the hell?"

[The Valkyrie]

I don't know. I've seen some pretty awful tats from studios and parlours.

[FlatAssembler]

You fail to understand..  No amount of bickering over the relative injustice of hell answers the claim that hell is necessary to justice.  Let's use an example that I know will work for you.  Making food is necessary to life.  "But", we say..... "It's so damned deadly - just look at all the devastation!"

-sure, and also necessary to life.  Next.

The devastation by food production is finite. The injustice of hell is infinite. It is an infinite punishment for a finite crime. Infinite punishment minus finite crime is an infinite injustice.

[The Grand Nudger]

You're still bickering over hells relative injustice as though that mattered to the claim that hell is necessary to justice.

[FlatAssembler]

You're still bickering over hells relative injustice as though that mattered to the claim that hell is necessary to justice.

The harm that something does influences the a-priori probability of it being necessary. Saying that grass-fed cows may be necessary to feed growing population, in spite of the harm they do (methane emissions...), is a-priori plausible, since the harm they do has relatively little with our ability to produce food. Furthermore, maybe there is some truth to the claim that a grain-based diet will lead to soil depletion. Saying factory-farmed grain-fed livestock is necessary to feed growing population is much less plausible: it is taking food away from us, rather than giving it to us. And if grain-based diet leads to soil depletion, factory-farmed livestock obviously makes things even worse. But saying factory farmed livestock is necessary to feed humans is still more plausible than saying that hell, which is an infinite injustice, is somehow necessary for justice.

[The Grand Nudger]

The harm that something does influences the a-priori probability of it being necessary.

That's a bold claim, and very explicitly the moralistic fallacy, again. The negatively valued aspect of some act or some thing determines the nature of things or it's probable relationship to that nature.

Harmful things, Bad Things™ may be necessary. Just as harmful things, Bad Places can exist. It never works in any context. The only argument against the proposition that hell is necessary to justice is an argument about it's function, not it's nature. Just assume that it's a horrible place. On par with any of the worst prisons on earth. The contention is that a place like this is necessary to justice, not that it does not do injustice. If some infinite amount of injustice were required to be applied to one subject, so that whatever justice is possible could be afforded to another, even if that amount of justice is meager and the amount of injustice done is immense, it would still be the case that this specific injustice were a requirement of whatever little justice there is to be had.

There are as many ways of earnestly and completely addressing it as there are arguments against any punitive ideology or regime. We do it in thought and, ostensibly, in practice, when we reform our own institutions. The failure of a god to match human efforts in this would be perplexing - but if that's what hell is and that's how this god works - again..more a comment on the author of creation than the nature or existence of any item in that creation. I presented a simple dismissal of the claim in accepting the propositions and determining that there was, then, no justice. You could express similar thoughts to your own apparent disbelief in the form of accepting that, maybe, some specific injustice is necessary to justice, but in that event, the amount of justice in the world might be vanishingly small on balance. I don't know how you'd do the math, but it's a more tenable claim than a non rule about a probability you never calculated - wouldn't you agree?