Life is dire. As I said at the opening, there is hardly less suffering to be found in the worst places of the real and verified world than there is in the very Lake of Fire. We can be tortured, starved, terrorized--we can be absolutely tormented in this world. And this is not a vision of hell after this life; we have hardly any need to appeal to supernatural hell to support the idea that there is, in real life, hell on earth.

Is there any hope? In the stance that there is no categorical salvation, there is not. If we do not seek categorical salvation, if we have no hope that it exists--then we must say, we who take this stance, that there can be no hope in our dire human condition. If we do not believe in categorical salvation or act as if we did, we shall probably not attain to it even were it formerly possible. Thus, to give up on categorical salvation--to call it impossible--is to succumb to a hopelessness we can hardly afford. With life as dire as it is, we can certainly be blamed for not doing everything within our power to escape its horrors and find any possible solution. And if what we do is the one thing most likely to leave us without categorical salvation--that is, disbelieve in its possibility--then we can certainly be blamed for not hoping when hope may have saved us. Were life not as dire as it is, perhaps we could afford passing by categorical salvation; but when there is so much torture and agony possible to befall us, we must side with Pascal on the validity of his wager. We must--and the only rational thing to do is--hope for and believe in categorical salvation; if we do not, and it passes us by because we would not believe in it; if we lose it when it was possible, because we wouldn’t consider it real; if we deny ourselves categorical salvation for an theoretic intellectual notion of its impossibility, therefore to lose the very salvation of our souls; then, if all these come to pass for us, we can rightly be blamed for acting irrationally. The only rational reaction in a world as dire as this is to do anything and everything to find the final answer and solution to life; this solution we know to be categorical salvation, and the one thing that can bring it about most effectively--should it be real--is belief in it, and action on the belief. Again--Pascal was right, we must hope and believe, since the stakes are simply too high for us not to do anything and everything we can to be saved.