Cosmic Scales
This drawing speaks to the ancient idea that one ascends a stairway to Heaven after death to be weighed in the scales of Divine Justice. If found worthy, one continues to ascend towards a better place. If found unworthy, one is thrown headlong from the parapet into the bottomless pit. Having no bottom, one would simply free fall forever -- unless gravity is weak, in which case one might float forever. Assuming gravity, the descent is supposed to be a scary and always increasing acceleration into a black nothingness. Yet if blackness is the case, then the problem becomes one of relativity, for if one is plunging into the bottomless, black abyss, there is nothing against which to relate one's fall.
Therefore, fire becomes necessary to illuminate the abyss. Let us assume that there is a thermal optimum so that the wicked might be toasted, but never annihilated. We also need to have each of the damned to in a human-shaped body so that there is an irregular surface area to create drag and a loss of aerodynamics that would result in a constant head-over-heels tumbling and a continual horrifying, yet useless, flailing of arms and legs.
What of the magnitude of one's sins? The most evil would be ballasted the heaviest with the several weights of judgment, and so would fall the fastest. And why not have the bodies of the damned be flammable for the sake of spectacle? They would be incarcerated in a condensed hydrogen-body whose fire was fed by an inexhaustible supply of fuel. Wicked sinners would be lighted and ejected at a great velocity for us all to watch as we dined at the finest view restaurant in Hell. This idea is something like what Augustine had in mind when he penned his award-winning Halloween short story which appeared on the front page of The Calendar Section of The Los Angeles Times.
