Locked Caskets and Broken Keys

Religious thought is more than a claim about the world; at its heart, it makes a claim about the nature of good. It seeks to answer the most fundamental question of moral existence: What is the exact value of what is done? In what way does it matter what you do to begin with? The concept of justice, purpose, and the afterlife is central to this and different traditions see these elements in radically different ways.  For too long, the pluralistic West has hoped downplaying these differences can lead to mutual respect and coexistence.  There is a fair amount of reason to believe in this approach.  But, sophomoric to hope to apply it to every cultural and situation.  Point blank, the Islam practiced by Hamas and its supporters is morally bankrupt.  That’s not a polemic statement.  It’s a technical point of fact.  Its ultimate expression?  Murdering the beautiful Bibas children, locking them in their caskets, and providing keys that don’t open them.  Meaning is turned upside down.

Jewish thought makes a bold yet simplistic claim: by living out values in this world, they become more profoundly evident to the individual in the next. Each act of kindness, love, and justice refines a person’s ability to recognize and experience these virtues in their purest form in the world to come. The reward for courage is to experience a perfected state of courage; the reward for love is a deeper, purer love. There is a direct correspondence between moral effort and ultimate fulfillment. This claim aligns with an intuitive sense of justice—one that is not merely transactional, but transformative.  Maimonides in Guide for the Perplexed, supports this vision.  The soul’s experience in the afterlife is shaped by the virtues cultivated during life. A person who has lived justly becomes more attuned to divine truth, while a person who has lived in moral corruption becomes estranged from it. This continuity between action and reward ensures morality is not merely an external requirement but an internal refinement of self.

Not all religious traditions follow this model. Some, like Hamas, envision the afterlife as a reversal of earthly suffering, where self-denial here justifies indulgence there. The logic is simple: renounce earthly pleasures, adhere to strict obedience, and upon death, receive boundless gratification. This vision is an unchecked hedonism, where one is granted whatever was sacrificed in life without moral restraint. At first glance, this might seem like legitimate compensation for earthly hardship. However, upon closer examination, it reveals a deeper moral incoherence.  A spiritual masochism.  Two examples illustrate this physical and spiritual self-harm.

Radical Islam’s solution to male sexual urges is to throw women into a bag with holes.  Large slits if you’re lucky.  The reward for such a novel approach to not objectifying women, sexually? About six dozen eternal virgins in the hereafter. The orgiastic public show would make even Hefner blush. It’s hard to tell if radical Islam’s solution to family dynamics is even more shocking.  It demands women to bow their head, remain silent before their father and husband and do what they’re told. If you can, even muster a sense of gratitude for being beaten if you forget your place or step out of line. In the same way Western morning shows give tips on maximizing your next summer vacation, Islamic clerics offer tips on how to say thank you to a beating from your “loving husband”.  In life, this dark ethic demands women abdicate the most valuable gift of life – personal responsibility.  So, in the next life women can hedonistically make all the choices they never dared.  Marry whoever you will despite any objections they might have.  Invest your time on whatever pleases you with total disregard for others no matter how self-centered or ridiculous.  In life strict subservience.  In death, reckless abandon.

A system in which deprivation is the price for later excess severs the connection between morality and goodness. It suggests that virtue is merely instrumental—a burdensome task rather than an intrinsic good. More alarmingly, it allows for a dangerous moral escapism: if suffering earns reward, then suffering may be justified. If reward is arbitrary, then ethical coherence dissolves. This is not just flawed reasoning—it is the groundwork for moral nihilism.

A just ethical system must be internally consistent with the morality it promotes. Any system that justifies grotesque suffering in this life with the promise of exaggerated pleasure in the next creates moral absurdity. It detaches ethical living from any meaningful consequence, enabling individuals to rationalize even the most horrifying behaviors. This detachment results in two major ethical distortions.  The first is moral arbitraryism – If the afterlife is entirely different from earthly morality, then there is no inherent reason to act morally other than self-interest. This contradicts the notion that virtue is valuable in and of itself.  The second is the moral justification of cruelty – If suffering in this world is rewarded with indulgence in the next, then suffering itself can be glorified. This logic has, in history, led to the justification of both personal and systemic cruelty under the guise of religious piety.

When any action—no matter how grotesque—can be framed as a path to salvation, the result is moral chaos. A system that allows for infinite rationalization of evil is not just flawed; it is the very definition of moral blindness. If one squints hard enough, even the most horrific acts can be reframed as righteous. This is the breeding ground of ideological extremism, where moral integrity is sacrificed to theological convenience.  History is filled with examples of how this recipe strips away a person’s humanity leaving only a monster. October 7^th and the horrid display of each hostage release is merely another chapter in this old story.  Animal brutality is justified as divine warfare.  Slaughter is transformed into an act of piety. Atrocity becomes a sacred duty. This is the result of a moral structure where virtue is detached from justice, where action and reward bear no meaningful relationship.  By contrast, a system where the afterlife is a purified extension of one’s virtues maintains moral coherence. It ensures that kindness leads to greater kindness.  Provide food and water to enemies who at least have the minimum decency to not lift a weapon against you. Justice to greater justice.  Holding our own soldiers accountable to laws of war despite an enemy that hides behind their most vulnerable. Love to greater love.  Plan for a future where our current enemies have a ready made rebuild civilization to return to. The afterlife, in this coherent vision, is not a perversion of morality but its ultimate fulfillment.

A just afterlife is not some abstract theological idea in the Ether; it has deep psychological and actionable implications in the here and now. The notion that good actions refine the soul aligns with psychological research on moral habituation. Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics, argues that virtue is developed through practice—that repeated moral action conditions the soul toward goodness. If the soul continues beyond death, then its moral trajectory logically extends into the afterlife.  Similarly, Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, describes the power of meaning in shaping human endurance and ethical resilience. If morality is meaningful only in terms of self-denial, then it loses its intrinsic value. However, if morality is part of a process of deepening human experience, then the afterlife is the logical culmination of this process that keeps in check the delicate moral balance a person lives out in their everyday life.

A vision of the afterlife that maintains moral correspondence—that virtue leads to greater virtue—preserves ethical coherence in the life you live now.  Any system that treats this world as merely a testing ground for indulgence in the next distorts justice and enables rationalized cruelty.  Everything sacred is weaponized.  Wife, children, home, family, and even the afterlife itself, are all weaponized for maximum suffering.  A world in which kindness, love, and justice refine the soul ensures that morality is not arbitrary but an eternal truth that begins now with your first breath.  Good is not an instrument, but an end in itself. That the afterlife should not contradict morality but fulfill it. And that a system in which suffering justifies excess is not a religious truth—it is a deadly lie that buries both the victims and even the evil perpetrators themselves.