Trump's Vision of Judgment

 A recent Daily Kos headline reads: "Trump only 'pretty sure' Lindsey Graham is in heaven."

The reference was to Trump's eulogy yesterday for the departed senator. Apparently the full quote was: "I think I know where he is, and I think he’s up there. I think he’s watching us. I’m pretty sure of it."

The president then felt obliged to add: Graham was admittedly a "tough cookie." 

Trump had observed earlier in the day that Graham "never met a war he didn’t like."

"I’d say: you’re a nice guy, how come you like war so much? He was very much into that," as Trump blithely put it. 

Let us pause a moment there to remember that Trump's and Graham's bombings have killed thousands of people in Iran already, including more than a hundred schoolchildren, and cost the lives of 18 American service members.  

So perhaps that has something to do with Trump's hedging on the matter of Graham's posthumous fate. He has notably said of himself that he's not so sure he's going to make it past St. Peter either. 

And in fairness, many of the families of people killed in a war Graham personally fomented might have a hard time imagining him and Trump getting a fast trip up the golden escalator. 

It is a large economy

   In God to save the like; —as Byron wrote of the deceased King George entering heaven (in his classic parody of Robert Southey's fawning elegy for the dead monarch, the "Vision of Judgment"). 

But, as a good infidel and universalist, Byron went on to add:

—but if he will

Be saving, all the better; for not one am I

   Of those who think damnation better still:

I hardly know too if not quite alone am I

   In this small hope of bettering future ill

By circumscribing, with some slight restriction,

The eternity of Hell’s hot jurisdiction.

Charles Baudelaire insists in his Intimate Journals that it is only people who have good reason to fear hell who deny its existence. 

Of George Sand, who "pretends that the true Christian cannot believe in Hell," Baudelaire sneers, "She has good reasons for wishing to abolish Hell." (Isherwood trans.)

But, good infidel and universalist and Byronite that I am, I can only say that the opposite observation seems to hold true as well: 

Many of the people who seem to most believe in hell's eternity stand to benefit most from its abolition (or at least "some slight restriction" in its "jurisdiction"). 

The Iranian theocrats, for instance, have not hesitated to pronounce in recent days that they have "tickets to hell" prepared—in their words—for American soldiers. 

These are the same fanatical leaders who are meanwhile sentencing their own people to be hanged for protesting their rule or to receive 74 lashes for singing in public with uncovered arms.  

And many an American evangelical, meanwhile, both believes in a God of wrath and retribution, yet  backs inexcusable crimes that are blatantly incompatible with the Gospel (such as the Iran war). 

My own universalism means that if there is a God worthy of the name (which I doubt), such a being could not damn any of its own creatures for an eternity—not even theocrats and warmongers. 

As Byron wrote in a letter (quoted by A.L. Rowse): he could not believe God "ever made anything to be tortured in another life, whatever it may be in this." 

That holds true even for Graham and Trump, on my soul. 

Byron was well aware that this put him in the minority and rendered him a heretic in the eyes of the world's churches and mosques. 

I know this is unpopular; I know

   ’Tis blasphemous; I know one may be damned

For hoping no one else may e’er be so; he wrote. 

But hope such we still must and do, even though we be damned for it. 

Of a God that would do otherwise—a God that would damn any of the beings that he himself chose to bring into the world in the first place—

—I can only say what Mill did (in a line that Weber misattributes to Milton): "though he sentence me to hell for it, such a being will never have my respect!"