I really enjoyed doing the piece on hell. For one thing, it let me indulge my mean streak guilt-free since it is impossible to be too harsh on such an odious doctrine. Some of hell’s defenders now mitigate the severity of the dogma to some extent. Jerry Walls, for instance, considers that many people are at an epistemological disadvantage, as he sees it, with respect to “the truth about Christ.” That is, many people, through no fault of their own, are in circumstances that make them unreceptive to the Christian message. For instance, someone may have been born into a culture of dogmatic, reactionary Islam and will therefore naturally give Christian claims short shrift. Walls understandably thinks that a just and loving God will not condemn to hell one whose unchosen circumstances preclude a fair hearing of Christian claims. His solution is “eschatological evangelism,” i.e., that after death those who have lived in invincible ignorance of Christian “truth” will be given a full and fair hearing and allowed to make an unbiased and free choice of whether to accept that “truth” or not.