A Question

How can incarceration in Hell for an infinite duration in return for unbelief for a short duration be justice?

T h e  A n s w e r : Reckoning a year to be three hundred and sixty-five days, the law of  justice requires for a one-minute murder, seven million eight hundred and eighty-four thousand minutes’ imprisonment. So, since one minute’s unbelief is like a thousand murders, according to the law of human justice, someone who lives a life of twenty years in unbelief and dies in that state deserves imprisonment for fifty-seven billion,  two  hundred  and  one  thousand  two  hundred  million  years.  It  may  be understood from this how conformable with divine justice is the verse,

They will dwell therein for ever.(33:65, etc.)

The  reason for  the  connection between  these  two  numbers,  so  far  from one another, is this: since murder and unbelief are destruction and aggression, they have an effect on  others. A murder which takes one minute negates on average at least fifteen years of the victim’s life, so the murderer is imprisoned in their place. While since one minute of unbelief denies a thousand and one divine names and denigrates their inscriptions, violates the rights  of the universe and denies its perfections, and gives the lie to innumerable evidences of divine unity and rejects their testimony, the unbeliever is cast down to the lowest of the low for more than a thousand years, and “dwells” in imprisonment.

S a i d   N u r s i

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