The concerning idea of
eternal punishment is a misunderstanding

The doctrine of eternal punishment, taught by the Church is treated objectively in 1006-1009 issues of The Spirits' Book, Allan Kardec. Spiritism, as we know, does not admit such doctrine, and the grounds are set in the aforementioned questions.

The thesis of eternal punishment reserved for those who break the laws of good and love, as much as the existence of hell, do not resist an objective analysis. The logical reasoning leads us to the following premise: If the Spirit suffers due to the evil they did, their unhappiness must be proportionate to the misconduct.

Indeed, answering the question "Could the suffering of the Spirit last forever?", St. Louis (Spirit) said: "They could, if he was bad forever, that is, if he never repented and improved, he would suffer eternally. But God did not create beings to have destination to remain perpetually evil. He only created all simple and ignorant, all of whom, however, to progress in shorter or longer time as the course of the will of each one. More or less late can be the free-will, just as children are more or less early, but sooner or later, it appears, because of the irresistible need that the Spirit feels to get out of inferiority and become happy. Eminently wise and magnanimous is the law which governs the length of sentences, because this term makes the efforts of the Spirit. Never deprive him of his free will: if he does this abuse, he suffers the consequences." (The Spirits’ Book, issue 1006.)

It should also consider that the life sentence would not accord with the Christian idea of the sublimity of divine justice and mercy. Jesus bore witness of goodness and love of God, asserting that the heavenly Father does not want to perish one of his sons.

Reason tells us that God is, as Spiritism teaches an infinite being in his perfections, it is philosophically impossible to conceive of the Creator in another way, as if He did not give infinite perfection, we devise another being that it was higher. Therefore, he being infinitely wise, just and merciful, we cannot believe that he has created people to be eternally disgraced because of a fault or a passenger error, evidently derived from his own imperfection.

The doctrine of eternal punishment embodied in Catholic theology emerged from the primitive ideas conceived the existence of an angry and vengeful God, where man gave him characteristics purely humans. The eternal fire is a figure that was used to materialize the idea of hell, in order to emphasize the cruelty of the sentence, on the assumption that fire is the most atrocious torture and which produces the torment more effective.

These ideas were used in a certain period of human history, to control the passions of creatures still imperfect, but they do not serve to the man of today, who cannot envision their meaningless.

Jesus made use of figures of hell and eternal fire to put itself within reach of the understanding of men of his time. The strong images that he used then were necessary to impress the imagination of some individuals who understood little things of the Spirit and whose reality was closer to matter and from phenomena that impressed their physical senses. But it was he who emphasized the idea that God is good and merciful Father and said that all the sheep Father entrusted to him, none would be lost.