Imagine that hell is real; everything you read about it is true. Imagine you have no doubt in your mind that there is life after death; this life is only a short preview of what awaits you in hell.

Now imagine if you have done enough bad things in life that you're convinced you'll be ending up there with no prospect for parole or reincarnation. The only question is which level of hell.

In your mind, none of this is hypothetical. You are as sure about it as the sun rising the next morning.

Now what would you do about this for the rest of your life? I can imagine a variety of approaches.

First, delay death as long as possible. But it's not a strategy, just a delaying tactic. Delaying death here is not as obvious as it sounds, it's an active fear for the end of life in anticipation of what greets you next, as opposed to peaceful acceptance.

Either way, this buys you time to develop virtues (as taught by the religion that operates your hell) in hope for better treatment.

The other approach is to not give a fuck. If you're ending up there anyway, why bother salvage the unredeemable? But as someone with total conviction about hell, I think this is unlikely to be your response so it can be dismissed.

But can I try and convince you with another approach? Instead of being virtuous, you attempt to earn karma points by performing magical rituals, hardcore.

They are mostly harmless; except these magic are performed by monks of all kinds. For some reason they cost a lot of money.

You're convinced these magic rituals help you have a better time in life after death, but the rest of the world isn't getting along with your conviction. Would you consider acquiring magic-money from family and friends by dishonest means? In light of eternal suffering, the benefit might outweigh the cost.

Why is being virtuous not the optimum choice? When rules and mechanics of hell are well-defined and unambiguous, then playing honest is a sucker's game. If you perform this specific ritual on this particular day, you stand to gain 20.27 karma points, this is a better choice than not causing problems to your family and stand to gain maybe-nothing.

If you wouldn't choose this approach, well someone I know did. This man's life choices has baffled my family's circle so much no one has been able to make sense of how he stooped all the way down. I suspect I'm the only who has a shot.

How are the rules of after-life came to be so well-defined and legible to him? They came from monks who demonstrated magical powers so convincing, what they said about hell must have haunted him so thoroughly that not only does he know it to be real, he adjusted his entire current-life for the benefit of after-life (which includes abandoning his family).

History is full of stories about how religions uplifted people and how it became misappropriated. Still, given another man with the similar life experience, it's not easy to end up where this man is.

To achieve what he has, you have to approach religion and the supernatural with absolute trust and no sense of criticality. All ghost stories are to be taken literally; there's no place for symbolic takes on scriptures.

Once the storytellers installed them into your head, there's largely no uninstalling them. After all, faith is not a choice.

To escape the beliefs is itself a leap of faith, a painful crisis few have the courage to endure.

This man might actually have a sound philosophy in handling life, in believing that suffering his worst fate in the current-life will give him an easier time in hell.

But he's gotten his science seriously messed up. He took data from the wrong places, mistake correlation for causation, defer to authority figures and all manners of cognitive biases.

For that, he is already in hell. On Earth. For many decades.

I want to say be careful about what you choose to believe but truth is you don't get to choose what you believe.

The next best thing to do is to install some epistemic humility to question what you've already believed, in case you've got a case of mind virus setting you on a wrong path.