Unimaginable Immortality
Immortality, as [theologians] teach it in the modern world, is but little more than a handy device for giving force and effect to their system of transcendental jurisprudence: what it amounts to is simply a threat that the contumacious will not be able to escape them by dying. Not many of them, I am sure, can actually imagine the life eternal, and most of them in all probability, waste no effort trying to do so. They leave that feat to the ... metaphysicians, to the class of scientists who try to reconcile science and revelation and to spiritualists, all of whom have greatly damaged the dignity and authority of theology by trying to enrich its ideology. I am myself a theologian of considerable gifts, and yet I can no more imagine immortality than I can image the void which exists before matter took form. Neither, I suspect, and the Pope. H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods , 1930