I find this from Ross Douthat pretty unpersuasive:
Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there's no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no's have any real meaning either. They're like home runs or strikeouts in a children's game where nobody's keeping score.
Judaism makes few claims to understanding what happens after you die. Nevertheless, Jews adhere to a faith that called upon its adherents to act morally without a vivid conception of hell for more than a millennium before the rise of Christianity. I'm not averse to the idea that people need moral guidance, and even atheists should recognize that religious morality isn't a mere question of the existence of G-d but about also respecting the moral wisdom of one's ancestors. But the notion that hell awaits evildoers really makes more of a mockery of human choice than hell's absence. After all, if you are making a moral choice simply to avoid hell, and not because it's wrong, you're actually just being coerced out of being a bad person. How much does your, uh, "score" really count if you were forced to pick up a bat at gunpoint?
