Well, they are right that annihilation upon death would be pretty awful.

Yep. Whatever else you can say about the world, at least no one ever just stops existing. That would be awful and bad and wrong.

...How bad is Hell, though?

...Pretty bad, but the threshold for going there is pretty damn (pun not intended) high, and it is not, in fact, eternal torment--a pretty large chunk of Jesus's purpose was to get out everyone who was there at the time.

"It's not great but as far as I know they don't go around torturing each other."

"How many demons are there and how many people went to Hell since Jesus emptied it?"

"I don't know exactly how many demons there are but ballpark of a few thousand. There were three thousand two hundred and seven tormented souls as of the time I came to Earth but I haven't received any updates on that particular topic since then."

"So like one or two people go there a year."

"On average, yeah."

"That's not very many but it is too many. But it also means that I probably wouldn't save very many people by going to prison hospitals anyway, so it's not so bad that it would make people do bad things."

"It is absolutely too many. But--yeah."

Sigh. "What are demons like besides torturey?"

"Depends on the kind of demon. Actually only the nastiest few kinds are actively torturey; most of the rest occupy themselves going to and fro on the Earth and walking up and down on it committing assorted mischief of massively varying maliciousness when they can manage it and just sort of--hanging out in Hell living their lives when they can't."

"I want to learn about the kinds that there are now."

"The worst ones are a category with many names but for expediency's sake I'll call them the Dukes of Hell; there are ten of them. They are basically concentrated nasty and a truly unfortunate level of power. The other kinds that go in for torture are the--there aren't words for it in English." And then she names them in Angelic, since Mehitabel can hear and understand it. There are four other kinds. "Those have assorted metaphysical differences from one another but on the psychological level are basically the same, which is 'a bit eviler than humans typically come in'. There are the incubi and succubi, which are actually the same thing and basically benign, at least for demons; current consensus suggests that they came into being because so many people think sex is evil but are fairly harmless because sex is not, in fact, inherently bad. I mean, it can be bad, but that's a different topic," she waves a hand. There's also..." and she goes on to describe the other sixty species of demon.

"That's one hypothesis, anyway, and one that matches the supporting evidence."

"Is sex the only one they got wrong?"

"...Well, there's demons for all Seven Deadly Sins, which...the problem with lust or greed or wrath etcetera isn't that you're not ever supposed to be lustful or angry or want things, it's that those things are really easy to prioritize more highly than you should. Lust leading you to not think of the person you want as a person with thoughts and desires that don't match yours, or pride leading you to not fix your mistakes or apologize, or wrath leading you to hurt someone even when it won't stop anyone else from hurting."

Mehitabel takes notes on this too. "Why are those the seven deadly sins in particular?"

"The Seven Deadly Sins as a specific, unified construct are actually a human invention. I think it might have evolved over time instead of being mad up all at once; I don't know exactly where it came from."

"Okay." Notes notes. "Are there ever new kinds of demons anymore or have all the kinds already happened long ago?"

"The last new kind happened five hundred years ago, but they were only happening at about one every few centuries anyway."

"Are demons ever kids or do they just happen already grown up?"