When an unrighteous, unrepentant, unregenerate person dies, they face either eternal conscious torment or eventual cessation of existence, ie annihilation.
If annihilation, upon death they will either entirely cease to exist immediately or they will undergo a period of suffering.
If they cease to exist immediately, then they escape justice and there is no degree of severity in God's punishment of evil. The nice Roman Catholic lady suffers the same fate as Adolf Eichmann, who was directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of horrible deaths, Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi perpetrator of live vivisections, and Genghis Khan. Jesus' statements about weightier matters of the law, the greater sin, millstones, and it being better had that man not been born are meaningless.
If they suffer for a time and at a level of intensity corresponding to their sin, the length and intensity either varies or does not vary.
If it does not vary, there is no degree of severity in God's punishment of evil. See above.
If it does vary, it either comes to an eventual end or it does not. If it does not, then eternal conscious torment is true and annihilationism is false.
If it does come to an eventual end, it ends either because their sin has been punished sufficiently or not.
If not, there was no point to their suffering and they have escaped justice. See above.
If their sin has been punished sufficiently such that their suffering can end, the implication is that once they died and began their suffering, this unrepentant unregenerate person who hated God during life was totally sanctified AFTER he died. Thus God overturns the free choice of the sinner after death, totally sanctifying them and perfecting them, only to totally destroy and annihilate them later once the punishment for their sins was attained (by their own suffering). God thus pours out wrath on perfect people, whom He allowed to live their whole lives in rebellion against Him before violating their wills to perfect them, which He could have done during their earthly life but chose not to do.
If they continue to sin in rebellion against God during their suffering, then their suffering cannot come to an end without violating principles of justice as stated above, for they keep sinning on an ongoing basis during their God-inflicted suffering. They do not stop sinning.
Thus they will never exhaust their punishment, suffering conscious torment for eternity, as even though they may somehow atone for their sin committed during life by their own sufferings, they continually sin more and more.
Which means that people who are in the process of sinning consistently and repeatedly against God can somehow reduce the wrath against themselves.
Which means that people atone for their own sin by their own works, apart from the atoning death of Christ.
Annihilationism is false.
