There is textual scholarship on the side of universal reconciliation; it's easy enough to find. There's a website devoted to it with many references: tentmaker.org.

According to Wikipedia, prior to St. Augustine's view becoming dogma, there were six views about the afterlife, and only the one taught by traditional Christianity today taught eternal torment.

But the strongest argument of all, for me, is that eternal torment is contrary to the nature of God as He is presented in the New Testament: "God is love." Suffering that never ends serves no purpose other than vengeance. Jesus invites us to compare God's goodness and generosity with that of human fathers; and, if a human father tortured his child mercilessly merely to make it suffer, we would call that father a monster, a fiend. How could it be true of God?

When I was young, people used to argue that God's justice demanded that people suffer for their sins; but this reduces the Gospel to being merely a new Law, of the same nature as the Law of Moses, rather than the new *kind* of law, the "law of love" spoken of in the New Testament.

Because of the way I was raised, I have struggled all my life with the fear of eternal torment that was drummed into me as a child. But, while I still struggle with the fear, I no longer subscribe to it as a doctrine. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes.