Heaven and Hell

[beccaelizabeth]

So I was thinking about heaven and hell
again
and I think why I'm not sold on them as concepts is a lot of the essential bits are pretty much like now, only more judgey.

Like, heaven is a good place, and hell is outside and full of bad stuff happening.

My flat is pretty much a good place, full of all the eats I choose and entertainment I want etc, and outside is people making such noises I have to guess if police or ambulances are needed, and further away stuff that gets on the news that is Very Bad.

And it's miserable in here.

I mean, no bad is directly happening to me, but knowing there is bad is miserable.

So I am unconvinced that heaven can ever be a thing If there is hell, because how could the kind of people heaven is meant to be for put up with that? I mean I'm a bit of a useless human quite often, but I care enough that all that bad stuff happening to other people feels really bad. So how could heaven be for good people to, like, sit there forever, while anyone else burns?

Can't work that way.

Either it goes all Buffy in Heaven and feeds them fake news and is a basic lie, or there can't be a hell if we're going to build heaven.

So I reckon there's a lot of work to do to figure out how to either get everyone out of hell or make it stop sucking there.

Comments

[elisi]

I'll get back to you...

ETA: OK, I'm not in the best head space for this, but I couldn't just let it pass. (Speaking from a Christian background here, as it's the only one I am familiar with.)

So I reckon there's a lot of work to do to figure out how to either get everyone out of hell or make it stop sucking there.
The misunderstanding here, is that hell is seen as somewhere people are imprisoned against their will. Theologically speaking, they're not. What Hell *is*, is to be cut off from God completely. And it's something people choose. The gates of hell are open, people can leave any time - but they would have to leave their pride or greed or whatever behind. And they won't.

/massive oversimplification

[beccaelizabeth]

No, I understand that.

It's still miserable if they're miserable.

[elisi]

That is sadly very true. But how can you help people that refuse it?

[indraja]

I agree that's a very important point. Once in my LJ I asked how exactly do people choose to have a belief system where hell is even possible. (In those cases when they made a choice indeed, as many of my friends did). How one could be so entirely bad and unfit to be reformed so as to deserve an eternal suffering. My friends said exactly the same as in the comment above: people just choose this. And the people who believe that chose the belief system because of some other reasons. Or they just felt that hell by default might indeed be very plausible, and welcomed christianity as a way to escape this. I still not get it.