What is your view of Hell?

[SeaCat]

I know the current and common view of Hell is a burning pit. I tend to disagree. To me hell is a cold and barren place. A place where you never warm up. A place where you suffer the misery of being cold through and through without relief.

Cat

 

[3113]

Being locked in a church with Evangelicals? Or maybe devout Momons? Or Scientologists...or Jehovah's Witnesses....

Hey, seriously. Hell is always to be found in the company you keep. Even a cold and barren place can be heaven with the right people...and some good liquor

 

[Guest]

I know the current and common view of Hell is a burning pit. I tend to disagree. To me hell is a cold and barren place. A place where you never warm up. A place where you suffer the misery of being cold through and through without relief.

Cat

Cold.

Like anger.

 

[cloudy]

I don't think there is such a place. *shrug*

 

[Boxlicker101]

I agree with Cloudy, at least no physical place.

 

[Misty_Morning]

I was borought up in a fundamendalist baptist environment. I was taught that hell was horror beyond belief. Fire and brimstone.

Later in life I began asking questions. And as far as christian religion is concerned, hell is being apart from god. Hell is being seperated from the oneness that all should aspire to become.

Then....I really learned was hell was.

Hell was being married to a man that used me for his own benefit. To run cover for him, to accept the wrongs that he did. To willingly be his scapegoat so that he could be percieved as being righteous.

Now....hell is a figment of mans imagination. Or is it?

Don't get me wrong....hell does exsist. Ask any child of abuse or any person caught in the crossfire of war.

I'm still learning....but today...to me...hell is life without meaning or hope.

Maybe you should ask the people in Darfur or Tibet or Myanmar or the countless other places that have been ignored by the great industialized nations of the world.

Ask the women of Fundamendalist Islamic nations, ask the starving children of North Korea, ask the kid in downtown Washington DC.


Hell is being forgotten by mankind for the sake of convenience.

 

[pellso27]

A country run by Hillary Clinton

 

[shereads]

Permanent spiritual isolation. The death of all love, and of the possibility of love. Consciousness that lasts for an eternity, but without another conscious being to share it with.

 

[LoquaciousLady]

To me, hell is isolation and sensory deprivation. Hell is like being alone in an uncharted cave with no lights. It's dark and oddly muffled, utterly alone in every sense of the word. It's not about temperature to me, it's about lack of stimulus. But in hell, I don't think you even get the benefit of going mad after a while. You stay completely sane and you know that you're alone in a dark place with no hope of ever getting out, trapped with your fears and regrets for all time.

 

[kimbalee]

To me, hell is isolation and sensory deprivation. Hell is like being alone in an uncharted cave with no lights. It's dark and oddly muffled, utterly alone in every sense of the word. It's not about temperature to me, it's about lack of stimulus. But in hell, I don't think you even get the benefit of going mad after a while. You stay completely sane and you know that you're alone in a dark place with no hope of ever getting out, trapped with your fears and regrets for all time.

Was going to say solitary, desolate, dark, and nothingness-void of all hope of escape, consumed by your own short comings. But you've captured the essence of what I meant... down to the comment on lack of escaping thru insanity. Weird, and scary that we think the same.

 

[Belegon]

Living the rest of my life this far away from her.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

I think our current image of the firy pit comes from the discription in Dante's Inferno... The seven levels of hell in concentric rings and all that.

There is no way I can believe in that. I see hell as a place our minds we make for ourselves. If you look in Pslams, it says, "The dead are aware of nothing at all." Is there a hell in the after-death sense? Or a heaven for that matter? I don't think so. Hell is here and now and lives in whatever guilt has been inculcated into us during our lives.

 

[Edward Teach]

I believe you make your own.

 

[English Lady]

Hell is the absence of God, which I see as being very like shereads discription -permanent Spiritual Isolation.

 

[knitedreams]

I think hell is a place that finds varied ways to break your spirit. It's a place that finds your darkest fears and makes you live through each and every one of them.

 

[oggbashan]

Hell is a perpetual "If only..."

Og

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Hell exists. Ask anyone who's ever been there.

 

[impressive]

Living the rest of my life this far away from her.

 

[The_Fractal_King]

Hell is what one makes of it. No opinion I give would be meaningful.

I think our current image of the firy pit comes from the discription in Dante's Inferno... The seven levels of hell in concentric rings and all that.

I don't recall a ton of fire in Dante's Inferno. In fact it ends with a pit full of ice IIRC.

 

[cantdog]

The lake of burning pitch struck me as a bit fiery, Fractal, but then, I read it.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

I have seen no evidence to suggest that when you're dead you're not just dead, but as for the idea of hell, to me it would be locked in a room for eternity not with true believers of any sort, but with banal people who don't think much about about anything at all.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Hell is a perpetual "If only..."

Og

How's that different from life?

(I'll answer my own question: Every life contains "if only's," plus many blessings to be counted. The hell you suggest is nothing but "if only.")

 

[cantdog]

I have seen no evidence to suggest that when you're dead you're not just dead, but as for the idea of hell, to me it would be locked in a room for eternity not with true believers of any sort, but with banal people who don't think much about about anything at all.

With a large inescapable television, and nothing to wipe up the drool.

 

[impressive]

Having my children harmed and being unable to stop it.

 

[oggbashan]

...

(I'll answer my own question: Every life contains "if only's," plus many blessings to be counted. The hell you suggest is nothing but "if only.")

Exactly - perpetual regret for things you could have done and didn't.

Og