I thought the thread was going to be about what religion is more scary, Catholicism or JW (since they teach that the unsaved are “erased”).
This is an interesting question. But not everything we’ve ever known is from God. Hate, lust, murder, fear, despair, pride - those are not from God. I believe hell consists of things such as these. As such, you might say, it should be pretty familiar to some people.
However, we always experience those things, more or less, together with their opposites, love, hope, humility, trust etc, even if the proportions might vary. Unless we did, unless we experienced the things that are from God, we would not be aware of their counterparts, of those things brought about by deprivation of Godly qualities.
And so, most of the time, there’s a bit of hope in our despair, a bit of love in our hate, a bit of humility in our pride. We can say - “I know what despair is, I once had hope” or “I know what despair is, I used to despair, but now I have hope”.
Hell, however, consists ONLY of the lack of God. Hatred, lust, fear, pride, whether we choose to see them as something that has existence in it’s own or as the deprivation of some positive qualities, will be “perfect”, so to speak. Perfect hatred, hatred for everything, including yourself, and love for nothing. Perfect despair - ho hope, not even the notion of hope. The way I see it, there probably won’t even be any notion of God, because knowledge of God is a good thing in itself. I don’t think the Godly qualities exist in Hell, not even as memories. Whoever gets there will no longer know, or remember, that there is such thing as hope.
And that kind of hell, I think is unknowable. We can talk about it, but mere concepts do not fully describe that reality. Like the person who sees and cannot really understand what it’s like to have been born blind.
I don’t know if the above coincides with the teachings of the Church, it’s just my two cents.
