I have no idea how many people are in hell, and I don’t think anybody on this earth does.
But as to its nature, I guess I’m inclined to find Ste Therese of Lisieux persuasive. She asserted that, at or about the point of death (possibly shortly thereafter?) one’s life is presented to a person fully and in its true nature. We understand it totally, and we understand how our sins were perhaps much worse than we thought they were; how much mercy was extended to us, and what we did about it. We recognize that we are totally unworthy to be in the presence of God.
We are then extended God’s mercy and love. We know we don’t deserve it. We know we didn’t earn it. We understand it fully, and how it heals but also stings our egos. We then have a clear choice. There is no mistaking it and its consequences. We can admit our faults and our need for mercy and God’s love, or we can reject God’s mercy and choose ourselves as our eternal object of love; knowing full well that it’s also self-hate and hatred of God. We will cocoon ourselves in ourselves forever. And the choice is absolutely clear and we make it in the full exercise of our faculties; enhanced by the clarity of what we have seen presented to us and the clarity of mind God gives us at that moment. So, everyone in hell, she says, is a clear-eyed volunteer. Nobody stumbles into it. We choose it. And why should we doubt this? After all, Lucifer and his cohort were a zillion times smarter than we are. They were in the presence of God, and were totally rational creatures. They weren’t emotional and stupid like we are. And yet, they chose eternal self-worship too, knowing full well what the choice meant.
Kind of hard to imagine anybody doing that; choosing hell. But one can a little, knowing how inclined to self-worship we are and how defiant we can be.
For some, perhaps most of us, we choose God but we don’t deem ourselves worthy to join Him in our present state. We therefore choose purgatory, as a total and clear-eyed volunteer, and we know what it will take for us to be purged of selfishness and our inclination to sin, and we know it will be hard, but we do it joyfully because our minds are totally clear. Not so very hard to imagine that. Not hard to picture oneself doing it. Not hard to think of oneself and how hard it might be to really purge oneself of one’s self-centeredness.
Now, if that’s all correct, then I would hazard a guess that not too many are in hell, relatively speaking (though there have been billions of people, which might up the numbers from what we might suppose). I would also guess that a very few go straight to heaven, and that the great mass of us will opt, yes, joyfully, for purgatory; not because we know it’s “safe on base” but because we really do want to love God the way He wants to be loved, and we want to attain that state. We know God wants us to bathe in His love and we want to present ourselves to Him in a way in which we can do that. But purgatory, it seems, is mainly a “state”; a state of self-purgation. We’re connected to God, but not as perfectly as our individual natures can do.
So, if that’s all so, then what are we doing with our lives here? Well, for one thing we’re developing habits of mind. Every little act of love enables us to love more. Every act of selfishness feeds the self-worship that can be so fatal. Every act of self-denial, of humility, strengthens our ability to accept that overwhelming forgiveness and love.
Anyway, that’s one way of seeing it.
And they’d be “judging their neighbor”, no?