Thanks for comments - let me respond.
CATHOLIC GUY - you say;
*Once you see God and all his glory and still reject him, you will never be forgiven. *
My point is that nobody seeing God as he is would reject him - hence nobody in Hell
THING
Yes if an individual knows God now he will avoid the anxiety of a possible Hell. But my questions are about people who honestly do not think there is a God…
Why would such people ask themselves about hell if they do not think about it. When the thought comes to the person about hell the solution comes also. A person is not condemned because of their ignorance, but because of their conscious rejection of what they know and understand is good.
SPOCKY PERSON
Hell is supposed to be 100% awful and everlasting. It is hard to think of anything that merits such a punishment. I may not be a very good person and I may not think that the evidence merits belief in God but I cannot think this merits an eternity of agony!
A fixed term punishment or anihilation would be more proportionate.
A scenario;
I think you are thinking and talking about hell in the way we think of things in this world. One significant difference with life in an eternal afterlife is the absence of time. If I enter into the afterlife at 4pm, time stops for me there. I do not say to myself, well it must be nearly 5pm now; 4pm is the very same as 5pm when in eternity.
When a person is in hell they do not experience their eternity as a passage of time stretching on into infinity. They experience it as the ever present ‘now’ event. It does not seem long, or indeed any time at all for them, they are always ‘in the moment’.
The difference between heaven and hell is only in qualitative terms. Both are ever present in the eternal moment ‘now’, but where those in heaven experience Gods qualities, those in hell experience the quality of Gods enemy.
Where those in heaven experience their vista ever increasing as they explore the infinite realm of God, those in hell experience the opposite, an experience of ever constricting circumstance.
They may find themselves in the dark, and in the same moment, because there is no time, the next experience may be a further constriction of their worldview by means of, lets say, a malevolent sense in the darkness, constricting further as cold and discomfort are felt, constricting further as sounds disturbing are heard, constricting again as disturbed voices are heard close to, constricting further as they find themselves in a claustrophobic tunnel with one exit smaller still, through less welcoming substances, water, fire, creatures, or anything which feeds on the paranoia which now controls their minds. There is no time, no perception of time, only worse and worse situations in the ‘now’.
At the lowest level of hell one may envisage the most constricting of circumstance. One may lie face down in the hot empty comfortless sand with a sense of your enemy behind you, you cannot turn to see you are so constricted now you are virtually paralyzed. Fire burns within you and comes through your flesh drying you with its heat but never consuming you. But bad as these constricting circumstances are there is still room for ever more, even as you become aware of the worst of your place ,now a burning rock lands next to your face and every ounce of strength and suffering is squeezed out of you as you try as you might to move your arm to move the rock which is offending you with its heat in your face.
So hell gets worse and worse without an experience of a longer and longer term. Those in hell are ever present in the eternal now, trapped in dark hell by their own paranoid minds. A paranoia which cannot accept anything not even the help of an angel of heaven.
