What Is Hell?

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what is hell? it isn’t about fire and brimstone… it isn’t about unbearable heat or the devil poking damned souls with pitchforks… these are metaphors for the impact upon the souls who will be condemned to a less-than-desirable eternity…

hell is about a single concept: being removed from the sight of god… hell is about confronting god and realizing our sins in his sight, as when adam and eve found themselves naked in the garden of eden and had to answer to god for violating the covenant of avoiding the tree of good and evil…

bottom line, hell is about shame… it is about confronting others with our sins showing, as when hester prine had to wear the scarlet letter on her chest… it is about knowing what our sins are and others seeing our sins at the same time, and being unable to cover our sins… every sin in our life from the beginning will be displayed as on a movie marquee: “now showing-- john’s sins; his lack of respect for others; his lying; stealing; bearing false witness; his lusts; his lack of faith in his god; his abusive attitudes…” the display of our sins will be the greatest video ever; it will be the ultimate “youtube”… the display will be irrevocable and without appeal… what you see is what you did… there is no “spin” and no “yeah, but”… no mitigating circumstances and no “cut me some slack”… all souls will be showing their sins and will be mortified for all eternity… each soul will be concerned only for how it appears to others and god… but, no soul will notice what sins others shall exhibit… each soul will be consumed with shame and guilt for what sins were committed in the mortal world…

there will be layers of shame/guilt… there is a layer for not obeying god’s commandments; there is a layer for not soliciting god’s help to win salvation and renew our commitment to god and bind ourselves to his cause… there is a layer for not helping others who asked us, but we treated them with indifference and rejection…

the worst shame of all is that god has turned his eye away from us, deeming our soul not worthy of being in his sight… we have exceeded his forgivness and his patience by passing on to the hereafter without making a final pact with him to ask forgiveness, thereby achieving his reward, a position next to him in heaven… it’s like dying without a will… if you don’t affirmatively leave instructions for the disposition of your estate, you whole estate is forfeit… if you don’t affirmatively designate god as your savior, your soul is forfeit… you must designate god as the executor of your soul, or you lose everything, period… in the absence of making your wishes known to god and making a pact with him, your soul will be left behind as road-kill, to be carted off to a place where your estate (sins) will be heralded for all to see… in this context, the prior life of a soul will be recalled by the sinful… the behavior that instigated each sin will be re-lived by the soul forever… this is in opposition to my other posts on “what is heaven?” where i stated that a soul’s afterlife would not recall anything from the human’s mortal existence… in “hell”, the prior life is recalled so that the sins that resulted in the penalty will be remembered forever, together with the shame/guilt of god turning away from us…

but, i could be wrong!
 
I would also add that there will be this attitude of arrogance in the damned soul, where he/she will say, “Well, everyone else did it! Or why does God care? Or if God is so good, then why am I here? Why this? Why that?” From this will come an eternal hate, anger, and resentment towards God and all things good. But the thing is, it will never be reconciled or resolved. It will literally consume the soul for all eternity.

I have also thought of hell as being the ultimate “politically correct” place, where the damned are forever trying to make the perfect God-less society, only never getting it right. This will just add to their agony.
 
sounds nasty to me. I think I will now go to reconciliation twice a day to make sure I do not ever go to this place
 
“…where the damned are forever trying to make the perfect God-less society…”

thank you for your reply… while i respect your view, i have to say that being in a “hell”, whatever the description, would not allow an opportunity for a soul to try anything, except possibly to remove itself from the shame it experiences from havings its earthly transgressions exposed to other “tenants”, and enduring the “consciousness”, if that is a proper term to describe a soul’s “waking state”, of god turning his gaze away from us…
 
endless business meetinsg with no agenda, every boor, backstabber, jerk you ever worked holding forth, in an dirty conference room with a sticky table, where the A/C does not work, and the presenter is fooling the entire time with his laptop trying to make his powerpoint presentation work. there will be only decaf coffee and rice cakes with ersatz creme. the hands of the clock on the wall will never move. you will have to listen to every stupid idea or propsal you ever heard repeated throughout eternity without chance to tell the presenters what idiots they are.
 
No, I think there’s very good reason to believe there is actual pain…analgous to physical pain. Any other suggestion is a softening of the doctrine. Of course, anything else, any kind of emotional longing, any kind of mental anguish, is preferable to your flesh being on fire. So, we shrink from the scriptural image of flames, I think primarily because it’s too horrible for us, and then we cloak our alternate hypotheses in theological language.

Call me a fundamentalist on Hell, but I think most of the above may be wish-fulfillment provoking these speculations that it’s anything but people burning in fire.
 
puzzleannie said:
endless business meetinsg with no agenda, every boor, backstabber, jerk you ever worked holding forth, in an dirty conference room with a sticky table, where the A/C does not work, and the presenter is fooling the entire time with his laptop trying to make his powerpoint presentation work. there will be only decaf coffee and rice cakes with ersatz creme. the hands of the clock on the wall will never move. you will have to listen to every stupid idea or propsal you ever heard repeated throughout eternity without chance to tell the presenters what idiots they are.
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Haha ^

Praps you should have come work with me over this week. You’re writing a computer program. Every time you fix a problem you discover two more. Your fixes for problems never work properly the first time, thus taking even more time. You’re using a paradigm you’re not familiar with which means you have to think sideways to figure out what the hell’s going on, and you’re using commands where you don’t even know what they do. Your internet is running at 28.8K meaning you have to wait 5 minutes every time you want to load up CAF for a bit of relief. Your other forums won’t let you log in due to technical problems. You have an urgent deadline to meet which never seems to arrive, so all it does is make you feel worried. Your only food comes from Coles supermarket half an hour’s walk away, and you bought sugar-free Cola by accident. Your family rings you up to bother you every now and then. You have no talent and no motivation and wonder why you even decided to take this course in the first place. You are in pain due to skin rashes. You can’t sleep properly. You have trouble keeping track of time and forget some other appointments you had… then you feel bad about having let everyone down.

Yeah I think I’m getting a foretaste of hell right now.
 
“I think most of the above may be wish-fulfillment provoking these speculations that it’s anything but people burning in fire…”

absolutely right, but then, isn’t life mostly wish-fulfillment? anyone writing about spirituality or the hereafter is writing about their own wish-fulfillment, arent they? they’re wishing about what they hope does or does not await them… this trait goes back to dante’s inferno and paradise lost; maybe the story in the garden of eden… who among us hasnt thought, “if it was me, i wouldn’t have eaten the forbidden fruit, and we’d all be in paradise, right now…” as to provoking speculatuions, i think that’s why we’re here… if these posts weren’t provocative, the website would be a flop and we’d have no one to write to or to read what we say…
 
thedavidwilson said:
It is actually about pride which turns into shame when we are show what we truly are or have become.
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pride may be a pre-cursor of shame, but it isn’t pride that we feel as we do time in “hell”… it’s guilt for what we have knowingly done wrong and shame that our sin is exposed to others who would see it plainly, if they weren’t concerned about their own sinful issues being equally exposed… thus we have sayings such as, “you could read his guilt in his face” or, “as plain as the nose on your face”…
 
Howard_Roark said:
No, I think there’s very good reason to believe there is actual pain…analgous to physical pain. Any other suggestion is a softening of the doctrine. Of course, anything else, any kind of emotional longing, any kind of mental anguish, is preferable to your flesh being on fire. So, we shrink from the scriptural image of flames, I think primarily because it’s too horrible for us, and then we cloak our alternate hypotheses in theological language.

Call me a fundamentalist on Hell, but I think most of the above may be wish-fulfillment provoking these speculations that it’s anything but people burning in fire.
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Recall that all throughout scripture, we are taught in parable and analogy. I suspect that Hell is not a “fire” as such, but that analogy was used to drive home the point of the misery that will be encountered there.

How many times have you heard the phrase “I’ve had the day from Hell”…perhaps it’s an eternity of days like those 🙂
 
Yeah, I hope you’re right…I just don’t think that you are…because wishing that “Hell ain’t so bad” has got to be the the ultimate in wish-fulfillment. Cheers!
 
I cannot conceive of how anyone who has experienced some of the more negative human emotions, such as despair, fear, rage, guilt, shame, deep grief and loss would want anyone to suffer in hell for all eternity whether there is real fire or no including even people like Hitler, Stalin, abusive priests, et so weder. It is horrible to even think about it. Unfortunately we see examples of people who blithely say they would prefer to live the way they do and go to hell. Lord have mercy on them.
 
OK…what does that have to do with the topic of what Hell actually is?
 
It has everything to do with what hell is. On this earth these feeling, if you will, are temporary maybe even fleeting. In the abandonment that is hell they are, in my opinion, permanent, pervasive, and eternal. Not just physical pain, but mental, something a spirit like the soul would be subject to. At the resurrection and following judgement the body will share in this pain. I wouldn’t count out real fire, but to wish just the mental anguish on anyone is enough to make me shudder. I am not sure that anyone who has not suffered in this way during their lives can relate to what that total abandonment by God would be like.
 
MmmmmmmmKay…so is there someone in this thread wishing Hell on someone, or are you just bringing up another topic?
 
Hell is a real place with real fire. A place of real torment and physical pain.

The vision of hell by the three Fatima Children and the first secret of Fatima:

Sr. Lucia:

“She [Our Lady of Fatima] opened Her hands once more, as She had done during the two previous months. The rays of light seemed to penetrate the earth, and we saw as it were a sea of fire. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls [of the damned] in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in huge fires, without weight or equilibrium, amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. (It must have been this sight which caused me to cry out, as people say they heard me). The demons could be distinguished [from the souls of the damned] by their terrifying and repellent likeness to frightful and unknown animals, black and transparent like burning coals.”
 
Hell is where God is not. Those who refuse Him have no choice but to exist there.
 
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