"Let me introduce you to my main man Brett,
He is smoking what is not a cigarrette..."
- Salt 'N Pepa - Heavin and Hell
Indeed it seems to be seeming that S&P defined hell as the ghettos in which there community is expected to survive and thrive. Infact they combine both paradise and damnation into one tight package.
There are no generally agreed specifications and dimensions for hell. Which really you know all it needs to be is the unpleasant alternative to Heaven, you know like a production line, or an eternity of having to sit next to a talkative old person on a tram, or just a room full of mosquitoes. Anything annoying when multiplied by eternity would infact become unbearable torture. One would think.
Maybe just people in a queue talking ignorantly about a band you like. Or talking passionately about a band you think is overrated.
Or just teenage girls talking.
Anyway the point is you wouldn't have to do much when talking about eternity to make hell extremely unpleasent.
Yet most church groups rely on vague terms like "the worst place you can imagine" if you grew up in the country that's probably the dentist.
If you watch lots of anime from Japan it's probably a lot worse than the Catholic church can imagine. (although presumably not much worse than what the inquisitors used to do to fellow human beings on their god's behalf).
But you know this definition is really the weakest, its quite hard to imagine some place without then realising with certain self admonishment that it doesn't work that well.
Straightforward: Lake of Fire. Burn in hell for eternity in a lake of fire. I mean it's impossible to really concieve this as punishment from a mortal perspective, simply because there's only so much pain a physical body can take then it shuts down. If your mind shut down because it was being roasted in inconcievable agony the experience would probably be akin to the athiest concept of the afterlife.
But supposing if the "afterlife" is different and one's threshold of pain is increased so one doesn't pass out. I imagine you feel pain, you feel pain, you feel pain, pain becomes boring and your mind starts to focus on other things.
Like moving from one climate to another, humidity makes it hard to breathe. Heat makes you sweat doing the simplest tasks and cold puts you to slip or makes your nipples go hard.
Anyway the point is if you are conscious to experience pain, and the feedback is useless (ie cannot alleviate the pain) then most likely your conscious is going to get over it and work on other things.
So we find ourselves in a game, to make pain and suffering of any use (as pain and suffering) there has to be ways to improve or reduce your situation on the pain and suffering front.
Furthermore this ridiculous dimension of pain is supposed to operate for eternity. Therefore Economics don't really apply because it would seem you have an infinite resource (time) and economics is based on the belief that relative to our needs(/wants) resources are limited. But if you had all the time ever (so much time, the concept of time became irrelivant) your potential would become infinite.
So say you take all the concepts of hell that various nasty individuals have imagined over the years and rolled them all up into one mega hell and then multiplied it by the largest number you can think of and...
Michael Jordan would still trounce it.
Think about it. Put someone with michael jordans work ethic into a hell even worse than has previously been concieved and give him an eternity to triumph over it and give it 10,000 or 100,000 years and he will triumph. Through sheer unshakeable resolve.
He'd push apart those mountains. Chew through the shackles holding him down and wring the buzzard that pecks out his livers neck. He'd dunk the giant bolder down on the apex of the hill so hard it wouldn't roll down the other side.
He'd recruit a reliable center and a swingman of similar ability to Scottie Pippen, maybe even put together a dream team and be simply unbeatable.
It may not happen overnight, in fact if hell does exist I'd be surprised given the time the tennents have had (6,000 years mayhaps for the one's that first made graven images) that I'd be surprised if it wasn't hospitable by now.
It just doesn't work, unless it works in ways so mysterious as to be inconcievable and thus not worth wasting your time worrying about.
So stop praying already, if you indeed have an afterlife, you've got plenty of time anyway.
