Does Hell exist? It’s fascinating we have to keep having the same discussions over such heresies, but this is the nature of the human heart; so be it. To begin with we can make some generally held assumptions about Christianity: one, God created human beings from nothing; two, God created human beings with a body and a soul; three, the soul of a human being cannot be destroyed unless it’s creator allows it to slip back into its original state of nothingness; four, love exists and is perfectly exemplified by the Holy Trinity; five, Heaven exists.
Heaven and Hell can be visualized as molecules in various states of entropy. Heaven is a place of infinitely low entropy and Hell is a place of infinitely high entropy organizationally speaking. What causes the souls to be in the various entropic states is not gravity or heat but rather love.
Love is an action; love is a verb, not just a buzz in the frontal lobe of the brain but something which restructures our neurological make up. It does this as one moves from being self absorbed and childish to being self sacrificing for others; as we mature emotionally we do so because of an increased capacity to love.
Because we have free will we can stunt this growth. Should we choose not to shift the focus of our life away from ourselves, we become more incapable of loving others. We may first experience vanity, then make more sociopathic choices, and finally one might reach the extreme of psychopathic tendencies. The other divergent path of being emotional self absorbed would be depression which progressed in severity until it culminates in suicide. Not that a psychopath wouldn’t kill his or her self, especially at the conclusion of a bloody rampage, but the reasoning for doing so is different.
Love on the other hand requires a human being not to become their own focus, their own God, but to cultivate a life and mind of service. To serve others is to serve God and this service echoes the nature of the Holy Trinity making the individual more like the creator creating lower entropy towards that true universal center and bringing it closer to that center. In Heaven there will be no distance between the soul and God.
The more a soul refuses to join voluntarily into this union of souls the further that soul flees, increasing its state of entropy until it is infinitely singular and totally alone. This is Hell. We know this place exists and most of us have an idea of what it’s like as we have more than likely experienced such emotional distress that we felt as though we were on fire inside or we were being torn apart piece by piece. Such emotional stress is almost always caused by being totally self absorbed. We tend not to feel such great empathy that we feel as though our soul is being dismembered over many hours. We can tire of empathy and we can withdraw; but that bad teenage break up will have one in the fetal position for years. It felt like Hell for a reason.
It has been stated that Hell has been conjured up to scare us straight. Hell is a boogieman to hold over our naïve heads to keep us in our beds at night. To paraphrase St Augustine, Hell has an open door souls can leave if they wish, they just don’t wish to.
God’s love can do anything but it can’t make you respond to it. Humans cannot be saved by making them automatons in the nth hour. Humans cannot be loved by catering to them though they may hate you, God can never be a doormat. Heaven will not be populated with these souls because they will not serve a God they hate. Self love won’t let them. They will be invited for all eternity for God will not allow their souls to slip back into that nothingness from which they were made. True love waits.
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