If you go to heaven, it's God's fault. If you go to hell, it's your fault. This is the Biblical picture, and if we go beyond we are wrong.

Heck was created for those who refuse to believe in Gosh.

A rabbi asked G-d about heaven and hell. "I will show you hell," G-d said, and he took the rabbi into a room with a large pot of stew in the middle. The smell was delicious, but around the pot sat people who were famished and desperate. All were holding spoons with very long handles which reached to the pot, but, because the handles were longer than their arms, it was impossible to get the stew back into their mouths. "Now I will show you heaven," G-d said, and they went into an identical room with an identical pot of stew and people with identical spoons, but they were all well-nourished and happy. "It's simple," G-d said. "They like to feed one another."

You call me Master and obey me not, You call me Light and see me not, You call me the Way and walk not, You call me Life and desire me not, You call me Wise and follow me not, You call me Fair and love me not, You call me Rich and ask me not, You call me Gracious and trust me not, You call me Noble and serve me not, You call me Mighty and honor me not, You call me Just and fear me not, If I condemn you, Blame Me Not.

Top Disney movies in hell: 16> "101 Damnations" 15> "20,000 Leagues Under the Earth" 13> "The Unrescuables Down Under" 12> "Ishtarzan" 11> "Your Booty and the Beast" 10> "That Darn Caterwauling!" 9> "Where the Heck Are All the Dogs?" 8> "Herpes, the Love Bug" 4> "James and the Giant Leech" 3> "Runny the Pooh" and Topfive.com's Number 1 Disney Movie in Hell…

Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And, taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a Heaven creature or into a hellish creature -- either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is Heaven: that is, it is joy, and peace, and knowledge, and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

If you want to go to Hell for stealing minnows, I'll furnish the minnows. -Miz Tackett (Sign over unattended minnow tank, Red River County, Texas)

A Safe Place To Stand In the days of the westward expansion in north America, when men saw that a prairie fire was coming, what would they do? There was no way for them to outrun it guess the safe route out. The pioneers took a match, burned the grass in a designated area around them, and then they would take their stand in the burned area and be safe from the threatening prairie fire. As the roar of the flames approached, they would not be afraid. Even as the ocean of fire surged around them there was no fear, because fire had already passed over the place where they stood. Jesus said, "I have come to bring fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo..." There is no escaping the judgment and division (fire) that has come since Jesus' sufferings on the cross (baptism). There is only one safe place to stand and that is where the match of God's judgment has been struck: The foot of the cross.

In the long run, the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell is... a question: "What are you asking God to do?" To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that that is what He does.

Commemoration of Charles Williams, Spiritual Writer, 1945 It may be possible for each of us to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden, of my neighbour's glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you may talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet if at all only in a nightmare. All day long we are in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities it is with awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal, Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit -- immortal horrors or ever lasting splendours.

Man transforms himself into the things he loves. When the time arrives for his sun to set, he has become that which, during the course of his life, he has, consciously or unconsciously, chosen to be."

Hell is the only totally just society. By: John Leax Source: Cryptic sayings from John Leax, associate dean at Houghton college from an article in the Houghton Milieu, August, 1993, pages 7-10

St. Peter and Satan were having an argument one day about baseball. Satan proposed a game to be played on neutral grounds between a select team from the heavenly host and his own hand-picked boys. "Very well," said the gatekeeper of Heaven. "But you realize, I hope, that we've got all the good players and the best coaches." "I know, and that's all right," Satan answered unperturbed. "We've got all the umpires."

I came across a book [To Hell and Back] written by a cardiologist at the University of Tennessee that corroborates an important aspect of the biblical message. In the course of their emergency room work, Dr. Maurice Rawlings and his colleagues interviewed more than 300 people who claimed near-death experiences. What made Rawlings' study distinct is that the interviews were not conducted months or years later but immediately after the experiences had allegedly occurred—while the patients were still too shaken up in the immediacy of the moment to gloss over or to re-imagine what they had experienced. Nearly 50 percent of them reported encountering images of fire, of tormented and tormenting creatures, and other sights hailing from a place very different from heaven. In follow-up interviews much later many of these same people had changed their stories, apparently unwilling to admit to their families, maybe even to themselves, that they had caught a glimpse of something like what the Bible calls hell. Dr. Rawlings concludes, "Just listening to these patients has changed my life. There is a life after death, and if I don't know where I'm going, it is not safe to die." Citation: Daniel Meyer, "The Light at the End of the Tunnel," Preaching Today No. 238

There's a joke that the father of an old friend used to tell, about a preacher who warns children, "In Hell there will be wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth." "What if you don’t have teeth?" one of the children asks. "Then teeth will be provided," he says sternly.

Hell in the Bible... is either very hot or very cold, depending on whether the sinner is perceived as a rebel or an alien. In either case hell is not a divine creation. Hell is made by those who climb the holy mountain and try to unseat the Holy One who, ablaze with glory, dwells in the light unapproachable. Those who mount an attack on God and cross the barrier of his exclusive divinity die like moths in the flame of him who will not and cannot be displaced. And hell is made by those who, turning their backs on God, flee the light and move toward the eternal blackness that marks God's absence. Hell, then, is unarrested sin's natural and programmatic end. Sin is either rebellion or flight, and, when persisted in, leads either to the fiery furnace or to the cold and desolate night. <i>as told in Cornelius Plantinga, Not The Way It's Supposed To Be: A Breviary Of Sin p 154-155</i>

What you must know about hell is that hell is part of divine mercy. God does not make hell. God cannot make anything bad. Hell is a place where those, who are turned away from God forever, hide from Him. They are least miserable in hell, not most but least.

Hell is not a punishment imposed externally by God, but the condition resulting from attitudes and actions which people adopt in this life.

The difference between heaven and hell is simple. Heaven is where people go who say to God, "Thy will be done." Hell is where people go to whom God says, "Thy will be done." In other words, the afterlife is where you get what you want most.

As was said before, the various figures by which the punishment of hell is depicted are not to be taken literally. For, when taken literally, these figures tend to contradict each other: how can hell be darkness and fire at the same time? The imagery is to be understood symbolically, but the reality will be worse than the symbols.

The only answer to all such cavils [universalism, annihilationism] is the cross of Christ. Behind that cross there is no concealed reserve of mercy or love.... Strange it is that they who are most emphatic in asserting that God must give salvation to all men in the next world, are precisely those who dismiss as fanaticism the truth that He gives salvation here and now to those who seek Him.

Now it is quite certain that all these expressions [fire, darkness, and chains] are intended to suggest something unspeakably horrible, and any interpretation which does not face that fact is, I am afraid, out of court from the beginning. But it is not necessary to concentrate on the images of torture to the exclusion of those suggesting destruction and privation. What can that be whereof all three images are equally proper symbols? Destruction, we should naturally assume, means the unmaking, or cessation, of the destroyed. And people often talk as if the "annihilation" of a soul were intrinsically possible. In all our experience, however, the destruction of one thing means the emergence of something else. Bum a log, and you have gases, heat and ash. To have been a log means now being those three things. If soul can be destroyed, must there not be a state of having been a human soul? And is not that, perhaps, the state which is equally well described as torment, destruction, and privation? You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all. (Matt. 25:34, 41) To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being in earth; to enter bell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is "remains."

Our Choices Matter

I do not know what befell Mother Theresa of Calcutta when she died, nor what has become of Joseph Stalin. But the same thing cannot have come upon both. If there is any moral rhyme or reason in the universe, all human beings cannot be equally well off as soon as they breathe their last and wake again.