Anyone who wants to which means anyone who doesn't want to go to Heaven. But understand that wanting to go to Heaven means loving God because God is Heaven. It's not just the desire to be saved or to have a beautiful afterlife surrounded by your loved ones or whatever it might be. It is loving God, your Creator. So, who goes to hell is anyone who doesn't love God.
Let me explain what I mean by this. I don't see hell as just a place of darkness or fire or cold or whatever it might be, somewhere you are constantly tortured by demons with pitchforks. That may be an extreme version but hell could also be a place of utter banality. There are probably different hells of different degrees of separation from God that are created by the mindsets of those who go there and so reflect different mentalities. There may be hells corresponding to the various vices as in Dante or there may be intellectual hells where clever materialistic atheists go. They won't exactly suffer but they won't know the joys of Heaven and, unless they repent and turn to their Maker, they will start to shrivel up spiritually which means their consciousness and sensitivity to life will gradually attenuate, becoming less and less responsive. They will fade not blossom.
Those who go to hell are not necessarily bad people as the world sees bad. They are spiritually unresponsive in one way or another but they are not necessarily wicked or evil. They have just failed the greatest lesson of life which is to love God. Clearly, none of us loves God as we should but even wanting to love God is enough for him to work with.
@William - 'In theory', there are probably a wider range of possible 'destinations' than Heaven and Hell - even than H & H understood with a variety of types. But this may be another of those possibilities that does not really apply here-and-now - in these end times, when things have come to a point.
ReplyDeleteFor example; I have a strong impression that some people are wanting a very negative outcome after death - unification/ merging with an impersonal God, loss of the self/ ego, survival in the spirit, without any kind of body. They certainly would not suppose that they wanted Hell - yet what they want is a state of negation that seems very similar to hell - and very similar to the annihilation which is assumed by atheists.
After all, if you have no self, do not think, have no will/ motivation, do nothing, have no body... in a sense you 'might as well' be annihilated altogether - for all you know of it.
So, it may be that those who do not want Heaven will in effect be choosing a version of Hell.
I certainly believe in a multi-levelled universe with the higher planes that occultism speaks of. "In my Father's house are many mansions". And I would also go along with the idea of purgatory in which those who have chosen God are cleansed of residual sin. On the other hand, ultimately there is only God or not God so heaven or hell. I am writing this post in the spirit of that aspect of things. From this perspective everything that is not heaven is a form of hell but I know that is not the usual understanding and I must admit I am playing with words a bit here though only to make (I hope) a wider point about final things.
ReplyDeleteWhen the universe comes to the end of its life cycle then everything will be distilled down to essentials. There will be heavenly existence with God or (probably) non-existence though perhaps some things will be held over in a kind of suspended animation for a future round of evolutionary unfoldment. Just a guess!