What exactly IS hell?
 

Serious question...

Is hell exothermic (gives off heat), or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

I'm interested in any explainations...

Before you ask a question like this, shouldn't you ask first whether Hell exists at all?

Ok, let's say Hell does exist.

I have 2 arguments:
1) Exothermic, aren't people supposed to burn in hell? Wouldn't they freeze if it was endothermic
2) If Hell exists, why does it have to follow the laws of science?

Also, there's a philosophy forum, wouldn't that be a better location for this thread?

in dante's inferno, as i recall, the lowest circle was ice...

Damn...uncle phil beat me to it. Dante described Hell as "a frozen lake, where all emotion died". So really, who in the Hell knows? Get it? Who in the Hell...? Oh, never mind.

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate that souls are moving into Hell and the rate they are leaving.

I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, lets look at the different religions that exist in the world today...

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

And no, I didn't think of that myself... it took 3 of us to come up with that. It was a slow day at work today...

Probably. I get confused about where to put some threads...

Three of you at work, eh? I guess a representative of the Urban Legends website was one of the three, because your answer has been posted there for two years.
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/hell.htm

Ahhhhh....<b>BUSTED</b>. :lol:

Word for word, verbatum.

TSK,tsk...and here I was being all impressed and shit.

And this is why you don't plagarize.

Feel like an ass now Meridae'n?

well he can say that it was one of the other 2 co workers that plagerized it....

I first read that back in high school, a physics student (not at my school) wrote it for a final and despite the subject, the teacher was so impressed they passed the student.

Sheesh! You didn't REALLY expect to get away with that did you? I recognised that instantly!

Anyway, onto the serious question , I think that it is say to assume that if Hell exists, it doesn't follow any of our scientific laws: i.e. it is not a physical environmnt, hence there is not hot or cold. Fire is presumably a metaphor.

And where did Dante get all of his insider information from?

You assume if it were to exist actualy take up some form of space. If a soul weighs nothing(weigh a mouse while it lives and right after it dies and note the lack of change from the soul leaving it) isn't it imaginable that a soul would also take up no space?

an unmeasurable soul is put into an unmeasurable place, and tortuted through isolation from everything else that has ever existed. Don't think the heat is a literal.

I think I could get used to it after awhile since eventually, my days in isolation would outnumber the days that I was alive..

Go find a 60 or 70 year old blind person, who was blinded at, say, 20. They have (obviously) been blind much longer than they could see. Ask them if they can ever be truly acclimated to their blindness, can they ever forget the time when they could see??

what about Milton's view of Hell - that it is both frozen and fiery, just in different places? also, if anyone's bothered to read the Divine Comedy, they know that Dante's "insider information" came from his tour of Hell with Virgil. though as to your point, papermachesatan - that of isolation going on longer than you're alive - isn't that somewhat contradictory? if Hell is assumed to be eternal, as is the soul, and the nature of Hell (fiery or frozen) is such that one never gets used to it, but is instead in a constant state of torture and unimaginable pain, then... yeah. follow the logic.

No you're all wrong, it's complete whiteness, you have a body and a consciousness, you cant move, you are experiencing the most horrible pain and emotion

Hell is neither endo- nor exothermic. It's a completely self-contained feedback loop with no energy transfer in or out. Each soul has it's own and none can ever escape.

Yeah, I know this much is true. Sure you won't believe me when I say this, but this IS TFP, so I trust not to get flamed by stating something of personal experience.. But I have been to Hell. Quite literally too. For those of you who don't believe.. You thought I was crazy when I said I am a Firm Believer, and for those of you who do? You would understand its a spiritual reality.. a plane of existance different than the one here. Its possible... but alas the story of this venture does not belong in this thread.

The area that I have seen, was a place of nothingness... It sucked... especially when deamons could easily pop in and out to torture you.... Did it feel... HOT? What is HOT and Burning of FIRE.. to your SOUL? If you burn your hand in five minutes, will you feel it in your soul? no... i doubt it. We understand Burning to be bad.. and painful, and something we could never get used to in a million years, even if we were in a constant flame..... THIS is why we see it as a burning pool of flame. Flame in the earthly world probably won't do much to one's spirit, unless they believe it to....

This thread has strayed from the important point of Meridae'n's plagiarism.

Was he thinking that no one had heard of this common internet joke?

Pull out Antagony, as i told you in my PM i was under the impression the person who told me was the one who thought it up.

Use someone else to make yourself look good...

In the Bible Hell is nothing but a pit of fire that the sinners are thrown into on Judgement day. I am not an expert on the Bible and I have not read the whole thing so it could also mention a place souls go to before judgement day which is where Dante visited with Virgil in The Divine Comedy.


Sorry, but this is impossible since what you are describing is a perpetual motion machine in which Hell is the machine.
I think that Hell is a place where things that are unthinkably torturous happen where bothe fire and cie exist, which has a limited amount of energy able to last at least up to the very day God decides to rain judgement on everyone ever to exist.
But who says Hell is the only horrifying place we go to after death? The Bible also mentions Hades and Death as holding prisoners till the end of time. (discovered that myself)

I don't understand how anyone can talk about Hell without including at least a little religion. :p :cool: :rolleyes: :)

To me, Hell is a state of mind devoid of all pleasure, where negative emootion has free reign. Heaven is the opposite.

Supposedly, it's a realm of endless torture, which in Dante's mind was related to the sins of the soul during the peroid of it's life on Earth.

Myself, I don't believe there is a supreme being. Why do I need a miraculous creator, created from nothing by miracle, to explain the miracle of creation?

Wrapping one miracle in many to explain the first?

Errrrrrr......

No. Causality is all I need thank you. Chains of cause and effect, whose ripples and interaction reach further and deeper than any being could hope to fathom.

The Origin is beyond our knowledge at this point, _all_ theories of it are just that. Theories, with no evidence to back up any claim one way or another. The only thing we can look at, is what happens after.

But, even if you believe in a deity, why would a creator create a sentient being, give it an apparent free will and then judge it at death according to it's actions. Without ANY concrete proof of either His/Her/It's/Their existence or His/Her/It's/Their wishes or preferences?

It'd either be a stupid God or an Evil/Vain God.

Hell is a tool for social control.

Bit mixed up. I'm drinking.

*gulp*

You could also get a Bible concordence and look up hell, and read what it has to say on it.

i dont believe in hell but my thought on this subject are that hell is what you have made it. I think it is a little cliche to envision an environment that burns when it would be a much crueler fate to reside in a place that reinvents the sins of a life lived badly. not to say it is just one place but several reliving all your sins through the eyes of those you have hurt, and sinned against

Well, I don't think we can trust Dante's view of hell. Dante wrote his trillogy as a comment on society and religion- one of the earlier forms of allegory/satire. I think that one's hell is in the eye of the beholder, ala. the crappy movie with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Robin Williams. If one is to go to hell, one will create it. Thats why I'm glad that my own personal hell will be Long Island ice teas on the beach.

hell hell hell... My mothers pretty big on the bible.. The bible refers hell to the common grave and that's it :)

But what is this movie that you all speak of? :D

THis girl who I used to know in high school started hyperventalating one day at lunch. She had told one of our friends that she didn't disagree with her being gay but she just didn't want her going to hell. I got into the conversation and said, "You're having premarital sex with your boyfriend. According to your beliefs, what's to say you're not going to hell too?" SHe started hyperventalating. Gawd. So to calm her down I said, "What do you think hell really is?! You think that there's a place where your SOUL burns?" Really guys.. how is it possible for a soul to burn? A soul has no nervous sytem and therefore can't feel anything.

Disclaimer: I tend to not organize my thoughts very well(they are all in my head, but not all of them make it out in a logical context) So if anyone thinks something is wrong or missing, just ask, I can probably justify it.


A thought on hell, kind of.

How do humans advance in almost all aspects? Through conflict. Man was given the garden of eden, but he could not accept good, so he rejected it and was sent out of the garden.

This is why I think God created evil. With evil, there is conflict. Through conflict Man can accept the final good.

But, if I have been understanding my religious readings correctly, God is full of unconditional love. Which means he does not want us to be part of the evil, his love wants us to get to the truth, or good.

Therefore, I think there is no hell. There is evil, but it is a tool that helps us realize good. I believe man will eventually get to a state of conciousness where they can accept good in everything, and not need to go through conflict in order to reach it(non-dual states) But for now, there is evil, but it is only there to realize the good God wants us to have.

I think the ultimate good, truth, state of conciousness, might be "heaven".(The garden of eden was basically heaven on earth.) So if humans understood that there is a heaven, their natural need for balance would create the thought of hell.

Ok. A few thoughts. First, someone told me once that they believed Hell to be people. People, as in dealings with people and people's perceptions, etc. A very broad, vauge way to explain it, but it works for everyone who thinks about it; which is more than you say about the collective religious explainations of Hell.

Second, If Hell and Heaven are eternal and enternally the same, wouldn't they both be a form of tourture after a few millenium? I mean, you judge how good something is by the bad. (i.e. "Oh, it's a great day today, but only because it was a really shitty one yesterday.") If Heavan was a place devoid of any pain and suffering, would you begin to forget why Heaven was so great?

And thirdly, in accordance witih tisonlyi: There are three statements. Only two of which can be true. 1. God is all powerful 2. God is all good. 3. There is evil in the world.

In a non-dual state it would not be that way(See above post)

I think I explained why all 3 can be true in my post.

nah i think hells got some kinda fusion generator. or it runs on poop or soemthing.
-----
funny how the people that think like that, are always doing something wrong themself.
-----
the old testament does not refer to hell in any sort or by any other terms.

I'll have eternity to adjust.

plus, there's always insanity... ;)

In stealing from Sam Kinison, I could imagine Satan appearing to me and attempting to frighten me. But after I stared at him blankly, he would say, "Oh, you must have lived in Mississippi. Well, there's certainly nothing I could do down here that would be any worse than that."

I recommend the movie "Jacob's Ladder", starring Tim Robbins, for one of my favorite views of heaven and hell.

IMHO, I dont think of hell as a physical place, so i dont htink the number of people entering/exiting? should affect it at all.
I also dont think that Hell is hot or cold. I think of hell, if there indeed exists a hell, as a place of nothingness, where everything is just.. nothing.. just eternal bore... :-P heh i guess you can see i'm the kind of person that is pretty claustrophobic...
I;m just afraid of being left in a desolate place all by my self for the rest of eternity, without being able to disappear...
*shudder*

You could go. What doesn't wipe you from existance can only make you stronger! You'd be a shattered walking corpse of a man who believes he is the strongest being in existence.

even if you were under that impression how come what you typed out is verbatim to what was typed out on someone else's site?