I’m sorry, but hell is no longer an option for you or anyone you might have thought of sending there. The only purpose of the belief in hell is that when you have passed through it, you will realize that only Heaven is real. Hell is just a temporary state of mind that seems like forever. Don’t you think God knew we would invent hell? We are always telling someone to go to hell. We are always god-damming this or that, but God never does such things. While heaven is considered to be pie in the sky, hell is considered real. But if Infinity exists, then where is there room for hell except in our self-torturing minds?

God doesn’t have to punish people, we do that quite well, thank you. In fact, all of God’s efforts have been designed to end our self-torture. This "hell of a mess" we are in is the exact reason we need to see our symptoms and suffering as blessings in disguise just as we are gods in disguise.

The only benefit of hellish thinking is to awaken us. It is hard to sleep through a fire. The most apt biblical metaphors for the symbol of hell are: the garbage pile (ash makes great compost), the furnaces of affliction (to burn away our attachments) and the fires that purify ore into gold. If God is a consuming fire, then god might be considered hell to the ego. Hell is not a place on earth or below the earth that you are going to, it is a place in your mind that you are coming from, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

Almost without exception whenever I have a client visualize a wall with a door in it, and a troublesome word put on it, the client imagines hell on the other side of that door. Indeed we put hell "out there," and thus we never find out what it is. The hell behind the door may be hot and painful, or cold and paralyzing, or dreadfully mediocre, or an endless void, but it is your own personal version of hell nevertheless. Hell is just our unexamined angry experience of pain, nothing else.

Sartre

God has no interest whatsoever in the infliction of pain to scare and control people. Humans do that to themselves on a daily basis. God’s problem is how to inspire forgiveness, mercy and peace in us. Crime and Punishment (Tolstoy) has been our theme for the management of children and other law-breakers from the git-go and where has that gotten us? Where has symptom–punishment gotten us? Jails full of misguided young talented gods. God has no desire to control human beings or else he would not have given us such freedom in the first place. Even the laws are given to us to protect us from our self-destructiveness and self-judgment.

Joseph Campbell

The experience of hell (separateness, lack and entrapment) is the experience of pain and is perhaps the chief symptom of our planetary delusions. The only merit I can see in the human doctrine of hell is that it contains , like any other symptom, the gift of potential awakening from our stories. The experience of hell then is the chief human symptom of our misguided imagination and it is simultaneously our chief wake-up call from our nightmares as well.