The choice of Heaven or Hell
Likewise, Christians like to say that we have no sorrows in Heaven, to try to go around the problem of parents being in Hell : but even many Christians are not this hard-hearted on Earth. Once again, if we are not the same person, then Heaven cannot be our afterlife.
Now, the pleasure box problem. I have discussed the parameters of the pleasure box situation in "Hatred of good and evil" part 2, and established that the two attributes to evaluate whenever it is moral to escape to a different, contained context are the richess of experience and the impact of its falsity. In this case, falsity is not applicable since we are talking about an experiential context, not only a belief system. But a case can be made that Heaven loses a great amount of experiential richness compared to Earth, due to the absence of sin and of the corporeal body.
Furthermore, for the reasons I have discussed, Heaven does not seem desirable, and if it is, it cannot be our afterlife. So it would seem that Heaven, if it existed, would be a worse situation than being on Earth.
How about Hell ? According to the Bible, it has the following attributes :
* Contrarily to Christian belief, the Bible clearly demonstrates that Hell is not a lake of fire (Rev. 20:14).
* Hell is a place of darkness (Matt. 22:13) and fire (Mark 9:44).
* What happens in Hell : weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 25:3), torments (Luke 16:23), sorrows (2 Samuel 22:6), everlasting destruction (II Thessalonians 1:9), lack of rest (Rev. 14:11) and unsatisfied physical desires (Luke 16:24).
Once again, in the absence of a physical body, most of these things are meaningless. But suppose we somehow concede them : perhaps this hypothetical soul has a "virtual body" by which it can feel pain, have physical desires, and so on.
We would then have to ask, how much suffering is there in Hell ? Common conceptions would have us believe that Hell is pure suffering. However, this is not proven by Scripture. Yes, it's a big advantage for your turnover rate if you claim great suffering for unbelievers, but we are not concerned about church turnover.
In my opinion, an objective mind is forced to conclude that the amount of suffering in Hell is indeterminate. That is, the scriptural data seems to accomodate moderate suffering as well as high levels of suffering. On the
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