Hell and Heaven are not meant to exist outside of a religious tradition- I think that should be obvious as long as we're not taking anything to literally and imagining a heaven in the sky and a hell at the core of the Earth.

Both of them are meant to be mental constructs to define one's relationship to God, and through God the relationship to the self and the world.

Thinking of Heaven as a literal place or goal and Hell as a punishment is common, but I think a misunderstanding of the goal of the religious tradition. I wish I could give credit to the source that put this into my head, but I cannot remember the book (just went to the shelf and looked through it for a little, browsing and trying to find something about it). Maybe it was a class and not a book, but anyways, here we go.

The sentiment "God is Love" is not often taken literally enough. It is easy to take the prefigured idea of God as an old man or omnipotent force and then change it so that it is a loving old man, or a powerful force of love. Neither of these is literal enough, since both of them make love adjectival, which the sentiment explicitly does not. God is not "loving." God is Love. If you have ever felt overwhelming compassion, care, and Love for anything, that is God. For the purposes of thinking about theology, I find this definition to be immensely powerful in bringing God to life in a very serious sense. It is one thing to not believe in a book, it is quite another to wonder about the nature of yourself relative to the idea of Love.

With the idea that God being Love in place we have a few interesting avenues to go down. We could talk about omnipotence and all of that, but frankly, that's a story. It's as interesting as wondering if there "really was" a Jesus. It might be a nice thought experiment, but it will not help you in your life. Only people who mistake "true" with "important" would think that saying anything in the Bible is untrue is a crushing blow, and I have no desire to focus on these kinds of detailed-oriented arguments.

I would much rather talk about you!

I am going to assume that you have been in Love.* Being in Love, experiencing Love, and letting yourself be loved by someone are immensely powerful feelings- it's a very Disney thing to say, but it's true. These are life-changing emotions. If you're currently in Love with someone it may be difficult for you to remember what it was like to not have that feeling- the person who was out of Love might feel distant, or unrelatable. That is because you are in Heaven. Not a complete Heaven, granted, but when you are experiencing a moment of revelatory Love, a rush of blood to the head, you are in Heaven in a real and meaningful way.

Staying in Heaven longer requires Loving more- it can be that simple. Can you imagine a "perfect" place in which there was anything you didn't Love? No- it is impossible. If something is exactly as you want it to be, beyond criticism, and worthy of adoration of the highest order, then it is perfect, and you will Love it. The simple definition of Heaven as a "perfect place" is (arguably) correct. It is any place where you experience Love at all times.

Now, does any such physical place exist? Of course not! Believing that you can wander somewhere, or float into the sky and suddenly experience all encompassing Love is childish. Such a notion assumes that Love is external, part of the environment, and one can pick it up as one chooses. We know this not to be the case- imagine how long it took you to find someone you felt Love towards (not counting family members, perhaps). Did you just "find" Love? Or did you search for it for quite some time before "finding" it. And to clarify, I don't mean when you found the person- I mean when you found "Love." After all, you are looking for Love, and the person is just the medium which excited it in you. You would no more say the person is the Love than that the paper is the story- the latter can't exist without the former, but the former certainly can exist without the latter.

So, we know now that God is Love, that Love is internal, and that Heaven is a place where you experience consummate Love for all things (or, maybe more accurately, despite all things). This is wonderful news, then! Heaven is internal! We can have Heaven wherever we go! Eureka! O Frabjous Day! Fucking Awesome!

Obviously, it is both exactly that easy and precisely that hard. Experiencing Love is not easy, not in a world filled with parking meters and shitty appointments and bad television- a world of annoying coworkers, law school, and whatever the fuck the kids are wearing these days. Fuck. Sometimes it seems like there's almost nothing to Love! Sometimes we think that we're clinging to a tiny scrap of Love in a huge ocean of shit.

And succumbing to this belief that most things are shit and that the world is going to hell and that, truly, you cannot experience Love for any thing, let alone all things, that is precisely the Gates of Hell.

Through me you enter into the city of woes, Through me you enter into eternal pain, Through me you enter the population of loss. ... Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

This exemplifies what Hell is. Hell is pain and loss, woes and hopelessness. But that's not the punishment for "going to" Hell. That is what Hell means. Hell is experiencing loss, pain, and hopelessness. Hell is having these to the exclusion of experiencing Love.

This is not meant intellectually.

This is not about everyone else, or the past, or some force you never see.

This is about you.

The worst times of life are the experiences of pain, loss, hopelessness and hate. The best are experiences of Love. It's a fairly simple idea which, when followed to extremes, creates an interesting philosophy, and one a lot more atheists would do well to investigate. Actual Christianity, not detail-oriented Christianity, is powerfully simple in its nature and extremely difficult to live.

But, I do have to sleep soon, so I'm going to end this here.

* (In your case, Skippy, I'm about 99% sure I know you AFK and I'm pretty darn sure you have been in love. To anyone else reading this, I'm just hoping you have been, too).