A reader writes:
It's interesting that you would refer to hell as "temporal" reality, and as something we can experience in this life. As a bitter ex-Mormon, I have to tell you, this was always the piece of theology about Mormonism I admired the most. Mormons believe that there is no such thing as an actual burning lake. Rather, hell is being cut off from the love and grace of God. We cut ourselves off from this love and grace in this life, and that is hell, that disconnect from the divine. Hell is spiritual death, not physical torture.
Mormons also believe that for justice to happen, every soul must be given knowledge of this love and grace and actively turn away from it, something that few if any souls would actually ever do. The horrific idea that the unbaptized, even infants, will suffer because of the chance tragedies of life, is rightly scorned. How can those who never heard the gospel turn against it?
In Mormon conception, the afterlife is also a place for spiritual progression, an occasion for those who didn't fully know God's love and grace to know and accept it (thus the strange Mormon practice of proxy baptism in the names of the dead). The end goal is to get everyone into heaven (at least at some level) to get everyone out of the hell of being alone and cut off. Mormon hell is a place where no one burns, but everyone yearns.
Another:
Wait, what? Please elaborate on what you mean by a "temporal, phenomenological reality", because your response suggests to me that you don't believe in any conventional notion of "hell" (be it flames, total darkness, utter absence of God in the afterlife, what have you). I'm right that you only believe in some sort of "hell on earth", then what are your thoughts on where the soul goes after death? Can there still be heaven without hell? To me it seems heaven and hell are essential to the entire Judeo-Christian tradition and worldview. As with "The Fall", there is no Christianity without heaven and hell. To view hell as simply a state of mind (or soul) here on earth is missing the bigger picture, is it not? And when you recite the Apostle's Creed, “He Descended into Hell. On the Third Day, He Rose Again from the Dead”, does that not imply the existence of hell as a real 'place'? What runs through your mind instead?
How can we describe a state of being which exists after our death, from whose bourne no traveler returns? Aye, there's the rub.
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause
I do not know. I do not believe in the medieval version of Hell, and I do not believe in a Christianity based on threats and eternal punishments. Any Christianity that is based on fear rather than love seems to have missed the point. What does Jesus constantly say in the Gospels? "Be not afraid." He represents the extinction of fear, not its manipulation. Do I believe that a person who has turned away from God's love his entire life and dies in that state will remain in it for ever? I fear so. But I also know that there is no condition on the love of God. So I remain suspended in that place, leaving the rest to God, and focused more on loving others and loving God now, which is the only place mortals ever actually live. Another:
You surely know this line from the great Brothers Karamazov: "What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love." I have not found a more accurate definition of hell.
I think being unable to be loved is worse, but they are, of course, connected:
In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures.
What greater Hell can we understand than that?
The Dish 