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What do you think: Will much justice be milked from my eternity in hell? Will this justice somehow be distributed to those deserving of it? Is it going to make some of the "innocent" (or forgiven) right-thinking folks in heaven *happy*?
Personally, I might feel a trifle guilty if I approved of anyone's eternal torment. What a way to improve the world by making it worse for everyone in it... what would that accomplish? Would hell be helping you rise above your self-perceived flaws? Would it mend any harm you think you've caused? Would it reconcile you with anyone you think you've wronged? Would it reconcile you with God?
"But", I learned, "hell is getting exactly what you *asked* for: Eternity without God!" Here're some things I might be asking for: Meaningful things to do, and the desire and courage to do them. Reconciliation with those I've wronged; peace of mind. A body I would actually like to inhabit, and a face I would like to wear. The ability to feel love for others, and to be loved, and to love myself, and to be unafraid of letting go in it. Wholly artificial food (or food without killing, anyway). Vast horizons, and no crowds, and freedom. With a nearby bus stop.
So if I don't want hot dogs and flamenco (i.e., somebody's idea of heaven) it doesn't mean I'm asking to be force-fed thumbtack gravy in a psychoacoustic torture chamber (i.e. somebody's idea of hell). Why divide it all up into some binary black-and-white reality in the first place -- when everything about life is fluid, organic, imprecise? And why take the state of our minds at the moment of death, the state of our minds with regard to some religion's central problematic, and make the purported afterlife out to be nothing but a consequence of that last moment, unchangingly, as if it weren't actually an after-*life* so much as a kind of eternal dream-or-nightmare? (Maybe the afterlife is a dream had while dying...)
And why would anybody *choose* hell, or hellish "consequences", anyway -- unless they (1) didn't know what they're doing, or (2) had gone *so* wrong as to be blind to, or terrified of, the very thing that could spare/save them from the consequences of their guilt? Honestly, I suspect the whole "choosing it" angle is ...white-washing it. In the Bible there's a lot of talk of punishment, condemnation, throwing into fire, handing over to torturers, wrath, etc.; if all that being-punished is metaphorical for some chosen fate, why shouldn't hell be a metaphor as well? (Or even God a metaphor for some sort of superego?) But you need a degree in theology to determine what's metaphor and what isn't in the Bible. Or more patience than I have.
To me it often sounds as if what really motivated this mapping-out of the hereafter wasn't any actual knowledge of it but a desire to judge people and threaten them with an eternity extrapolated from their here and now... and sometimes to preserve the idea of hell, and with it the integrity of one's beliefs, against accusations of tyranny, injustice, cruelty, or pointlessness. Sometimes it seems anything's fair in picturing heaven and hell -- just so long as *we* are the ones to blame, and as long there's suffering in stock for those of whose deeds or (for crying out loud!) thoughts, beliefs, desires and feelings the hell-apologist in question disapproves. If we *choose* hell, we can't complain about this setup being a wee bit unfair.
And there're so *many* ways to justify hell, in addition to the various brief allusions to what we call "hell" now that're actually found in the Bible. To some it's all about triumph and glory and punishment, perhaps because that's what wows *them*. Others stress a self-imposed separation, a "getting what you asked for"... or they speak of natural consequences. Or they consider this throwing-into-the-fire an annihilation rather than a torture. Or they posit a sin-cleansing "fire" that's not *literally* forever. And they all have their own variations on what rules must be lived by and how literally they're to be taken -- and many will point out that that's actually impossible. Yet failure to comply, failure to achieve the unachievable, still earns us well-deserved eternal torment, according to some apologists! Huh. And that's just a few variations of just one religion.
If you had total control of the universe, would you be leaving it up to a book full of blood and torment and condemnation and archaic notions of collective guilt and men's and women's places in life to teach them the way out?