11. Do you believe in hell? What kind of place do you think it is?

(link to challenge because it’s now far enough down my blog that it’s getting hard to find it)

I don’t really believe in hell. I don’t really believe in heaven. 

I accept the remote possibility that maybe hell exists and is a terrible place where I will burn forever for being a Satanic fool, but them’s the wages of free will. I would rather take that risk freely than worship That Bastard Up There (TBUT) and do everything He says in life, just so I can do even more obeying Him and worshipping Him in heaven. 

I don’t really believe in reincarnation either, exactly. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to just keep reincarnating on the same planet again and again and again. What’s the point? 

I do however seem to believe in some sort of afterlife… in fact, “afterlife” is a very apt description of it. My best guess is that when we die, we move on to another plane where we live a different life, with different challenges and opportunities for growth, as spiritual beings. In that life eventually we may die as well and advance to yet another plane, and another after that, until eventually, maybe… we become Gods. 

Somebody told me this is kind of a Hermetic idea. I know basically nothing about Hermeticism but maybe that’s the wheel I was reinventing with that. 

On a more somber and down-to-earth note, I believe in living hell, especially today when I look out my window and see the sky completely gray, not with clouds, but with thick smoke from the wildfires up north. Climate change is in the process of turning the world into an inferno. We need to wise up and do something about this. 

I think about the huge squalid tent cities that already exist in San Francisco and Oakland, and I think about all the people who lost their homes to the fires and wonder how much those tent cities are about to grow, and I think about how callous and ignorant most people are about the tent cities and the people in them, and I just know….

Hell is human evil and the ways it shapes the world. 

But we could make this place paradise, too.