Religion

I can't reconcile them without making them so abstract as to be meaningless. "Hell is separation from God" sort of pabulum.

There are different descriptions of heavens, too. The birds fly in the heavens. God's in heaven. I have yet to see God flitting from branch to branch or flying to a power line to roost.

So when you die, you're in hell. The Tanakh has a nifty "gathered to his fathers," which I always thought was a nice metaphor. Then I saw that in the area around current Israel they usually lay bodies in tombs to decompose, and clear out the bones to reuse the tombs. In some cases prominent people's bones would be kept separate in ossuaries. In other cases, there'd be a hollowed-out chamber under the tomb where the bones would be chucked. Literally gathered with their fathers' bones. I say when you die you're in the grave. For my father, hell is apparently the corner of my office, in a metal urn.

Then there are metaphorical extensions. Lazarus was alive and talking in hell. Meh. Nice analogy. Don't see a necessary assertion there. "Living hell" is the same kind of metaphor.

Gehenna is a koine word for 'hell'. It was literally the trash dump outside of Jerusalem. You put things there to burn them up and be rid of them. So I figure gehenna for the damned is where they're put to be burned up and rid of.

At that all the hells that people are consigned to are at an end. I don't see one where the dead are placed to suffer interminably. Some days I'm of the opinion that god's a dick, but not that much of a sick f**k. (Other days I'm not of that opinion. It's complicated.)

Same for heaven. God's in heaven. Angels get there, too. In 50 AD somebody claiming rights to say the truth said of all humans, only Jesus had gone to heaven, and that's because he came from there. Jesus said nobody had gone to heaven. That included Moses and David, so the standard for entrance had to be pretty high. 20 years after the crucifixion nobody had qualified, so the standards must be very high. Stephen didn't make the cut, and he was killed for his faith. (Apparently everybody now goes to heaven, so Stephen got a raw deal, if you believe most ministers. Hell, many think their cats or goldfish are higher priority than poor youngish Stephanus.)

But there are birds in heaven, so either there are two heavens or things are very confused. Yet English has the same distinction: The heavens are the atmosphere; the overarching 'vault' or sky, i.e., the welkin in its etymological meaning; or the abode of the god(s), wherever that is.

The New Jerusalem, where the saints are with God, is explicitly said to descend from heaven to Earth for habitation, not to be in heaven. The entire "we go to heaven" is rationalized by the same 'book' in which the souls of the dead are under an altar in heaven. That nicely follows the thinking that the Tabernacle and Temple were made after a model of what exists in heaven; when animals were sacrificed, their blood, their lives, were poured on at the base of or under the altar; and it says those are those who were martyred or sacrificed for their faith in God. But if you don't know the context as to how a likely reader would interpret it, it could mean anything.


Then there's purgatory. For those that we don't sentence to hell because we like them too much or feel sorry for them, but really can't say are going to heaven quite yet.