"The Voidoids" was in my opinion the most brilliantly evocative punk band name of all time. It says so much about that whole state of mind!

I once nicknamed daylia's twin sons "Null and Void" back when they were at that teenage stage where you constantly insult your twin brother by calling him "gay" and so on...

They have since grown up and are no longer acting like Voidoids. Yippee!

Now, Hell. Okay. It's both fact AND fiction. Just depends which particular version of hell you're talking about. I tend to think that the fundamentalist view of a literal hell complete with devils, lakes of fire, and sinners suffering the tortures of the damned for all eternity is absolutely ridiculous. God would not create such a place, only a human being in a really twisted state of mind would dream it up.

However...there may be astral regions (not physical places) which resemble it somewhat. Some spiritual traditions suggest that there are many hells...those being various levels of spiritual reality which correspond to various disturbed states of mind. A soul would naturally tend to go to the level that was in resonance with that soul's state of mind. That isn't punishment. It's just the natural movement of an energy body into a spectrum that suits it, that's all.

Consider these examples: In actual physical life many people are irresistibly drawn to a place that I would describe as hellish...a seedy downtown bar full of drunks. Walk in. Look around. It's dark, gloomy, and smelly. The place stinks, in fact. The people there are often hostile, truculent, looking for an argument, potentially violent, depressed, or overexcited in a not very good way. They're mostly quite drunk and rather incoherent. They are wasting their time, ruining their health, and quite possibly endangering the health of others.

That is a place that I perceive as hell, but its patrons perceive it as "a good time". :-) Note how the individual mentality is naturally drawn toward its own energy resonant level.

Another such place is a casino. I consider casinos to be hellish. Their patrons consider them to be just fine.

Another such place is Walmart. This is a milder sort of hell, mostly devoted to greed and overconsumption divorced from reality. Again, its adherents see it as "a good time" or "a good opportunity".

And so it goes... :-)

So, I say that God doesn't punish anyone! People punish themselves through their own lack of awareness, their own self-hatred, their lack of confidence, and their various fears and weaknesses.

There are probably any number of Astral hells to which the soul can gravitate (just like there are any number of Earthly hells), but they only appear hellish from a higher perspective. One hell could look heavenly from another hell, and they could both look heavenly from yet another. And heaven? A heaven could look terrifying to someone more comfortable with his familiar chosen hell.

It's just a question of what you want.