Wow. Some years back in my life, I could have given ya a nice simple relatively clear answer. Heaven is "where" (I don't think I would have really pointed up into space since I was very young) God is, and where people attuned to Him spend eternity with Him. Also in my early years, hell for me was a place of literal agony in flames, the destiny of those who didn't measure up to God's standards, and who didn't ask his forgiveness/accept Jesus's sacrifice/for their sins/shortcomings.

If "hell" has any meaning for me now, I guess it is alienation; from others, from "God", from one's best self. I absolutely reject a literal/fundamentalist "hell". Say for a moment that "Osama Bin Laden definitely deserved to go to hell". Then think with me; he is dropped into searing flames. He is there in agony for three hundred sixty five billion years as punishment for the first of the victims of 9/ii. Then three hundred sixty five billion years for the next victim. Except it doesn't really work that way. He is now actually no closer to relief from total agony than he was 770 billion years before. And, to the true-blue fundamentalist, Osama is accompanied there by millions of decent people whose downfall was...failing to accept Jesus.

I've been so conditioned to think of Heaven in terms of eternal peaceful fellowship with God, that is still there in my mind. But I have no real conviction now that I'll ever know any "Heaven" except that my wife survived last summer and is still with me, I have some very dear family and friends, and I've learned something of the best hearts of even a lot of people I may never meet in person, thinking especially just now of Nigel Patterson's thread here.