What are heaven and hell? Well, I think that Europeans and their offspring got most of their concepts from Dante, but where did Dante get his ideas from? It the Divine Comedy almost entirely from his imagination mixed with a bit of scripture, or are there folkloric sources also?

In general, I prefer not to speculate, but I do have some general idea of heaven as being absorbed into the One, the unity of all with God (or if no God, then just the unity of all). Some theologians speculate that if God is as good as we claim God to be, then hell could not be God's creation - that it is built somehow by the evil that exists in humankind. Most progressive theologians seem to think that if there is a hell, not many people go there.

But I don't think about heaven or hell very much. I focus my life on the present, of drawing as much as I can out of the current moment. I was raised in a Catholic family and went through 16 years of Catholic education (half of that in a Catholic seminary), and I didn't really get very much exposure to thinking about heaven and hell.

Works for me.

-Joe-