Actually, I appreciated your rant very much, but I thought since you were answering me, you might address the view of 'hell' I laid out at http://cblf.org/messages/57240.htm

There is a lot of Christian popular culture that is minimally biblical, and many people's views about hell derive from ancient and medieval Catholic concepts that aren't well supported biblically. The hell problem you are psychically wrestling with, the eternal torture problem, is a medieval Catholic construct that, like indulgences and priestly celibacy, is by no means an essential part of protestantism. I don't know if you're protestant or not, but your early-20th-century liberal-christian concept of a scientifically explained holy spirit that is merely a part of accelerated consciousness (often misleading thought of as the unconscious or the subconscious)is not something that Pope Benedict would support. Therefore I conclude you're either non-catholic or ex-catholic or returning-ex-catholic and your attachment to medieval hell is not fundamental to any religious denomination that you adhere to.

Likewise, even though your concept of temporary punishment recapitulates the medieval catholic purgatory, I think you've reinvented it from first-principles rather than actually following along with a historical papal bull.

To me, it's not that people are eternally punished or tortured, it's that they have reduced themselves spiritually to almost nothing. A brilliant novelist's vision of this conception of hell is laid out by C.S. Lewis in the Great Divorce, and I recommend that to you as a starting point for understanding what the alternative, orthodox, scripturally based views of 'hell' are like. These views are not as easily represented as the medieval ones -- they don't make a nice scary painting full of demons and smoke -- but they make a much better show for themselves in terms of biblical consistency and moral evaluation.

But to really 'get' them, you have to apprehend the nature of evil, which is not just an equal choice on the branching tree of choices. Rather, as a reflex toward pure self-service regardless of other people and oblivious to love, it is a choice that, if you like, curves you inwards towards yourself, abstracts you from a big chunk of reality and human community, and, in general, reduces you to a small spiritual dimension. If you take a serial sex killer like Paul Bernardo, famous rapist and torture-murderer of young girls and women, and try to see what reality looked like to him from the inside of his head, you'll soon realize that whatever he saw, the whole picture of the girls' personal realities, their hopes, loves, kindnesses, frustrations, and so on, was either completely missing or was only apprehended as a sort of erotic junk food to be consumed. He was profoundly in divorce from their humanity, from any vision of common humanity; he was lost in himself and that self was not expansive but rather implosive, sucking things into itself as wanted and giving nothing out.

You know that in science, a collapsed star, a black hole, becomes a 'singularity,' represented geometrically by a point, and evil like Paul's is the spiritual equivalent, a total collapse into consuming, high-gravity, spiritual nothingness.

All God need do to make a hell for Paul is to allow that tiny point of post-malignant self to extinguish upon death. That is Paul's trip to the garbage pit of Sheol, the metaphor that gave rise to the medieval concept of hell.

Don't get me wrong, it would be magnificent to see Paul rehabilitated and stand in heaven eternally mortified in the face of all those he killed and caused pain to. But that might be a much worse hell; with full knowledge of what he had done, even in forgiveness, how could he avoid endless agony? I haven't been there, I don't know, but I speculate that God would be merciful and grant him his self-cultivated oblivion.