I wonder if that’s actually true. Raised a catholic, it was mentioned that good people and those who love God go to heaven and bad people and those who refuse to love God go to hell. It didn’t seem to give us much of a choice…
I think the Catholic God may be a little more forgiving. That sign is at a Pentecostal church.
It’s…complicated and vague to say the least. Church hasn’t even defined if Hell is a state or a place and has been described as one or the other in various points in time by various popes and religious authority figures.
Does that make any difference? 
The posted sign was an attempt of a church to make a funny statement and at same time supporting a political position. I don’t think it was supposed to be taken literally…
The Pentecostals are pretty literal in their interpretation of the Bible, so I’m not so sure about that.
As holder of the Keys of St. Peter, the pope has the power to “bind and loose,” i.e. to determine who goes to heaven, and who goes to hell. So which place you go to depends a lot on who the pope is when you die. In theory, some future pope could just abolish hell and let everybody go to heaven, but there are probably solid marketing reasons why they don’t do that.
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What happens to, say, mildly unpleasant people who love God? How about good people who refuse to love God?
I reckon the Catholics haven’t quite thought this one through. At best, the visa clearance procedure for heaven must get quite complicated for them.
Gee, that second image is like my Heaven on Earth though!
Biblically it’s not down to how good or bad you are but simply whether you believe in Jesus, although I guess the Catholic interpretation is somewhat different.
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Shouldn’t they have to dance under some kind of pole to get into heaven? But seriously, folks, a papal committee endorsed by Benedict XVI indicated in 2007 that this medieval concept of limbo was not a dogmatic teaching of the Church.
The Catholics have thought everything through, and written it down with hyperlinks
PART ONE, SECTION TWO I., CHAPTER THREE, Article 12, IV.: Hell
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Hell is the absence of God. It is a monument to free will. And the doors are locked from the inside.
This is how some of my favorite theologians describes it.
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Should be easy to get out then 
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It doesn’t work like that. You can’t save people from themselves.
Hell considered as a loving God’s way of giving up.
If we’re going to go there, I just consider it to be a particularly puerile line of bullshit But Andrew said the door locks from the inside. Well, that’s how they do work. You can open them if you’re inside
You can. But people don’t choose to. Hell to me is not an actual place, it’s is to be without Gods grace. But the scriptures don’t really say too much about hell so maybe it can be an actual place.
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How do you know this 
Why wouldn’t anyone choose not to leave hell if the door was right there?
It seems like it can be about anything anyone imagines it to be.
This is how I would explain it to an atheist from a secular point of view. People create their own hell. We internalize a lot of blame for things that happen to us within and not within our control. We feel guilt and shame for things and we love to hang on to baggage.
I don’t know if you know many victims of rape, I’ve sat through to observe many counseling sessions with them. They are the perfect example of this. They build up guilt and shame, blame it on themselves. They internalize all these feeling and it festers in every thought and every action. Destroys all the good around them like relationships and from people who want to help them. Depression and other mental illness sets in and becomes a cycle of it with every thing in their life becoming a mess from their own house to job and more. It manifests into a living hell for many of these victims and they often find things to cope like drugs and alcohol or sometimes they end it permanently through self harm. Why do they do this when they can simply move on? I guess it’s human nature.
Drug addicts and alcoholics are also like this. Why don’t they simply stop drinking and using drugs. It would make their life so much better if they could. Most of them don’t want to be helped. You can offer them a bed and pay for their entire rehab. And a lot of them would refuse.
You’re talking about mental states in actual life. I don’t see how that has anything to do with a state after life.
I don’t know if you know many victims of rape, I’ve sat through to observe many counseling sessions with them. They are the perfect example of this. They build up guilt and shame, blame it on themselves. They internalize all these feeling and it festers in every thought and every action. Destroys all the good around them like relationships and from people who want to help them. Depression and other mental illness sets in and becomes a cycle of it with every thing in their life becoming a mess from their own house to job and more. It manifests into a living hell for many of these victims and they often find things to cope like drugs and alcohol or sometimes they end it permanently through self harm. Why do they do this when they can simply move on? I guess it’s human nature.
The short answer is they can’t simply move on because they’ve been hurt. But many people do move on after time and with various kinds of help, though some scar may always be there.
Drug addicts and alcoholics are also like this. Why don’t they simply stop drinking and using drugs. It would make their life so much better if they could. Most of them don’t want to be helped. You can offer them a bed and pay for their entire rehab. And a lot of them would refuse.
Some would, to varying degrees because they have a chemical addiction or underlying problems which lead them to seek a destructive path. But some don’t and break out of it.
I understand these kind of mental states to some degree, but I’m not seeing what connection there would be to a hell in an afterlife, which is said to be imposed by an external force after all.
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Most people would say mind and spirit are one in the same if not connected. Why wouldn’t hell be something people experience in actual life? The Bible says hell is a place that destroys soul and body. We are souls or have a souls in the biblical sense when we’re alive
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The short answer is they can’t simply move on because they’ve been hurt. But many people do move on after time and with various kinds of help, though some scar may always be there
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Of course, I’m just making a point that perhaps it’s in our human nature to hang on to things that cause us pain instead of letting them go. Ergo, suffering like hell.
Not impressed on external force from my perspective. Self imposed.