But this is what troubles me. There can be no evil without goodness. Evil, after all, is just the privation of goodness - so if Hell is indeed an absence of all goodness, we run into a few problems, the first of which is all being is goodness, fundamentally. The second (which follows from the first) is that one could not perceive what you've said without some goodness, just as cold has no meaning without the ability to experience heat. So if goodness is present in whatever Hell is, it follows that hope must also be, since goodness is not simple at the level of experience, and we don't believe God exists in Hell (in the regular sense). So perhaps we say that we take our memories of goodness with us and these are what remain. Or maybe it's just that your being is continuously being destroyed and regenerated, just to be destroyed again, but that runs into even more problems, namely, where is the recreative power that reconstitutes your being coming from? Is God recreating you just to punish you again? This doesn't mesh well with the view that Hell is truly just the supreme absence of God, i.e. the ultimate separation. Others might say that it is an immaterial kind of punishment, an agony of the soul itself. But the soul is pure light and this makes no sense, because it does not feel pain. Pain is of a material nature, of an accidental nature, and many of the esoteric veins in religious history have recognized (correctly, I think) that evil is really a vector that moves *into* greater and greater materiality (as opposed to a movement toward pure spirit). There are many reasons that I don't believe Hell is what we have culturally come to believe it is, especially since I am a kind of monist, who sees everything that exists as fundamentally one kind of thing: light. The furthest possibility for movement away from the source is into darkness, and we should expect a place having the least light to be ultimately cold. The Jews and Christians depicted the Seraphim, those angels closest to the Holy Throne of God to be burning with the 'love of God', or light. The light is of such a magnificence and power, that the pre-Christian Jews knew it would obliterate man's flesh, and even the spirit could be obliterated. The best example that I've ever heard, which causes this to become a visceral sort of understanding, is to imagine that power from the main power station of your grid could somehow make it to a lightbulb in your home without the voltage being stepped down at any point. What happens if that encounters the lightbulb? It annihilates it. All of creation could be thought of as a kind of transformation process that steps down the energy of God, which has always been just called *light*. For my part, I don't believe that any of the classic depictions of Hell can correspond to the reality. Instead, they are straightforward ways of understanding something that is truly spiritual in nature. Whether we freeze or burn, it is least likely to be in the sense we grasp these things physically.