Is a hell a good or bad place?

I have heard a saying, the doors of hell are all locked on the inside.

yeah ive heard of that saying too but i think it is rhetoric. the whole motto of it is not god who sends you to hell it is you who chose to go. it is a nonsensical argument because the system for how things work would need to be defined and set. Therefore to design the system to work in the way that allowed a person to chose to end up in hell would be the product of the designer. you can't end up in hell if it is not an option made available.

hell only exists in the imagination but so does god.

There is no scriptual or spiritual reason to believe hell is like the popular imagination defines it.

well i would agree on just about every basis, and even common sense. but in the new testament Jesus speaks about hell as if it were a place of torment and burning. there are dozens of passages where he is mentioning something to the effect of, "a place of eternal fire" or "as a place of torment, fire, and agony" If you want references, most of them appear in mathew but there are other books as well that site passages and references.

despite the fact that the bible mentions it, doesn't change my opinion about the bible being nothing more than the work of some very imaginative humans in a collaborative attempt to imprison the less intelligent into a system of servitude and ignorance.

When reading the bible you have to keep in mind it has two levels. The obvious litteral level for the common people and a deeper meaning, usually intended for the few admitted into the "inner circle".

actually a good deal of the popular imagery of hell is derived from non-Christian sources, including Zoroastrian, which had enormous influence on the development of Christian eschatology (= 'fate of souls'). But belief in heaven and hell are both cross-cultural and pretty well universal in the pre-modern world.

For half of their history, the Jews had no hell or heaven. The exile in Babylon ended with Zoroastrianism in a very good light and many features were adopted including heaven and hell and the battle betwen good and evil. The surge in hellfire sermons was during the middle ages. Prior to this, heaven was emphasised, esp in the early church. The Catholics now say hell is the abscence of God meaning that when you go to hell you will never know God.Not in Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Tao, Shinto and many shamanist religions .

Medieval Buddhism had very detailed descriptions oif the hell realms - hot hells, cold hells, often illustrated in traditional iconography with Dantesque levels of detail....It is not one of the aspects that is emphasized by the 'politically correct' vendors of Western Buddhism....

The others I mentioned have no hell ?

How do you get into hell if you are reincarnated ?

Transformation over and over. Spontaneous arising and ceasing due to heavy karmic mentality.

I can back up jeeprs statement, and it definitely makes it's way into Mahayana. As i mentioned in another thread, Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva has a vow to liberate all beings from the hell realms before obtaining full and complete enlightenment. Well that is just one of his vows. But the Buddha proclaimed that he had already fulfilled the vow.

Well, the doctrine is that after this life, one will be re-born in one of six realms in the next life. These are Heaven worlds, Asura worlds (asuras are like demi-gods), human realm, animal realm, hungry ghost realm, hell realm(s). The duration of your existence is determined by your karma. In the Hell and Heaven realms, the lengths of time are depicted as pretty astronomical - but not eternal. There is nothing eternal, as in 'of limitless duration'. Of course, the Buddhas, Arhats and Never-returners are completely 'out of the loop' by definition. The Bodhisattvas incarnate in various realms 'for the welfare of all sentient beings'.

The best of all possible births, if one is to be born at all, is in the human realm, as only in this realm is it possible to hear and comprehend the Teaching. Those who fall back into the lower realms may be consigned to them for 'aeons and aeons of kalpas'.

That anyway is a thumbnail sketch of the traditional doctrine.

and i say even if you return to the lower realms, it's not really that big of a deal because you won't remember any of it anyways. it's like if you went through a traumatic accident but had absolutely no memory of it. Not very traumatic now is it? so i can't help but ask, is this just another one of those things that is being used to try to scare people into behaving? it just doesn't pan out. I surely have no memory of ever being in hell but according to how the whole system works, more than likely i was there in the past. it has absolutely no bearing on me at all because the system itself doesn't actually reveal anything substantial enough to lead me to believe that any particular action is favorable over another unless it is put into a context.

So Hinduism has an obscure hell and Buddhism has none ? Is that correct ?

I can understand how I would get thrown out of the heaven world, but how would you do it and where would you go next ? Surely everything is a downhill step from there and you havent done anything to deserve it .

Well according to the Buddha, the heaven realm is actually not perfect. it is not the desirable goal in Buddhism, even though it is ironic to say it like that. The Buddha says that all beings residing within the heaven realm are still subject to rebirth, although their life there is so pleasant and long they don't care about death or being reborn because it takes so long. Which is why jeeprs mentions that the human realm is the only ideal place to be, because it is in a position to actually handle the dharma. Where as all the other realms are either too conflicted or too unconcerned to care about the dharma.

there is a huge amount of Buddhist that say the Buddha was speaking metaphorically about the six realms of transmigration and there is some validity to that. But even if they are real realms of existence they really do nothing at all because you never maintain any knowledge of experiencing them. If you could remember then perhaps you would have an opportunity to do something about it.

But to the Hindus, Buddha hasnt destroyed hell ...how do they migrate into and out of hell and heaven ?

well its relative. According to most Buddhists, they would say that Hindus practice a lesser vehicle. The Buddha isn't concerned about what religion you are or adopt or what you believe. He was only concerned about showing you the way out of Samsara.

There's a lot about that doctrine that I have never tried to rationalise or really understand. It is from a very different time and place to this one. That sketch I gave is what I learned about it in Comparative Religion. Basically my personal interest is in the practice of Zen and Vipassana meditation. I have a fairly secular orientation to it.

Although that said, I don't believe that all of the traditional imagery can be, or has been, simply superseded. It is psychologically meaningful, at the very least, and for all we know, might still be literally true, too!

Hell is simply a state of mind. I know this because I've experienced it personally in my life. For those of you who take the Bible literally or semi-literally about its descriptions and teachings of Hell, all I have to say is that I understand exactly what Hell is like. It's a subjective experience but with a common theme running through it. I've experienced everything the Bible described (NOT in a literal fire and brimstone place deep in the bowels of the Earth!), and more. I had a lot of negativity in me and surrounding me which led me to this state of mind and now I'm lifting myself out of it through improving myself inside, and improving my life.

Be very careful about what you choose to believe. The afterlife is said to be very fluid and it always reflects your expectations/beliefs. Luckily for me, I have not been sucked into the traditional beliefs about Hell and Heaven. I choose to believe I will be with my loved ones after I die. As my life is getting better, and I am improving my inner self I have no reason to expect that I will end up in some grim place.

hell is considered a bad place to be, and a good place to avoid.