Hell

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."
This is what Dante reads as he enters hell.  Hell is eternal- the last stop.Regardless of what mistake got you there, whether you killed your sister or you just lied a lot...get comfortable because this is it.
It's a scary concept, really.  Something I've been thinking about a lot since this topic came to the surface in class is if you really truly believed in Hell with every fiber of your being...like, believed it as surely as you believed you had 10 fingers...a hell like Dante described...would anyone ever sin?  If you actually BELIEVED a place such as this existed and that sinning would send you there?  I find that extremely hard to believe.  Even if you for the most part believe in hell, I don't think you completely do. This is because, to me, if eternal punishment is real, that's one of the (if not the most) scary things I could imagine.  No hope. Just suffering. Forever.  Believing in something like that is completely unimaginable to me, but in my mind, it would lead to a much different life than the one I lead today.
Another thing I found interesting is that people could end up in hell just for being "uncommited"- being neither good or evil..just doing nothing of value.  Tying back to the first point I made in this post...it's crazy to imagine the initiative more people would take and amazing things that could have been accomplished in the world today and how much further we would be as a society if people feared eternal suffering just for being "uncommited!"  I feel like the world would just be DRASTICALLY different.
A lot of this for me is just very hypothetical- as I said, I find believing in such an unforgiving, cruel world extremely hard to imagine.