In reality, the damned are in the same place as the saved–in reality! But they hate it; it is their Hell. The saved love it, and it is their Heaven. It is like two people sitting side by side at an opera or a rock concert: the very thing that is Heaven to one is Hell to the other. Dostoyevski says, 'We are all in paradise, but we won’t see it'… Hell is not literally the 'wrath of God.' The love of God is an objective fact; the 'wrath of God' is a human projection of our own wrath upon God, as the Lady Julian saw–a disastrous misinterpretation of God’s love as wrath. God really says to all His creatures, 'I know you and I love you' but they hear Him saying, 'I never knew you; depart from me.' It is like angry children misinterpreting their loving parents’ affectionate advances as threats. They project their own hate onto their parents’ love and experience love as an enemy–which it is: an enemy to their egotistic defenses against joy… Since God is love, since love is the essence of the divine life, the consequence of loss of this life is loss of love.. Though the damned do not love God, God loves them, and this is their torture. The very fires of Hell are made of the love of God! Love received by one who only wants to hate and fight thwarts his deepest want and is therefore torture. If God could stop loving the damned, Hell would cease to be pure torture. If the sun could stop shining, lovers of the dark would no longer be tortured by it. But the sun could sooner cease to shine than God cease to be God..The lovelessness of the damned blinds them to the light of glory in which they stand, the glory of God’s fire. God is in the fire that to them is Hell. God is in Hell ('If I make my bed in Hell, Thou art there' [Ps 139:8]) but the damned do not know Him. . Peter Kreeft
About This Quote

The fact that people don't always know what is good for them, doesn't mean that there isn't an ultimate reality. The fact that people are not always making the right decisions, doesn't mean that there aren't certain guiding principles which are the ultimate reality. For example, it is true that if you are not making the right decisions today, then there is no guarantee that you will make the right decisions tomorrow. But this does not mean that there is no ultimate reality which would guide your life even if you were to make all of the wrong decisions.

Source: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Heaven But Never Dreamed Of Asking

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  3. I think Heaven will be like a first kiss. - Sarah Addison Allen
  4. Earth's crammed with heaven... But only he who sees, takes off his shoes. - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  5. Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish–a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow–to sleep late, have fun,... - Hunter S. Thompson
More Quotes By Peter Kreeft
  1. We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.
  2. This is the secret of life: the self lives only by dying, finds its identity (and its happiness) only by self-forgetfulness, self-giving, self-sacrifice, and agape love.
  3. If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction.
  4. The heart is like a woman, and the head is like a man, and although man is the head of woman, woman is the heart of man, and she turns man's head because she turns his heart.
  5. Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes.
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