(Via Atheist Media Blog)

I’ve joked before about hell sounding like a nice place to go, but in all seriousness it’s designed to sound a horrifying as the human imagination can permit. The Adventist threat of instantaneous annihilation isn’t all that powerful, but a place with constant torment and torture for all eternity…now that’s frightening and something the imagination can have some terrifying fun with.

But of course it’s ridiculous. That’s all it is. It’s not that atheists reject or hate God and it’s not that we don’t want to go to heaven (although I didn’t even when I was a believer), its that we are unable to believe. There’s no choice involved, we just can’t buy into the absurdity.

If the only crime is being unable to believe then the punishment (the worst suffering you can imagine and then some) doesn’t fit the crime.

Of course if Hitchens did happen to find himself in Heaven I’d imagine the response would be kind of like this: