Now that we are talking about Hell, I think poor old Hell has been sorely misrepresented by thoughtless theists!
Hell is almost always portrayed as subterranean and basically volcanic. It's easy to see why the ancients might look down a caldera and (before the damn thing blew their heads off) they probably figured that there must be some really bad stuff down there. It would have smelled evil too, of sulphurous rotten egg gas, nauseating, drying and acidic.
The Badlands. The Place of No Return. Mordor.
It's not quite fair, though, given that almost everything in nature will kill you. Hell, people have died from having a coconut fall on their head. One time the roof of a building in the Vatican complex fell in, killing four tourists, whose deaths were obviously more mythic and dramatic than most.
Storms, floods, cold, heat, sunstroke, earthquakes, droughts. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. So why the bad rap for our beautiful hot subterranean minerals?
Geological life is necessary for biological life to emerge. Perhaps that's why? Embarrassment at the primitive relatives?
Children get insecure if you call them a baby, just as teenagers will reject being called children, and young adults baulk at being treated like teens.
There is an inherent embarrassment at what we used to be. So humans have often been insecure about our obvious similarities with other apes, and thus "gorilla" and "ape" became terms of abuse, along with denial of evolution.
By the same token, maybe we life forms are even more embarrassed by our geological origins? Banishment to the hot realms of the geological is (aside from its lethality) the ultimate regression - mere rocks - not even bugs or worms!
This bad press is simply unfair. Rocks are beautiful things and they are much more rare and special in the universe than dark energy, dark matter, plasma and molecular clouds. Sure, they are not warm, friendly, willingly helpful or much entertaining, and sometimes they are lethal - and this does not endear them to many - but when you look past all that you realise that rocks and us are the same.
We life forms are basically animated hydrated rocks. So remember to show your great, great etc etc grandparents a little respect. Yes, it certainly could feel like Hell as a child to be stuck at my grandparents' place on a nice day, but the torture was never intentional
Hell is just the bad stuff in life plus accidental self inflicted mental wounds. The subterranean will soon kill you but it is not Hell, rather the engines of life. Engine rooms are famously not suitable for habitation but that does not make them a repository of evil.
// Mineral Rights Advocacy Statement