I sometimes joke that I hope my late best friend has gone to evangelical Christian hell, because he was a bisexual punk who loved tabletop roleplaying games (like Dungeons & Dragons).

I was raised vaguely Christian, and when I was realising I didn’t believe in God, I felt a lot of conflict, because I was still scared of going to hell. I was getting stuck on the idea that if all good morality came from God, does that mean that I would be evil as an atheist?

In the end, I concluded that if all morality came from God, that the many atheists who lead good and virtuous lives must still have the favour of God. On the other hand, morality existed independently of God, but that unbelievers would go to hell no matter how good they were in life, then I’d rather be defiantly good and go to hell than be coerced into belief.

This was before I understood that hell has historically often been understood as just a place without God (which, to a Christian view, is a hellish existence).