Watch a clip of the Twilight Zone episode, “A Nice Place to Visit”: In 1992, Wayne Barrett. “And the man said, ‘If this is Heaven, let me go to Hell.’ And the person said, ‘You are in Hell.’ (pp. And the first place Rocky goes upon recieving the money is—you guessed it—a casino. Wolfsheim Dec 23, 2003 and god is on your side dividing sparrows from the nightingales: remember that twilight zone episode where the shady gambler dies and thinks he's gone to heaven because he's winning all the time and is flush with cash and such but then he figures out winning all the time can get boring and realizes he's in hell. The Five Best 'Twilight Zone' Episodes Trying to sift through all 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone and pick just the five best episodes is rather daunting. Plus, it opens one up to mass criticism because TZ fans are passionate about their favorite episodes.

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Published in The Catholic Thing on September 2, 2020

I’ve been thinking a lot about Hell lately, not because I want to, but because we’ve become so good at surrounding ourselves with its working replicas in the here and now. Check the news.

As for the Hell of Christian faith: Anyone who doubts Hell’s existence should try this simple test. Turn out the lights some moonless night and listen alone to the late Heathcote Williams’s brilliant reading of Dante’s Inferno.

It’s a little too vivid for comfort. In the sunlight of a warm September morning, leathery demons in a pit of descending torments, no matter how ingeniously described, can seem ludicrous. We live in the Age of Science after all, with its well fed confidence and disdain for the superstitious. The “real,” we’re told, is what we can measure and prove – this, despite the conveniently blind assumption that reality conforms to the limits of our senses and the kind of material data they can collect.

But in the dark, with the eyes turned inward on the landscape of the soul, the terrain of the real reality – the things that actually matter in the course of our days, and the choices and consequences that shape us – can be very clear. As Dante wrote,

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wilderness,
For I had wandered from the straight and true.

Dante follows his guide, the poet Virgil, into a Hell that’s alarmingly persuasive and perversely right, absent the noise of the modern world. In a nation now drunk with hatreds and resentment, it’s useful for a reader to dwell awhile on the Inferno’s Canto Eight, where the River Styx, in an endless flow of excrement and filth, holds the souls of those damned because of their anger. The wrathful thrash the surface, biting and attacking each other; the sullen drown below, swallowing their own muck.

The idea of the afterlife as a “place” is deeply embedded in the human imagination. And understandably so: We live in a physical world with mappable geography. Our bodies teach us pleasure and pain. So we tend to picture Hell as a lake of fire; or an extremely shabby Las Vegas where the drinks are miserly, the dancers ugly, and no one ever wins; or the Inferno’s final and lowest circle – a ferociously cold pit of ice.

The fiction of C.S. Lewis – especially The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters, but also That Hideous Strength – captures something of what Hell might be like. Or instead, it might have a sardonic twist: eternal boredom. In The Twilight Zone episode “A Nice Place to Visit,” a small-time gambler, desperately in debt but addicted to the adrenaline of risk, dies and wakes up in a fabulous casino. It’s loaded with beautiful women, and every comfort and convenience. But he can never leave and worse, he can never lose. In The Night Gallery’s “Hell’s Bells,” a cynical, hard-partying rocker dies and slides down the chute to damnation. Hell’s massive “fire door” opens on a cozy sitting room, a comfortable sofa – and an elderly couple eager to show him their vacation slideshow from Hawaii. Forever.

All of these images can be implausible, frightening, or amusing by turns. All may contain a grain of truth. But they miss the heart of what Hell would finally be, whatever form it takes, and why its suffering would be so fierce.

Hell would be the utter absence of love: a radical severing of the soul from the God who is Love himself, the source of our meaning and identity. Dante drew his inspiration for the structure of the Divine Comedy from Augustine, who described our “weight” as our love. Real love, unselfish love, is a fire: sacrificial, generous, ever-expanding; a blaze that lifts the soul upward toward God. This is why the lowest depth in the Inferno is not a furnace but a lake of ice, kept eternally frozen by the sin of pride – the arctic, willful, unrepentant flapping of Satan’s great wings.

Yet a question poses itself: Why, for us poor humans with lifespans barely a drop in the ocean of eternity, would Hell’s separation be permanent? For finite beings, the prospect of eternal punishment, whatever that might mean, seems hideously unfair. But it’s entirely fair. God doesn’t inflict Hell. The damned freely prefer it.

The damned, by their actions and choices, become creatures unable to have it otherwise; creatures who cannot bear Heaven, cannot want Heaven, and could never fit there. If we are free – and our freedom is central to our special dignity; it sets us apart from all other creatures – God cannot force us to be what we’ve freely chosen not to be. God’s mercy is infinite. But it requires the sinner’s honesty, humility, and repentance. These the obstinate sinner will not give. Thus “mercy” would simply be an alibi for injustice.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that while Heaven is “an acquired taste,” a taste acquired over time through a certain course of life, it was nonetheless made for men and women. Hell was never intended for the human soul. And what enters Hell is no longer fully human. It’s a cinder of human remains burned out by rage, frustration, loneliness and devouring self-love; just as a white dwarf star is no longer the fullness of a star, but its collapsed, self-consuming shell – the shriveled memory of a star, but with a crushing mass and a ferocious gravity that allow nothing to escape its appetite but the faintest light.

Dante ended his Divine Comedy with one of the most powerful and beautiful lines in Western literature, describing God as “the Love that moves the sun and other stars.” I suppose the lesson here is simply this. Whatever the fury and turmoil of our times might be, it’s who we love, what we love, and how well we love that determines our destination. So we need to choose. And the wise choose well.

© 2020 The Catholic Thing.

Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and senior research associate at the University of Notre Dame.

It’s high time to rethink Heaven and Hell. A lot of people believe everyone will go to Heaven. But maybe that’s because they underestimate the appeal of Hell. There seem to be too many angels with harps floating around on clouds in our view of Heaven. And too much fire and brimstone in our view of Hell. God is “pro-choice.” He allows us to freely choose Heaven or Hell. Why not think of Heaven and Hell as places we choose according to the respective merits of each?

Let’s give Hell a chance.

Think of all the choices we have in this life, then think of living with those choices for eternity. We have only a hint of what Heaven is like. Saint Paul teaches, “What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him.” (1 Cor. 2:9). And how do we love God? “If you love me, keep my commandments,” says the Lord. (John 14:15) Is Heaven worth the effort of following the difficult teachings of Christ when we have so many dreams and plans and ambitions of our own?

The Twilight Zone Episodes

We’re accustomed to thinking of Hell in negative terms, as the fiery furnace Jesus describes as the “fires of Gehenna.” Gehenna was initially where some of the kings of Judah sacrificed their children by fire to appease the demon Moloch. What goes around comes around. Could it be that the unrepentant kings of Judah would spend an eternity suffering in the manner they chose for their children?

Twilight Zone Casino Episode Heaven Or Hell Freezes

So we tell ourselves: Relax. For us, Hell may not be that fiery furnace, unless we sacrificed our children to demons. This is the 21^st Century. For those who choose Hell today, maybe “the fires of Gehenna” is just metaphor, like the teaching, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out.” Is Hell really as bad as we think?

We say: Think positive. Hell is more than a place; Hell is what we choose! Think of all the pleasures of the world and then think of possessing them for eternity. Like chocolate. Maybe Hell is made up of the worldly pleasures we freely choose, our personal “absolutes,” what we want, and when we want it. Is that so wrong? Come to think about it, Satan is good at customer relations. He’s there to please.

Of course, there’s no going back. Repentance spoils everything because it would reveal we doubt the value of our attachments to things and pleasures. So there can be no recalibrating of our lives to coincide with the difficult law of God. His ways, after all, do not quite square with modern sensibilities (or ancient Roman and Greek sensibilities for that matter). Follow your dreams. Keep God out of them and be assured, you will live your dreams – for eternity.

In an episode of The Twilight Zone, “A Nice Place to Visit,” Rod Serling and author Charles Beaumont had a similar idea. After robbing a pawnshop, Henry “Rocky” Valentine is shot by a police officer as he flees. He wakes up to find himself seemingly unharmed. A genial old man greets him. He explains that he has been instructed to guide Rocky and give him whatever he desires. The two travel to a luxurious apartment. Everything is free. Rocky concludes that he’s dead, and believes he’s in Heaven (and the gentlemen is his guardian angel).

Rocky visits a casino, winning every bet he makes as beautiful girls gather around him. But no one except Rocky and his “angel” is real. By and by, Rocky becomes thoroughly bored with having his every earthly desire instantly satisfied. No friends, no generosity, no love. Just absolute instant gratification. He calls the gentleman and tells him he is tired of Heaven and wants to go to “the other place” to join his friends. The gentleman’s response is the grand finale: “Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea you were in Heaven, Mr. Valentine? This is the other place!”

But – you say – we’re nice people. Tolerant. Accepting of others. Never judgmental. So much so that we’re indifferent to the plight of unborn babies, pro-choice Catholic politicians, the poor. And much else. Why get involved?

Be advised. The road to Heaven may not be pleasant in this life. By God’s design, after the Fall, the path has become the way of the Cross of Jesus. It’s sometimes difficult to keep His commandments. It’s difficult to be kind, faithful, pure, honest, courageous, humble, generous and mutually forgiving. It’s difficult to “love until it hurts” (as Mother Teresa advises). We must agree to be in God’s hands, not our own; and we must be willing to risk losing the things of the world and ourselves in the service of others for the love of God. These are the choices that form us in the law of Christ’s love.

Heaven is not an eternity of earthly pleasures, but an eternity of glorious joy and spiritual pleasure, spiritual ecstasy of the Beatific Vision, overflowing into the flesh of our glorified bodies. An intriguing option.

Certainties are elusive this side of eternity. But we can count on this: “Before man are life and death, good and evil, whichever he chooses shall be given him” (Sirach 15:16). We become what we choose, and we will be what we choose. For eternity.

The Twilight Zone All Episodes