Question for atheists, out of curiosity?

I can't remember what I thought as a kid, but I know that in my early teens I thought of it in terms of emotions. Kind of like one of those dreams where you can't remember seeing or hearing anything, but you remember how you felt.

I imagined heaven as a peaceful, loved feeling. Hell was terror, loneliness and regret.

Heaven is a rainbow snow cone on a hot summer day.

I don't think about hell, but maybe it's being locked in a room with someone who wants cure gays.

It depends on what religion, section of a religious text, or subgroup of a religion 's heaven and hell I'm trying to image. Since all of them aren't true anyways, there's no reason to favor one over the other.

The first images I came up with in my mind were the hell from South Park (specifically, the "It's Christmas time in hell" song) and the heaven from a local commercial for a brand of butter (fluffy clouds to sit on, fluffy cloud floor).

The images that pop into my head are those implanted there by the media. I imagine white clouds and people with wings playing harps when I think of Heaven, and I imagine a lava filled cave full of torture devices when I think of Hell.

I've read too many stories and seen too many cartoons. Larry Niven's reboot of Dante's Inferno, for instance. Or the cartoons with St Peter's desk stuck on a fluffy cloud, Satan with a pitchfork etc.

I picture them just like I picture any other mystical place written about in countless other fairy tale books. Like Alice in Wonderland. The story clearly describes what this place was like so thats how I picture it in my mind. The bible also describes heaven and hell and thats how I picture these imaginary places to be like.

The Judea-Christian/Islamic "Heaven" requires being stripped of your ability to think...

If you come across a mass murderer that killed in the name of god and therefore was granted access in to heaven, how can you not have bad thoughts of that horrible person?

The ONLY way for someone to have "Eternal Peace and Happiness" is a removal of free will, a removal of the ability to think, the ability to make moral judgements... You would be stripped to nothing.

I picture heaven as clouds and hell as a fiery underground pit. Both pretty standard ideas.

Hell would be an eternity surrounded by pompous, boring, moralising prats.

Heaven would be total and complete oblivion; the cessation of all thoughts and feelings, Nothingness.

Hell: No fried chicken, No MSG's in my food

Heaven: Jennifer Lopez.