The answer lies in the origin of hell.You see, God is a creator. He loves to make things. God created angels out of nothing! Angels have an intellect and a free will. A hierarchy and there are countless numbers. They are pure spirit. Not bound to material limits. We have to be in one place at a time. We age. Pure spirits do not age . They can be anywhere just by thinking it. They are immortal. Their intellect works differently to us. They just see and know intuitively. They are much more powerful than us and can affect the material world.
So what happened after 'creation' was that one angel used its free will to NOT thank God or worship God. This angel REJECTED God! Sound familiar? Lucifer, Satan, devil were its names. He seems to have had a very high rank and be very powerful. Even possibly being the brightest and most brilliant of all angels. Underlying his rebellion seems to be the desire to be godlike....to be as if he were God...sound familiar again, who else can I think of who would like to be top dog. Anyway.....he had a huge amount of self love. Think narcissism on steroids. No time or consideration for others, me, me,me.
Angels talk through mind to mind contact. Thus any battle they have would involve arguments, not swords or spears. When Satan communicated telepathically to all the other angels why he was rebelling he gave his reasons too. A good proportion of the Angels made the same choice as satan. Of course Michael didn't. The others were blinded by their own greatness. They didn't fully consider the entire plan God had in mind. Remember, though angels are marvellous, they are no where near God himself in intellect. They jumped the gun. My dad might have told them to 'hang on a minute and think it through'. Like us when we see something attractive and pleasing, we tend to jump in without thinking five years down the line. This can be a good thing, otherwise no one might get married. The whole thing can be summed up in the Latin phrase 'non servium' or 'I will not serve'. Which relates back to marriage as a covenant and not a contract. A marriage based on 'my rights' will not work. Only a covenant in which both parties give themselves to the other will last the storm (and of course heaps of grace by doing it in the Catholic church helps).
The devil and the other angels knew nevertheless, what they were doing. They made a conscious decision to reject God. It was pure spiritual pride on their part. Now we get to the main point. Because they are spirit their decision was irrivocable and permanent. We have to filter everything through our brains. This takes time for us. Our brains go through many unseen steps in making a decision or performing an action. Then there is a chance that we could be wrong. Actually more than a chance. We muse things over, frequently changing our minds, seeking advice. Angels however see immediately what they are looking at from every angle! Pun intended. They do not conduct research. There is no anxiety with angels about missing something. They have all the facts and grasp everything instantaneously. Angels do not have to think because they have all the data. They see and make a choice. This choice is forever because they have made that choice with complete conviction and full possession of all possible data. We do this when, for instance, we recognize a face. If I see RBB in the street and we nod as we pass, he wouldn't comment to me as he's not doing that at the moment, nothing would persuade me that it was not him but rather say, TC. I've made that decision for all time. I have all the data available and made my choice that it was RBB.
Likewise the angels knew all the consequences if rejecting God. They just didn't care. This is why their fall was so terrible. They also rejected all those attributes we associate with God. Truth. Satin is therefore a liar. Goodness. They embraced evil. Light and life also they rejected.Hence they sank into the abyss of darkness.
They would hence rather be in hell than heaven. People reject good too, all the time. With free will it is possible to prefer sadness to joy. Our redeeming grace us that we can admit that we were wrong and ask forgiveness. The demons can't do that because they did know what they were doing and were sure of their actions. Actually the devil would say he was mistreated, he would claim God had no right to include him in his sham kingdom, a kingdom where pathetic little human beings would get to reign with God. He would say that God was being so blatently unfair. This is how Satan felt when he fell from grace and how he feels now. He can not change his mind (he doesn't have a mind anyway being pure spirit), and that spirit has
already made its once and for all eternal decision having seen all the facts! This is the key to understanding the enigma of hell and it's everlasting nature. Hell isn't a place God made to punish creatures, it's a place creatures go to to get as far away from God as possible. God exists because the rebellious angels wanted it, not god. In a sense the demons invented hell and they have no desire to leave.
But what about us? Why is there the possibility of us going there? To answer this we must look at what happens at the moment of death...
Source: "Hell" by Anthony DeStefano
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