If for some reason you are inclined to believe in Hell, the natural reaction (after a while of having accepted that God can send anyone there for any reason) is to ask oneself: can I escape Hell and if so how?
And the answer is “no”. You can try the various routes. The path of moral goodness. The path of penance. The path of self realization. The path of grace. The path of merger.
The problem with the path of moral goodness, penance and grace is the lack of reassurance. At no point will you have achieved any level of goodness or absolution to give you any level of certainty that you’ve avoided Hell.
“I’m too good of a person to go to Hell!”
Yeah, well … humility obviously isn’t your strong suit.
“I’ve atoned for all of my sins!”
Yeah well … that doesn’t erase the pain you’ve inflicted on others, so …”
These are just the interesting parts about Hell that call for a spiritual system to avoid it. The existence and belief in God may in fact be a reaction to an innate fear of punishment.
The Self realization path depends on what system of philosophy you’re following. The Buddhist path preaches salvation by letting go of craving. To my knowledge, following the Buddhist path to its end does not result in knowledge and vision that Hell has been utterly avoided. Maybe I haven’t taken it to the end, however … idk
Grace is also difficult because Jesus (the redeemer) doesn’t exactly give you any assurances that you’re “saved” outside of the dogma that believing in him guarantees just that.
As far as I can tell, for the believer in Hell, the best way to avoid it is to cling to the hypothetical God who sends you there in the first place. Ie. He cannot send you there if you’ve merged your being with His.
Ultimately, if you’re a sober, seasoned believer in Hell, the outcome of your eternal soul living or perishing is up to God. There is some reassurance in the idea that a loving Gid would not send a basically moral person to Hell, but it may be the case that all humans are simply destined for the furnace by design (and there’s no avoiding it).
At this point it becomes helpful to just not think about it. What’s the point? Live a good life for the sake of it. Don’t penance too much, cause it won’t do you any damn good outside of some psychological unresolved parent-child reward dynamics.
Realize the “ultimate” as much as you like and if it makes you happy then go as far as you can with it.
Grace? How do you know you’ve received grace? Can any Christian explain grace outside of dogma? What does it feel like to be given the kind of grace that saves one’s soul from Hell? I don’t know. I’d be interested in the answer.
Outside of just discarding the notion of Hell as pure rubbish, the task of avoiding it (for believers) is a multifaceted array of possibilities and tactics. These things in and of themselves have some appeal from an outsiders point of view - merely in terms of what the tactics are, how the premise of the theory supports the conclusion of the escape, and why diffferent people adopt one or the other, etcetera.