Maybe the same place would be hell for them. For instance, an unrepentant homophobe walks through the Pearly Gates and sees Jesus himself welcoming an AIDS victim. Not that I believe in this kind of an afterlife, but I can see people who were full of hate when they walked the earth not happy seeing the people they hated incorporated into the Devine Universal or whatever lies beyond.
As I am presently constituted, I can’t conceive of a heaven that deserves enjoyment unless every single person who ever lived is patched up and reconciled to God and everyone else.
If God is omnibenevolent and omnipotent, anything less would be an inexplicable failure.
The presence of the actual evils that do exist is already pretty inexplicable, but if it were all leading to a state like the one I described, it’d be at least a little more explicable.
Bingo.
I’m not WordMan, but if I had come up with that line (and I wish I had!), I would have meant: can I be in Heaven and still feel like I’m better than some of the other riff-raff cluttering up the place - feeling, say, that I clearly belong, but that some of the others there…well, maybe God let them in, but he was being a lot more forgiving than he needed to be in my case. 
If they let me in, I sure can’t complain about who else is there.
I’m with you on all this.
That’s the sort of heaven I believe in anyway. The Great Divorce (thanks, Koxinga, for bringing that quote in!) got me started along that path, but even there, C.S. Lewis concludes that there are those whom God won’t be able to reach. Madeleine L’Engle had a simple argument that, IMHO, refutes that. It boils down to: however evil, full of hatred and violence, hard of heart, etc. someone can be, God is more loving than they are evil - and has an infinitude of time at his disposal to be perpetually available and persistent in his love, while the persistence and stubbornness of even the most confirmed sinner has to have a limit.
If the Christian God exists (as I believe), and desires that all should be saved, God can make it happen - and not by simply ushering the bad into heaven along with the good, but by bringing even the worst of the worst to a willingness to abandon the evil in themselves so they can embrace the love of God.
I think the question comes down to whether every single person would want to accept God and thereby enter Heaven. What if there are people who reject God and can’t stand to be in his overwhelming presence? If Heaven is defined as being in the presence of God, forcing such people inside the pearly gates might be condemning them to eternal torment, unless you think God should violate their free will and make them into puppets.
The situation you’ve described is, in fact, how it actually works. Either everyone goes to heaven or none of us do. The advice to forgive those who do ill, share what you’ve got, love your neighbor as yourself, etc, should not be interpreted strictly as individual recommendations (i.e., that you as an individual should behave that way) but also as aggregate recommendations (i.e., that society should not punish people for doing wrong, that society should distribute resources to everyone, that no one should be treated as a foreigner or enemy or other than a neighbor, that all policies towards all people should be the embodiment of love). And it can’t happen except insofar as it happens in a way that embraces everyone as participants. And, oh yeah, it happens here, not somewhere else after you die. (You do, however, keep on getting reincarnated right back here so whatever future you help create is the one that is your next life, etc).
Or close enough for comprehension purposes.
How free would you say a person is who willfully sticks their hand in a fire whenever given the chance, insisting that though it causes them considerable agony, it’s nevertheless for the best? Assume they can’t give any coherent explanation as to why it’s for the best.
In my view the only afterlife teaching that makes sense is one that acknowledges that knowingly rejecting joy and perfection is a sign that the will in question isn’t free. A will that is either deceived or unable to act on the truths that it knows (or both) is bound, not free.
Cite? 
That’s a beautiful thought, but I don’t think there is much support for that in Christian scripture. Although there are some Christian and Islamic theologians that would agree with the essence of what you are saying, I’ve never seen much from the Bible, Koran, or even the Hadith that supports the idea of everyone ultimately getting into heaven.
Questions raised in OP and subsequent posts are largely what lead me to atheism. There is too much from the holy books of all three Abrahamic religions that indicate that God is certainly not all-forgiving and merciful.
The nature of God, and the concept of heaven and hell, as depicted in Scripture is much more indicative of the thinking of Bronze Age men, rather than that of a all-loving omnipotent deity.
Too many people are set up for failure, according to Christian scripture, for God to be all-loving and forgiving. Especially, when one considers he is ultimately responsible for setting all this in motion.
Back to the OP. if one goes off what scant information is in the Christian bible about heaven, and the nature of God, the individual’s opinions about who else gets into heaven are irrelevant. By one account, it comes down to an individual’s name being recorded in the “Book of Life.”
Surprised, first of all? 
My theology includes “if you accept the divine mercy you’re in”, so in my case I’d expect to see there a few people of ill and worse-than-ill repute.
Quite a few, on the Christian side. While the idea of “eventually everybody gets in” isn’t usually expressed like that*, the notion of “a waiting period where sinners still have time to repent” is the notion behind Purgatory.
- A phrasing I hear often although it mixes other concepts in is “when St Peter closes the Gates, Mary opens a window”.
I had a perhaps blasphemous mental image of Mary opening a window and beckoning in John Redcorn from King of the Hill.
Exactly, but as I’m sure you know, purgatory isn’t universally accepted in all the sects and denominations of Christianity.
I know people who would brand you a polytheist for saying such a thing.
I had never heard that, but for all its cheesiness I kind of like the sentiment. Back when I was Christian I often toyed with the idea that those Catholics and Orthodox who think a lot about Mary were onto something.
I know people who would brand her a polytheist simply for being Catholic.
I’m an atheist as well, but I think there’s more support for this in the Bible than most people realize. (I was a Christian Universalist before my deconversion…)
The recipe is to emphasize the places in the Bible where it’s said God wants everyone to be saved, that “every knee will bow,” that Jesus came to save “the entire world,” etc, and then to EITHER emphasize the symbolic or allegorical nature of various hell passages OR make an argument (surprisingly viable AFAICT) that “forever and ever” in the NT actually, in the greek, just means “until the final age” or something to that effect.
That plus logic (a God who commands us to love everyone surely would love no fewer people, and a God who loves everyone would want them all saved and would have the power to do so so…, plus and, it only makes sense to punish someone for something they do freely, but doing thing knowingly that send you to hell is a sign you’re not acting freely so…)
I did have someone tell me once that they would miss me in heaven. That stuck me as odd, having less than blissful moments in heaven. For heaven to be true perfect bliss, wouldn’t you have to have no knowledge of your life on earth? That conflicts with the images of a reunion with dead relatives. I don’t know what to think.
I am far more puzzled by people thinking heaven is like an eternal cocktail party where you can mingle and talk to your favorite movie stars and historic figures.
I have heard people in the church I used to go to, talking about how much they look forward to meeting famous people. One of them was talking about collecting autographs!
I know people who think they will have some sort of golden condo and wander around chatting and playing shuffleboard like it is a retirement community.
My brother-in-law died last year, and I went to church with my sister the following Sunday, and a lady came up to my sister and said, “This is Chad’s first Sunday in Heaven! I bet he has his room all straightened out by now and is meeting some very nice people…” My sister elbowed me in the ribs for laughing, she laughed too, but later.
I can’t fathom that at all, even when I believed in God, I never imagined it being like that.
Where do people get the idea that Heaven is like Boca Raton?
If it is, you will most certainly have issues of spirits getting pissed at each other, gossiping, being jealous of each other’s Mansions of gold, and other petty crap.
I don’t know what to think either, except that it isn’t real.
There are endless ways to rationalize a particular sect’s beliefs, but I get were you are coming from. You sound like you were lucky enough to be exposed to a far more progressive religion than I was.
I was raised as a Southern Baptist, but I did try out a couple of other Protestant denominations before I turned to atheism.