That’s damned close to what I meant to say – pun intended! 
Let me explain it a little better. I had a friend once, in my college days, who was really something intellectually – the sort of guy who absolutely loved to explore all the implications of an idea. Bull sessions with him were like sitting in on one of Socrates’s dialogues. I enjoyed them so immensely it’s hard to explain – they were exhilirating; I felt like being possessed by Einstein’s ghost.
But he got into psychoactive drugs very heavily, exploring new avenues of experience. And more and more, the person whom he was, and whose mental agility was so precious to me, was replaced by a person who apparently needed the escape from reality that the drugs gave him. And inevitably he burned out. All the things that had meant so much to me about him were no longer there – he was a husk, an ash, of whom he had been, craving his drugs and without the ability to make the awesome mental leaps he had had.
I lost track of him after that, but I heard some years later that he was in a mental institution.
His choice, his life, to live as he chose. Had I been more mature, I would have known what to do, how to help him deal with the reality that he couldn’t face. But what he did foreclosed possibilities for him. He was no longer able to deal with the world on its terms, much less to enter into those exhilirating bull sessions.
His life is my metaphor for Hell as I understand it. What I see God offering is the chance to be yourself more fully and more joyfully – not an arbitrary rulemaker, but a Father guiding choices freely made by his sons (and daughters), to steer them away from destructive choices and into ones that will be more fulfilling in the long run.
Hell is there because He’s not prepared to compel us into living out the choices He would prefer for us to make. What we choose in life has consequences, and those consequences are necessary for choices to be meaningful. If, for example, drinking alcoholic beverages had no more effect than drinking equal amounts of water, then the choices of using alcohol for relaxation and stress relief, and of getting drunk, would no longer exist. That most of us would see the first as a positive and the second as a long-term negative, and might see a moral code as allowing the first and prohibiting the second, has virtually nothing to do with it. We are talking physiological effects and their psychological and social consequences here, not moral theology.
God wants us to turn and love Him, to choose Him and the relationship He wants to have with us. But it has to be a free choice – and that means that the alternative choice, with its consequences, must exist. So Hell is there – as the choice for a lifestyle that rejects Him – not because He is an ogre out to punish us, but because the natural consequence of the life chosen by a sapient mortal creature without His grace results in physical death, sooner or later, with any surviving consciousness caught in a sort of hysteresis of torment and regret. Physical consequence, not moral punishment – just as you are not punished for drinking a twelve-pack of Michelob with a hangover, but you get one as the physical consequence of doing so.
