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Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living good life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

You've chosen your own hell. In Marcus Aurelius' time, Roman religion was a hodgepodge of different rituals and ideas, which were evident in Marcus's own behavior.

For instance, he deified his wife and his stepfather Antoninus, but at the same time he spoke repeatedly about how this life we are living is all there is.

It goes without saying that he also rejected the teachings of the Christians who he thought of as a product of his time as threats to the authority of the Empire.

But it also turns out that the Stokes and the Christians held beliefs that were much closer than Marcus understood, particularly as it related to hell.

As far as we know, the Stokes didn't believe in hell. Their writings make only a few vague illusions to the idea of an afterlife.

But similarly, the idea of hell is not as clear and Christianity as conventional wisdom might dictate either.

Nowhere in the Bible is there anything close to the hell that believers talk about today, a place where bad people and non-believers go after they die to be tortured and punished for their sins for all of eternity.

Even the word hell, which varies from translation to translation, appears only a few times with different contextual meanings in each case.

One of the most frequent occurrences is the word Gehenna, which was an actual literal place, though admittedly not a good one, though there is some thought that it was Jerusalem's trash dump.

What might Jesus and the Christians have been speaking about when they spoke about hell then? Perhaps it was the same thing that the Stokes spoke of.

Not a place we go after we die, but a place far too many people are in right now, based on how they've chosen to live.

Marcus Aurelius didn't warn against indulging and cheating and lying and stealing because he thought you'd be punished for it later.

He knew these pleasures would produce tortures in the here and now.

As Rob Bell, the pastor and author writes in his beautiful book Love Winds,

People choose to live in their own hills all the time. We do it every time we isolate ourselves, give the cold shoulder to someone who has slited us.

Every time we hide knives in our words, every time we harden our hearts and defiance of what we know to be the good, loving and right thing to do.

Whatever you believe, whether you're closer to Marcus Aurelius or a follower of Jesus, there is something to learn from where these two schools converge.

It's a matter of faith whether hell exists after death. It is a fact that it exists here on earth in our souls.

If there is hell in the afterlife, whether or not you go there will be God's decision.

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