One of the "versions" of Hell that was explained to me at some point was the idea that Hell isn't a flamey pit of intolerable heat for eternity but an absence of God. On the other hand, Heaven would be where we get to see the big picture. We get to stand with God and learn what all this was for.
If that is the case, then atheists would have their way. Upon dying, they would simply die, as they tend to predict, and that would be it. No afterlife, no judgment, just an eternity dead. That eternity, of course, being spent apart from God without ever knowing what this life was about and without knowing the essence of who God is.
But if that is the case, that would imply then that those who spend their lives believing but come up short of salvation would endure a more painful eternity without God because they would know that God does indeed exist. Not only that, but they would have faced Him for judgment and the Bible tends to say that being in the presence of God is something we just are not equipped to handle because He is simply too great and too Holy.
Also, if that is the case, it would imply that God is not enough. It would imply that even if we'd know God upon our earthly death, the real benefit of Heaven would be to finally have the answers to the questions we'd spent this entire lifetime asking.
So then what is Heaven and what is Hell? Or do we have the right to know as Christians? Because shouldn't God be enough? Shouldn't we be focused on Him anyway, rather than projecting the outcomes of our curiosities onto the future to appease our worries and falsely stifle the unknowns?
What if only God knows what happens after this? Shouldn't that be enough? Shouldn't we trust Him enough?
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Generally the idea of the absence of God isn't the complete absence of God but the absence of what is called "common grace". I actually intend to write a longer piece on this soon but the idea is essentially that some people are so horrible that their lives would be Hell if it weren't for the relief God grants them from their constant hatred of everything. When God removes this grace they are monsters in a pit with other monsters.
These ideas are often linked to a wider concept of who gets into heaven. Quite early in church history a number of authors believed that certain Roman pagans who had demonstrated that they loved the things of God might get in despite the technicality that, through no fault of their own, they had never heard of Jesus.
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