Chapter 34: Heaven: It’s Not What You Think It Is

Heaven is believed to be the most wonderful place imaginable where images of pearly gates, streets paved with gold, and little chubby angels playing harps fill our heads. Heaven is a place where good people go along with bad people who just happen to hold the right beliefs. It is a place where all of your dead relatives are waiting for you with open arms. Heaven is a place of perfection. Or is it?

It will come as a shock to many, that the popular image of Heaven today has virtually no Biblical basis. Thanks to early Christian writings and art, such as Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, western civilization has adopted some imaginative views about Heaven which continue to been portrayed in books and movies to this day. In the days of the Old Testament, people believed in the three-story universe. We had the (flat) earth with its four corners where all of God’s creatures dwelled, the “heavens” above, where God and the angels lived, then “Sheol” (mistranslated as “Hell” in the King James Version Bible) below where the dead “went” — in the Old Testament, this was not a place of punishment or torment. In the New Testament, Paul is quite clear that Jesus is raised from the dead, but nobody else is . Heaven is not a place where our “souls” are all reunited, but to the writers of the New Testament, Heaven will be here on earth and we will all be given new bodies while living here with God. So this means that currently Grandma and Grandpa are not watching you from anywhere — they’re just plain dead (for now at least).

That’s right. All this nonsense about spirits of ancestors floating in Heaven with God is either science fiction or comes from another religion (which is still science fiction). According to the Bible, Jesus’ resurrection was the start of God’s kingdom on earth. Early Christians, including Paul, were waiting “any day now” for Christ to return again and finish the job. 2,000 years later, 2 billion Christians are still waiting. Once Jesus and some “angels” exterminate 80% of all the people you know in the bloodiest, goriest, most violent, genocide ever imagined, this new “Heaven on Earth” will be all yours, according to the Book of Revelation . This is, of course, assuming you are among God’s chosen ones. Here are some other questions to consider about Heaven:

• Do you see your dead loved ones in heaven? What if your great aunt Edna loved you dearly but you really didn’t like her at all. Are you stuck spending eternity with her?

• Perfection is relative, is it not? What if little fat naked angels creep you out? What if you prefer the angels like the ones in Victoria’s Secret commercials?

• What bodies are you given? Are you given a new version of your old body before the maggots devoured it? Or your body as is? In the Bible, after Jesus was raised from the dead, he appeared to Thomas with his wounds and all. Sucks for all those people who died in tragic steamroller accidents. What about people born with birth defects? Or do all males look like Brad Pitt and all women like Angelina Jolie? Or do we even have a gender?

• Do you retain your memories from your earthly life? Without a brain, how do you keep those memories? We know that memory is stored in our physical brains and brain damage and age cause us to lose memory.

• Do animals go to Heaven? How about mentally challenged people who are unable to make moral choices? Or people with brain defects that cause them to act or think in a certain way. Where do they go?

• If Heaven will actually be on earth, won’t we run out of space? Some estimates say that over 100 billion people have lived and died so far. Even if 10 percent of those are saved, we will have some major overpopulation issues.

• Where do all the people go who were alive before Jesus? Do they get a free pass or are they out of luck? In either case, is that justice?

• How about those who never heard of Jesus? Is there some kind of “get to know Jesus” course before Heaven?

• How about those who spend their life worshiping the wrong God? There are billions of well-intentioned, spiritual, and deeply religious people breaking the first four commandments.

• How about the lifetime murderers and rapists who accept Jesus on the electric chair? What will it be, perfect forgiveness or perfect justice?

• Do babies and children age in Heaven? Or are they transformed into adults? Isn’t our mental development dependent upon our experiences?

• What if you have multiple spouses that have died? Do you become a heavenly swinger? How will your spouses feel about that? What if your spouse had multiple spouses they lost to death? How would you feel about that?

Now let’s imagine this wonderful time has arrived. You are nothing like you are now. In fact, nobody you ever knew on earth is. You have a new body without the ability to feel sadness, sorrow, pain, remorse, frustration, anger and any other feeling or emotion seen as “bad.” You no longer can make free choices since you cannot choose to do evil, wrong, or even make (and learn from) a mistake. God allows for evil and suffering here on earth so we can have the opportunity to help others, show forgiveness, compassion, kindness, and love. In Heaven, we no longer have that opportunity. Everything that makes us human will be stripped away from us when we are forced into a robotic-like existence worshiping God in a slave-like manner for all of eternity with no end in sight. You know, Hell might not be that bad after all.