Life is short, and shortly it will end;
Death comes quickly and respects no one,
Death destroys everything and takes pity on no one.
To death we are hastening, let us refrain from sinning.
—Ad mortem festinamus (“We hasten toward death”), medieval memento mori, Libre Vermeil de Montserrat, 1399
Between 50,000 B.C.E. and 2017 C.E. about 108 billion people were born.2 There are alive today around 7.5 billion people. This makes the ratio of the dead to the living 14.4 to 1,3 which means that only 7 percent of everyone who ever lived is alive today.4 Of those 100.5 billion people who have come and gone, not one of them has returned to confirm the existence of an afterlife, at least not to the high evidentiary standards of science.5 This is the reality of the human condition. Memento mori—“Remember that you have to die.”
Life is short. Thanks to public health measures and medical technologies, life expectancy has more than doubled and is now approaching age 80 for Westerners, but no one has exceeded the maximum life-span of approximately 125 years for our species.6 The current record of 122 years, 164 days is held by Jeanne Calment of France (1875–1997), although some poorly documented claims are made for longer-lived people, so I set the upper ceiling at 125. While I was writing this book the world’s oldest person died at the age of 116, replaced by another centenarian, also aged 116.7 This cycling through of the longest-lived person will continue indefinitely, but unless there are major medical and technological breakthroughs in life extension, which we will consider in due course, it is very unlikely to exceed 125. Memento mori.
Life is final. The poet Dylan Thomas urged us “Do not go gentle into that good night,” but instead “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Most people, though, opt for John Donne’s conviction that “One short sleep past, we wake eternally.”8 But to get there you have to die. Memento mori.
The belief that death is not final is overwhelmingly common. Since the late 1990s, the Gallup polling group has consistently found that between 72 and 83 percent of Americans believe in heaven.9 A 1999 study found that Protestants remained steadfast in their heavenly belief at 85 percent over the decades, whereas afterlife belief among Catholics and Jews increased from the 1970s to the 1990s.10 A 2007 Pew Forum survey found that 74 percent of all Americans believe heaven exists, with Mormons topping the chart at 95 percent.11 A 2009 Harris poll found that 75 percent of Americans believe in heaven, ranging from a low of 48 percent for Jews to a high of 97 percent for born-again Christians.12 Tellingly, belief in the devil and the invocation of hell has been in gradual decline in both liberal and conservative churches,13 and in all polls belief in hell trails belief in heaven by 20 to 25 percent, thereby confirming the overoptimism bias.14 Globally, rates of belief in heaven in other countries typically lag behind those in America, but they are nonetheless robust. A 2011 Ipsos/Reuters poll, for example, found that of 18,829 people surveyed across 23 countries, 51 percent said they were convinced that an afterlife exists, ranging from a high of 62 percent of Indonesians and 52 percent of South Africans and Turks down to 28 percent of Brazilians and only 3 percent of the very secular Swedes.15
So powerful and pervasive are such convictions that even a third of agnostics and atheists proclaim belief in an afterlife. Say what? A 2014 survey conducted by the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture on 15,738 Americans between the ages of 18 and 60 found that 13.2 percent identify as atheist or agnostic, and 32 percent of those answered in the affirmative the question “Do you think there is life, or some sort of conscious existence, after death?”16 The percentage is certainly lower than the overall mean of 72 percent for all Americans in this study, but it is surprisingly high given our understanding of the worldview held by most atheists and agnostics, which commonly presumes that if there is no God then there is no afterlife. Perhaps that is presumptuous; who knows what is in the minds of people when they complete such surveys? But given the fact that 6 percent of atheists and agnostics also believe in the bodily resurrection of the dead (compared to 37 percent overall), perhaps belief in God and immortality are orthogonal—independent of each other. One may believe in an afterlife but not God. Or both. Or neither.
DYING TO GO TO HEAVEN
Heavens above may or may not be real, but heavens on earth are, at least in the minds of those who believe in them. In that sense, the empyrean realm of gods and heavens that resides in the brains of believers is as real as anything in the terrestrial kingdom. Given the power of beliefs to drive people to act, we should treat such attitudes as seriously as we would political, economic, or ideological beliefs, which hold the same power over actions. As the Saudi cleric Abdullah Muhaisini shouted to his rebel factions in Syria to exhort them to retake the besieged city of Aleppo in 2016, referring to the paradise filled with beautiful women with lustrous eyes with which they would be rewarded upon death:
Where are those who want 72 gorgeous wives? A wife for you, O martyr in heaven, if she spits in the sea, the sea becomes sweet. If she kisses your mouth, she fills it with honey … If she sweats, she fills paradise with perfume. Then how would it be in her embrace?17
Ever since 9/11, people in the West have become understandably curious about the role of heavenly beliefs in suicide terrorist attacks. Although most Muslim scholars say that the Qur’an forbids suicide—much less suicidal bombings that kill civilians—there are obviously work-arounds for this proscription, given the proliferation of young men (and a few women) intent on becoming martyrs by donning bomb vests and blowing themselves up in crowded public places. In fact, in Islam the only people allowed to skip the purgatory-like judgment stage and go directly to paradise are martyrs. According to the religious scholar Alan Segal, “in a ‘holy war,’ the mujahidin can attain the status of the shahid, the martyr. Not only that, the early Hadith literature encourages martyrdom. The person seeking martyrdom, the talab al-shahada, is to be exalted and emulated. This kind of martyrdom is earnestly prayed for and devoutly wished for.”18
It was in fact Muhammad himself who ruled that as a general principle any Muslim soldier who died while attacking an infidel would go straight to paradise. Of course he would say that, given how well the promise motivated his own troops on March 15, 624, when Muhammad’s army faced a vastly larger force at the battle of Badr. After a lengthy prayer vigil, Muhammad announced to his anxious soldiers that the archangel Gabriel told him that an entire angelic force would be on their side and that anyone killed that day would instantly wake up in paradise. According to legend, a fifteen-year-old soldier named Umayr proclaimed in response: “Wonder of wonders! Is there nothing between me and my entry into paradise but that these men kill me?” Muhammad’s force won the battle and allegedly suffered only fourteen casualties that day, one of whom was, ironically (or not), Umayr. As in the Wild West, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.19
To carry over this martial payoff into modern suicidal missions, the “enemy soldiers” to be defeated are the invading armies of the Great Satan—Israel and America—against which those who self-identify as Muslim martyrs are fighting. For this small but noticeable minority of the world’s Muslims, by definition, anyone who supports Israel or the United States is an infidel, and in this context, any violent act committed against the Great Satan is done in self-defense. The Satanic West, then, is anti-Islamic by definition. Thus, this form of terrorism differs from those of the political anarchists of the early twentieth century and the Marxist revolutionaries of the late twentieth century in that Islamic terrorists are willing to die not just for a political cause, but for religious motives with the promise of paradise as the reward. A paradigmatic statement of this modern belief comes from the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, whose suicide note (found in the luggage that he left in his rental car that morning before flying American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Center building) included the following passage:
When the confrontation begins, strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world. Shout, “Allahu Akbar,” because this strikes fear in the hearts of the nonbelievers. Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty, and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out, “Come hither, friend of God.” They have dressed in their most beautiful clothing.20
This religious conviction was reinforced in a 2016 article in the ISIS publication Dabiq titled “Why We Hate You, Why We Fight You,” in which six reasons are enumerated:21
1. We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah—whether you realize it or not—by making partners for Him in worship, you blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son.
2. We hate you because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things He has permitted.
3. In the case of the atheist fringe, we hate you and wage war against you because you disbelieve in the existence of your Lord and Creator.
4. We hate you for your crimes against Islam and wage war against you to punish you for your transgressions against our religion.
5. We hate you for your crimes against the Muslims; your drones and fighter jets bomb, kill, and maim our people around the world.
6. We hate you for invading our lands and fight you to repel you and drive you out.
The unnamed author reminds his readers not to be thrown off by the secondary political motives. “The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.” And: “What’s equally if not more important to understand is that we fight you, not simply to punish and deter you, but to bring you true freedom in this life and salvation in the Hereafter.”
There it is. The Hereafter. Whatever other motives these suicide terrorists may have for committing violence—money, sex, adventure, U.S. foreign policy22—anyone who doubts the sincerity of their deep religious conviction that they will be rewarded in heaven for their murderous martyrdom is living in denial.
HEAVENS’ PLURALITY
The many and varied beliefs about the afterlife and immortality are the reason this book’s title—Heavens on Earth—is pluralized, and the earthly genesis of such beliefs is indicative of their origin in human nature and culture. This book is about one of the most profound questions of the human condition, one that has driven theologians, philosophers, scientists, and all thinking people to try to understand the meaning and purpose of our life as mortal beings and discover how we can transcend our mortality. It is about how the awareness of our mortality and failings has led to beliefs in heaven and hell, in afterlives and resurrections both spiritual and physical, in utopias and dystopias, in progress and decline, and in the perfectibility and fallibility of human nature. There are nearly as many ideas about heaven—and heavens on earth—as there are people who have thought seriously about the matter of what happens after we die and what we can do to perfect life while we’re alive. This transcendence leads to a quest for spiritual immortality in heaven, physical immortality on earth, and the perfectibility of society here and now.
The luminaries we will meet in this book include psychologists and anthropologists and their theories about death and dying and how the awareness of our mortality affects us; archaeologists and historians on who were the first people to become aware of their own mortality and how this awareness led to the creation of myths and religions; Jews, Christians, and Muslims and their monotheistic ideas about heaven and hell, the resurrection of both body and soul, and what happens after we die; spiritual seekers from other religious traditions who seek immortality through altered states of consciousness, including modern spiritual gurus like Deepak Chopra and their belief in transcendent consciousness for eternal life; cognitive scientists in search of explanations for anomalous psychological experiences, and psychic mediums who believe that we can talk to the dead; scholars and scientists who treat near death experiences and the belief in reincarnation as evidence of the afterlife, and skeptics who interpret them from a more materialistic perspective; secular philosophers and scientists in search of immortality through radical life extension, minimal senescence, antiaging remedies, cryonics, transhumanism lifestyles, singularity technologies, computer mind uploading, and other afterlives for atheists; imaginative writers who envision perfect societies; dreamers who attempt to construct utopias; pessimists who lament the decline of civilization; dictators and demagogues who exploit these fears and attempt to rebuild societies in their own imagined fashion of what a paradisiacal state should be, only to see it collapse after the inevitable collision with reality—thus do utopian dreams turn into dystopian nightmares.
Finally, at the end of this voyage we will consider such ultimate problems as why are we mortal and how our species can become immortal, what it means if there is no heaven above or here on earth, and how we can find meaning in an apparently meaningless universe. There are scientific answers to such deep questions, if we reflect upon them with reason, honesty, and courage.