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10 reasons Christian heaven would actually be

VALERIE TARICO, ALTERNET
31 JAN 2015 AT 00:39 ET
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aybe descriptions of Hell are so horrific to keep people from thinking about
how hellish popular versions of the Christian Heaven would beeven without
Pat Robertson in the mix.
Most Westerners are at least vaguely familiar with the popular Christian version of
Heaven: pearly gates, streets of gold, winged angels and the Righteous, with their
bodies made perfect and immortal, singing the praises of God forever. Whats
surprising is how few people have actually thought about what a nightmare this kind
of existence would be.
Let me start by laying out a bit more detail about Heaven itself.
Popular Christian Descriptions of Heaven Derive from the Bible
Our familiar images of Heaven come from texts written in the first and second
centuries and incorporated by Catholic councils into what we now call the New
Testament. The Hebrew writers of the Torah alluded to an afterlife much like the
Hades of the Greeks and Romansa hazy underworld in which the souls of the dead
neither die nor fully live. But by the time the New Testament was written, the

concepts of a distinct Heaven and Hell had emerged in the Jewish culture, from
whence they entered early Christianity and then, later, Islam.
The books of the New Testament were written at different times and for different
ends, which means they dont always agree. Although Paul, in 1 Corinthians, says that
Heaven is beyond imagining, other writers offer concrete details. The popular version
of Heaven today is a composite that comes from several texts but relies heavily on the
book of Revelation.
Heaven is a real place. The writer of John puts these words in the mouth of Jesus, In
my Fathers house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have
told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you,
I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be
also (John 14:2-3NRSV). Some Christian leaders use verses from Old Testament
prophets to pinpoint the location of Heaven, suggesting that it is somewhere
beyond the North Pole.
People in Heaven have bodies. The earliest Christian texts, the letters of Paul,
suggest that the eternal body is pneuma or spirit, but later New Testament writers
inclined toward physical resurrection of both Jesus and believers, though with
renewed, perfected bodies. This view was affirmed by Church fathers and is now the
predominant Christian belief. From this we get the Evangelical belief that in the
End Times bodies of believers will rise up to Heaven in a Rapture. This belief in a
bodily resurrection is even used to explain why Christian women should keep their
bodies chaste and pure.
Trappings of wealth abound. Many translations of the Gospel of John say that the
dwelling places in Heaven are mansions, which fits with other descriptions of
heavenly opulence. In the book of Revelation, the writer is taken in a vision to
glimpse Heaven for himself: And the foundations of the wall of the city were
garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the
second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; The fifth,
sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolyte; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a
topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an
amethyst.And the twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several gate was of one
pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.
(Revelation 21). God sits on an ornate throne, and along with crowns, the heavenly
hosts are clothed in white, a symbol of purity and a reminder that they do not need
to work.
Heaven is eternal and reserved for believers. The Bible verse that is most quoted by
Protestant Christians is John 3:16, which makes both of these points: For God so
loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him
may not perish but may have eternal life. The author of Revelation assures that, he
will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying
and pain will be no more (Revelation 21:4). In this eternity, it is always light
(Revelation 22:5) and there is no need for sleep (Revelation 7:15).
Children who die before an age of accountability also go there. Despite the belief
that children are born bad, thanks to original sin, most Christians believe that
children who die young go to Heaven because the alternative is simply unthinkable.
For evidence, they point to two verses in the book of Matthew: So it is not the will
of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost (Matthew
18:14). But Jesus said, Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for
it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs (Matthew 19:14).
Although Christians have disagreed over the centuries about when a budding
human acquires an immortal soul, a process called ensoulment, many now believe

that this happens in the process of conception.

Inhabitants spend their time serving and worshipping God. Even though it is
always light, we are told that the saints (meaning the saved) will serve and worship
God round the clock. For this reason they are before the throne of God,and worship
him day and night within his temple,and the one who is seated on the throne will
shelter them (Revelation 7:15). Several passages suggest that the faithful will
receive crowns, which they can then offer up as gifts to God. Some take this literally
and some do not.
Please note that I have made no attempt to analyze or explain what these passages
may have meant in their original contexts, given the culture and objectives of the
writers. My purpose here is to demonstrate where modern Christianity got the image
of Heaven so often depicted in hymns, sermons, art and pop culture.
Why This Heaven Would Be Hellish
To many people the biblical description alone is enough to make Heaven sound
unappealing, especially if you then add the company of noxious but professing public
figures like Pat Robertson, Mel Gibson, Sarah Palin, Ken Ham, or Anita Bryant. (Why
does God have such a bad marketing department?) But the problem isnt just bad
company. The closer you look, the more the Bibles version of paradise seems like
another version of eternal torture. Let me spell it out.
Perfection means sameness. Much of what makes life worth living is the process of
learning and discovery, growth and change. We delight in novelty and laugh because
we are startled by the unexpected. Curiosity is one of our greatest pleasures, and
growth is one of our deepest values and satisfactions. In fact, our whole psychological
make-up is designed for tuning in to change, including our senses. When a sound is
continuous, we mostly stop hearing it; a static image on the eye registers as a blind
spot. Even art relies on imperfection and newness to create beauty or to trigger our
aesthetic sense.
By contrast, timeless perfection is static, as Christians are reminded in the traditional
hymn, Immortal, Invisible God Only Wise. We blossom and flourish as leaves on the
tree/ And wither and perish but naught changeth Thee. In the book of Matthew, Jesus
commands, Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect, and in Heaven, we are
told, this ideal is finally attained. The problem is, perfect means finished and
complete. It means theres no room for improvementfor change and growth.
Perfection is sterilein every sense of the word.
Your best qualities are irrelevant. If everything is perfect, then many of the qualities
that we most value in ourselves and each other become irrelevant. Compassion and
generosity are pointless, because nobody is hurting or in need of anything.
Forgiveness? Not needed. Creativity? Courage? Resilience? Decisiveness? Vision? All
useless. Sigmund Freud once said that mental health is the ability to love and to work,
but in the state of perfection both lose their meaning. There is no need to create or
produce, and little value in offering our affection and commitment to another person
who is 100 percent perfect and complete without us.
Gone is the thrill of risk. In addition to loving and creating, some of lifes most
exhilarating experiences require risk. Picture flying down a ski slope almost out of
control; pounding a single track over bumps and beneath hanging branches; jumping
out of an airplane; racing cars; surfing; or performing. The adrenaline rushthe high
and the euphoria afterwards surge only because, despite our skill and preparation,
there was some chance we would fail.
Forget animal pleasures like food, drink, sleep, and sex. Does the risen Jesus with
his new and perfect body have a penis or anus? Do angels? Eating, drinking, or
fornicatingeach of these physical pleasures depends on hunger of one sort or

another. Ice water tastes most heavenly when you are hot and thirsty. Falling asleep is
most delicious when you simply cant stand to be vertical any longer. The reality is
that our bodies and brains are made for each other and optimized for life on this
planet where our pleasures are linked to survival.
To make matters more complicated, we are predators in a complex web of life. The
eating that gives us so much sensory pleasure and sustenance simultaneously destroys
other lives and creates waste. Christians disagree about whether there will be meals in
Heaven. Some point to feasting in the book of Revelation and reassure foodies that
eating and drinking will be part of paradise. But none dare speculate on the perfect
slaughterhouse and sewer.
Free will ceases to exist. Some Christians explain the presence of suffering and evil
here on earth as Gods way of creating creatures who would love him freelyby giving
them the option to reject him. But that is exactly the opposite condition they predict in
Heaven. In Heaven there is no sin, no option to sin, and so, by Christianitys own
definition, no free will. (Some skeptics point out that love me or Ill torture you
forever doesnt exactly create the conditions for genuine love either. Why, they ask,
would a god who wants love to be freely given threaten us with hell, even if it
existed? But that is a different article.) Secular philosophers and neuroscientists
debate whether free will is real or merely and adaptive illusion. Either way, in the
Bibles version of Heaven, even the illusion vanishes.
Ninety eight percent of Heavens occupants are embryos and toddlers. Human
reproduction is designed as a big funnel. Most fertilized eggs die before implanting,
followed by embryos and fetuses that self-abort, followed by babies and then little
kids. A serious but startling statistical analysis by researcher Greg S. Paul suggests that
if we include the unborn, more than 98 percent of Heavens inhabitants, some 350
billion, would be those who died before maturing to the point that they could
voluntarily accept the gift of salvation. The vast majority of the heavenly host would
be moral automatons or robots, meaning they never had moral autonomy and never
chose to be there. Christian believers, ironically, would be a 1 to 2 percent minority
even if all 30,000+ denominations of believers actually made it in.
The theological implications are huge. Christian theologians typically explain evil by
arguing that this was the best of all possible worlds, the only way to create free will
and to develop moral virtues (like courage, compassion, forgiveness and so forth), to
make us more Christ-like and prepare us for Heaven. But if we run the numbers, it
appears that God didnt need the whole free willsinredemption thing to fill his
paradise with perfect beings because no suffering, evil, or moral freedom is actually
required as a prelude to glory.
The ratio of adults to embryos has social implications as well. Pastoral counselors
sometimes tell a women that she will get to apologize in Heaven to the fetus she
aborted, which will be a fully developed person there. As a psychologist, I dont know
what this means, because the brain and mind, our individuality and identity, and the
qualities that define our personhooddevelop only via experience. Imagine if 98
percent of the people around you had never made a decision or felt sorrow or
experienced anything akin to an adult conversation. The company of Mr. Robertson
starts sounding not so bad.
Gems and streets of gold define heavenly wealth and beauty. Our desperate, goatherding Iron Age ancestors may have yearned for the trappings of royalty. They may
have heard rumors of the gold and jewels amassed by Pharaohs or kings or tribal
warlords and wished the same for themselves. Both greed and inequality are timeless,
and the story of King Midas has played out in countless variations over the millennia.
So, the fascination of the Bible writers with gold and precious stones is

understandable.
But lets be honest. Their gem-encrusted paradise is the product of limited
imagination, the challenge we all face in trying to dream beyond the arts,
technologies, and mythologies of our own time and culture. The Bibles version of
paradise is like a velvet painting from a tourist shop when compared to a real alpine
meadow or cloud forest or coral reef (or when compared to a world that contains all
three as Tracy Chapman does in her song, Heavens Here on Earth.)
Take your pick of sadism or ignorance. One of Heavens dirty little secrets is that it
co-exists with hell. Or maybe it isnt a secret. Maybe its a perk. Some theologians have
argued that witnessing the torment of the damned will be one of the joys of paradise.
In the words of Puritan superstar Jonathon Edwards, who preached a whole sermon on
the topic: When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful state of the
damned, how will this heighten their sense of the blessedness of their own state, so
exceedingly different from it! When they shall see how miserable others of their fellow
creatures are, who were naturally in the same circumstances with themselves; when
they shall see the smoke of their torment, and the raging of the flames of their
burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they in the
meantime are in the most blissful state, and shall surely be in it to all eternity; how
will they rejoice!
If we are to believe the earnest Christian hate mail that Bonnie Weinstein of the
Military Religious Freedom Foundation has now compiled into a book, or love letters
read aloud by biologist Richard Dawkins (watching him struggle with the word biatch
is priceless!), at least some of the faithful can hardly wait for the show to start.
Other Christians, to be fair, find this thought horrifying or even traumatic, and some
teach universal salvation or that evildoers are simply annihilated. But for hellbelievers the alternatives to gloating arent a whole lot better: Either the faithful are
blessedly blissfully indifferent to the endless suffering of the damned, or their joy
depends on them being unaware, meaning ignorance is a condition of their eternal
bliss.
Your celestial day (and night) job is to sing Gods praises. What do the faithful do in
Heaven? The same thing the angels do. They worship God and sing his praises. The
writer of Revelation even offers us a sample song. In one passage, 24 elders fall
before the one who is seated on the throne and worship the one who lives forever and
ever; they cast their crowns before the throne, singing,You are worthy, our Lord and
God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will
they existed and were created (Revelation 4:10-110). As one graduate of Evangel
College (Assemblies of God) observed wryly, Having spent some time in N. Korea,
where the incessant praise music and propaganda were required and all-pervasive, I
sometimes wonder if the dynastic leaders there somehow lifted a page from an older
playbook.
It has been said that the only god worthy of worship is one who neither wants nor
needs it. What are we to think of a deity who creates the earth and her inhabitants
in fact the entire universeso that a crowd of bipedal primates, most of whom were
never born, can spend an afterlife in this posture of praise and adulation?
This Heaven goes on forever. Most of us would prefer to live longer than the time
allotted to us. Aging sucks, and losing a loved one is one of the most painful wounds
we can experience.
But forever? Forever is infinity. It never ends. Think of the best possible experience
you can imagineyour favorite symphony or rock concert, the most beautiful place
youve travelled, the most intimate or intense sex ever, holding your child . . . . Any one

of them, stretched to infinity becomes unthinkable.

Fiction writers who seriously explore the idea of immortality rarely treat it as
something to be desired, and for good reason. Even kids grasp the problems, for
example, when they read Tuck Everlasting. Author Edgar Shoaff put it bluntly:
ImmortalityA fate worse than death. The movie Groundhog Day is a comedy. But part
of whats funny for viewers is the insane array of suicide attempts Bill Murray makes in
order to stop living the same day over and over. What might an inhabitant of the
Heaven Ive just described do to cease existing?
Could an omnipotent god create an afterlife that was actually some form of paradise?
Perhaps. And without a doubt pained Bible believers who read this article will insist
that their God has done just that. Some will fall back on the words of Paul and claim,
on biblical authority, that they (and I) have no idea what Heaven will be likeother
than eternally wonderful.
But the fact is, Christians for centuries have claimed that they do have an idea of what
Heaven will be like. New Testament writers, Church Fathers, monks, iconographers,
crusaders, inquisitors, reformers, conquistadors, missionaries, priests, nuns, Sunday
school teachers, pulpit pounders, faith healers, televangelists, internet wonders . . . .
For almost two millennia Bible believers have sought to entice small children, the
desperate poor and the vulnerable or trusting by promising the kind of tawdry,
debased everlasting life described above. They still do today. Selling shares in this
Heaven is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Crowns and white robes and streets of gold and angelic choruses have long been
Christianitys carrot, with the threat of eternal torture as the stick. Millions of people
have lived and died, fearing one and anticipating the other, never noticing the sleight
of handthat they are two versions of the same thing.
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