I believe, but I’m not interested in God. Hell is clearer
Conscience without God is a horror, it can get lost in the most immoral
F.M.Dostoevsky
If you had the opportunity to choose a place to spend eternity, what would you choose? Heaven or hell? Would you choose heaven? Do you really need it? — I would ask.
The other day I read an interesting dialogue in the novel “The Great Divorce” by C. S. Lewis. A philosopher who got to Heaven from Hell (he lives there) is talking to his old friend. This friend is a blessed soul who dwells in Heaven and asks his friend-philosopher to stay with him. The philosopher is convinced that only knowledge and absolute freedom are capable to make people happy. He was a bishop on Earth, but he admired God only as a great idea, a philosophical phenomenon. The philosopher has almost agreed to stay in heaven if they allow him to comprehend and learn more about God. Heaven is the right place to learn God, isn't it?
When the moment came to meet God, the moment to be in His love — the philosopher refused to stay in Heaven. He’s not interested. He prefers to return to hell to lecture on religious issues.
On the way back to Hell he sings a hymn: ‘The City of God, how broad and far.’ The dingy town of hell seems like heaven in the eyes of this blind from insensibility intellectual. He believes that hell is the heaven where the lights of knowledge and absolute freedom will save fallen humanity from all its disorder. He hurries there, to this dingy town, leaving heaven and singing the hymn about heavenly Jerusalem to give a lecture in Hell about God.
Truly, religion without love and a simple desire to know the object of one’s faith and love — this kind of religion is absurd. So many people go to church to get something there. They can hope that their children will be healthy or get a better job but they neglect God. What for? Do we really think that if God exists, then we can neglect Him? Someone we can live without? If God does not exist, why do we go to church and celebrate Christian feasts? Just in case? So, a person will prefer to stay in Hell and listen to lectures about God because he didn’t strive for God before. He used to be about God. But this is a completely different matter.
