Heaven would be Hellish
It’s not the paradise you think it is.
Nearly every Christian will assure you that Heaven is a GOOD place! Everyone always says, “Yeah, Man, it’s the place I want to go!”
Not me, of course. NO, thank you, I’ll pass — I’ve got no interest whatsoever in the place if it exists, which it doesn’t.
Heaven is full of hypocrites, I take no interest in joining the club these people may be a part of: Pat Robertson, Mel Gibson, Sarah Palin, Ken Ham, Anita Bryant, all the Televangelists — those are but a handful. Add in the executives from all the anti-LGTB groups, the anti-abortion groups; Trump believes he’s certain to be there — and there are many others, but that’s a story for another time.
The closer you look at it, the more the Bible’s version of paradise seems like a different version of eternal torture: let me spell it out the way I see it:
Perfection
Everything in Heaven, of course, is supposed to be Perfect. Perfect. And what is “Perfect”? Sameness. A “perfect” package of 10,000 ping-pong balls means that any and every single one of them looks the same, weighs the same, and IS precisely the same as any and every single other one.
For all of us, much of what makes life worth living is our differences from others, as it is the process of learning and discovery, growth and change. We enjoy novelty, and we laugh because we are startled by the unexpected. Curiosity is one of our greatest pleasures, and personal growth is one of our deepest values and satisfactions.
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; when we look at anything too long, it begins to vanish into the background. Even art relies on imperfection and newness to create beauty or to trigger our aesthetic sense. We enjoy life most when it’s dynamic when anything and everything constantly changes, and when everything forever becomes new.
Contrast that with "Timeless Perfection," which is static and unchanging, 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 tells us, “Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect,” and we’re constantly informed that in Heaven, everything is Perfect. Problem is, Perfect… means finished and complete. That there is no room for improvement — for our personal change, growth, and learning. In other words… Perfection is sterile — in every sense of the word.
Individual / Personal Qualities will become irrelevant in Heaven
If everything is perfect, many of the qualities we most value in ourselves and each other become irrelevant. Compassion and generosity are pointless because nobody is hurting or in need of… anything.
Where we can often feel useful and gain pleasure from helping reduce others’ pain, that won’t be needed in Heaven. Consider it for a moment: what need would there be for specific, individual talents such as creativity? Or courage? Or resilience? Or decisiveness, or vision, which is one’s ability to take a problem today and imagine how it might be resolved. None of those will be needed. Nobody will be an “individual”; everybody will be just like everybody else.
I remember that Sigmund Freud once said that mental health is the ability to love and to work, but in Heaven, in the state of Perfection, neither of those has any meaning. There won’t be any need to create or produce, and there won’t be any value in offering our affection and commitment to another person who is 100 percent Perfect and complete without us since all of their needs — all of them — will already be met.
Risk
There won’t be any Risk in Heaven. There is no danger of getting harmed or killed — which would totally take away the thrills we all enjoy so much from driving fast or skiing, or from any ‘daring’ things we might do such as acting or performing. Those are meaningful to us here because we might fail — yet often, we master both our fears and the skills we need to develop to accomplish what we try. In Heaven, there won’t be any chance to fail, so many of the things we enjoy here will become… boring.
Pleasures we enjoy on Earth won’t be available to us anymore
Food, drink, sleep, sex… none of them will exist in Heaven. It seems reasonable that when we ascend into Heaven, none of us will have an anus, vagina, or penis — why would we, when there’s nothing to do there with them? Eating, drinking, and sex depend upon our having a hunger of one sort or another, and we won’t have those.
Do you remember how, well, heavenly ice water tastes when you’re hot & thirsty? You won’t experience that in Heaven. Forget the pleasure of quietly enjoying & admiring the ethereal beauty of breathtakingly beautiful people — everyone’s going to be like everyone else, remember? Or, consider how great it sometimes is to fall asleep when you simply can’t stand to be vertical any longer or hold your book up while you’re reading. Won’t need to sleep in Heaven… so you can forget the pleasures we now experience from dreaming, also.
Free Will
As we think we know it here, won’t exist, of course. Many Christians will tell you that the presence of suffering and evil exists here on Earth because God gave humans Free Will so that humans could love Him freely — by giving them the option to reject Him. But in Heaven, there isn’t going to be any sin or option to sin or even any thoughts or desires to sin — so, by Christianity’s own definition, there won’t be any free will. We’ll become soulful robots; every one of us just exactly like every other one of us, needing nothing, desiring nothing, being refused nothing.
A Heaven full of fetuses
One minor (but major) little matter no one ever seems to think about… is that 99% of all of Heaven’s occupants are going to be embryos in various stages of development plus fetuses that self-aborted, followed by infants, older babies, then little kids. I can’t predict if those fetuses will be slithering/sliding around; if so, then where? For what? What would they know of… anything?
One Harvard researcher once estimated that it seems at least 75% of all pregnancies miscarry/fail (most of them because the body recognizes a fault in genetic sequencing or that the pregnancy, if it continued, would be deformed / defective somehow…). Since those embryos/fetuses/infants never had the chance to “sin,”…. the anti-abortion crowd assures us “they’re people”… Well, anyway, the estimates are that there will be at least 350 billion of them up there.
The ratio of adults to embryos has profound social implications as well. Pastoral counselors often tell a women that she will get to apologize in Heaven to the fetus she aborted, which they assure us “will be a fully developed person there”. I can’t even imagine what this can mean for that environment because the brain and mind, our individuality and identity — all those qualities that define our personhood: Empathy, sympathy, feeling, concern, anger, joy and all the rest… develop only via experience. Imagine if 99% of the “people” around you… had never made a decision of any nature, had never felt any emotions of any nature, had never had any “people” experiences of any nature, or ever experienced anything akin to an adult conversation; could never plan anything for Tomorrow, had never felt any Responsibility… Could you really call them “people”?
Then, there’s the City of Heaven itself
The Bible assures us that Everything’s Going To Be Made Of Gold and Precious Gems — so that Rolex or diamond you’ve enjoyed or wanted so much isn’t going to be very meaningful when everybody has them.
I guess there will be Spectator Sports, kind of: according to the Bible, those in Heaven will be able to look down to those in Hell. Some theologians have argued that witnessing the torment of the damned will be one of the joys of paradise. One superstar preacher, Jonathon Edwards, preached a whole sermon on the topic and informed his congregation:
“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!”
To be fair about it, many Christians consider that such… spectacles… would be, um, undignified; that there’s something unChristian about our taking pleasure in other’s pain. I guess perhaps the Heavenly occupants somehow might not even know about the possibility of such… pleasures… existing.
Let’s not forget that Revelations tells us that our celestial day (and night) job is to sing God’s praises. That we’ll do the same thing the angels do: they worship God and sing his praises, over and over and overandoverandov… forever. 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 4:10–11).
I can only speak for myself when I tell you that if I had to listen to (or especially sing!) the same thing over and over and over, endlessly… I’d go stark raving nuts.
Further, I agree with whoever once said that the only god worthy of worship is one who neither wants nor needs it; I wouldn’t be much impressed with some God that… demanded or even needed… endless worship, adulation, and praise. I don’t even like Donald Trump, and I must assume he’s a rank amateur narcissist compared to God.
I urge you to keep in mind that this Heaven goes on forever and even longer than that. Think of it this way: consider any pleasure you’ve ever experienced: conversations, a particular wine, a particular musical passage, a scent; heck, even the most intimate and sensitive sexual experience ever — and stretch any of those into Infinity. Would it still hold the same reward and appeal for you? (Probably not…)
OK; OK — I’ll concede that an Omnipotent God might very well create an Afterlife that actually IS some form of Paradise for us, even if it’s necessary that we somehow become brain-dead for us to actually, um, “enjoy” it. So far as we know, it will be “wonderful.” But that, alone, would be the only possible way for me to envision the “Perfection” of Heaven as enjoyable.
Me, my version of Heaven… is that once it’s “lights out” for me, I’ll become just like I was before I got here: nonexistent. I won’t have any regrets about anything: I won’t miss admiring beautiful people, won’t have any thoughts, no wants, no needs, and for me, especially, no fears & no being alone anymore.
I almost can’t wait.
