Sunday, August 28, 2011

My Vision of Heaven, or Not


My feeling is that Heaven is a mindset, not a destination. I do, however, sometimes think about what type of place Heaven would be if it was in a fact a "place". I came to the conclusion that for a location with such expectations put on it to serve purpose, it would have to combine some aspects of life as we know it with the completely fantastic. There would have to be no ill will. Disagreements would still happen, but they would always resolve amicably. There would have to be some way of making progress. Without advancement, even utopia could get extremely boring.
The main concept that has to go is a huge one: Hell. I don't see how a place could ever be regarded as "paradise" if we aren't all there. How could one live in eternal bliss knowing that most of their friends, loved ones, or even just influences are languishing in damnation? That seems contradictory to what I understand being an "angel" to be. I imagine a place where Hitler and Jesse Owens play chess together. J. Edgar Hoover and his partner would have MLK and Coretta over for dinner. Tupac and Biggie headline Summerjam in Heaven. The absence of evil and hatred in people would be the primary difference between Earth and Heaven.
There would have to be some sort of challenge still in existence in Heaven. The feeling of rising up from something seems like a feeling that any place that is eternal would need to have. I just imagine that "suffering" would not exist. There would have to be different levels of bliss on order to prevent boredom from setting in.
Honestly, the more I actually entertained the idea of a Heaven, the more I saw how preposterous of an idea it is. The existence of an afterlife is not a silly concept. It is the idea that we could possibly fathom what life after death is when we do not understand what life itself is, that makes the conventional view of Heaven seem insane.

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