Okay, so that's the cartoonists' view of heaven, but it's absolutely the only one you ever see pictured - I know of no other image. For a place that's the ultimate goal, the entire reason to be religious, it's funny no one even talks about what it looks like. If you ask a believer, they get all funny and defensive. It's a question you're not supposed to ask, and for a very good reason - all the answers are silly.
I can hear believers say, no, that's the simple view for the simple people - heaven is just the place where all good souls go after death. Your spirit hangs out with your friends and ancestors and departed family members. But that's not what the Bible says; it says you will be resurrected in the flesh. Which flesh? The cells in your body are replaced every seven to ten years, so no matter how long you've lived, most of you is less than ten years old. Are you raised from the dead as you are on judgment day, a rotting corpse, a few atoms scattered over the countryside, or in some animal's spoor? That can't be right. Do you come back as you were just before you died - blown apart, say, or wracked with disease - perhaps in flames? Surely not. Maybe you'll be as you were just before whatever killed you happened. So all the people who died of old age get to be in their nineties forever? What an inducement to off yourself when you're young and healthy. What about all the dead children, infants, and the stillborn? They go to heaven too, do they not? Do they get to spend eternity as half-formed beings, incapable of communication, frozen forever in that helpless and dependent state, never to grow up, never to love? And what about the people who have always been deformed or ugly? They never had a satisfactory body they'd want to spend eternity in.
How else could it work? Maybe the all-merciful god allows you to choose what version of your body you will be in forever. That would be fair and democratic, though religion is the least fair and democratic of all human pursuits. What would you choose - that innocent child you were when you were ten, before puberty turned you into a carnal beast? In early middle age, when you're at the apex of your maturity and mental powers? How about in your twenties, when you're at the height of your physical attractiveness? Do you get to choose any appearance you want? Will there be billions of people who all look just like Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz? That would be confusing - "Martha, is that you?" But it could also be pretty hot with all those beautiful bodies everywhere. Oh wait - there's no sex in heaven is there? I think most Judeo-Christians would agree on that. No sweaty angels banging each other. So we can all be young and beautiful, but we can't be attracted to one another or have sex. All those genitalia, just like God's own (He made us in his image, remember) waving around in the celestial breeze but never to be used or even touched. Sorry, I just don't see how resurrection in the flesh can possibly work.
Maybe this is another case where the Bible can't be taken literally. Like most things in the Bible (such as the Ten Commandments), most believers today say that we are free to interpret the Bible; it's a guide, not a rigid law. As a non-believer, I can't understand this. It's either the absolute word of God or it isn't. If it is God's law, how the hell do you have the nerve to say you can interpret it as you wish, even disregard vast portions of its strictures and commandments - who made you God's editor? The Bible says we should kill our children if they disobey us, we should kill or enslave anyone of different religions, and hundreds of other examples of horrific behavior even devout Christians no longer obey. (And if it isn't God's word, then all scripture is a bunch of wishful superstitious fantasy, so that obviously can't be it.) It strikes me odd that each generation of true believers interprets the word of God as they see fit, eliminating commandments they see as outdated or inconvenient. Leaving that aside, let's say this new liberal reading is acceptable. It's okay to make graven images (Catholics especially are big on statues); it's okay to kill if the other guy is black or gay or an atheist, etc. If you think you can toss out some selected commandments, that's fine with me. I certainly don't want Christian sharia law. If every person who committed adultery were stoned to death, there would be damned few folks to read my screeds - or write them.
Okay, so in spite of what the Bible says, we don't resurrect in the flesh. We're some kind of bodiless spirits that float around in the ether. That certainly eliminates a whole lot of awkward questions about eating, grocery stores, and celestial Port-a-cans. Personally, I find it hard to imagine my mind (okay, soul if you insist - same thing) existing without a body. To me, my body is not a container for me - it is me. Who I am is so inextricably interwoven with my body, its experiences and travels and sensations and injuries and tastes and desires, that I can't think of what I would be like without it. I suppose I can imagine my mind being somehow extracted from my body, like uploading it onto a cloud server somewhere - a common science fiction trope. I can even imagine it being downloaded into another body, or a cybernetic body, or even a mechanical body, and my existence continuing. But to be incorporeal forever, with no physical location, no center, no sense organs, no residence, seems inconceivable - and very unappealing.
But I'm not a believer. If I were, apparently this would be the desired state I worked and prayed all my life to attain: having no physical form, unchanging forever, unable to do any of the physical things that make life worthwhile - eating, traveling, going for a swim or a hike, petting a dog, making love. We will be in the presence of God, and that will be enough. I am content.
One thing we know for sure - we'll be surrounded by our loved ones - everybody we cared about in our lives will be there. That's the whole point of heaven. Our deceased parents will be together forever, whether they got along or not, and no matter how shabbily they may have treated each other in life. For better or for worse, whatever parents we got in life, they'll be with us every day forever. Our deceased spouses will be right there, too - all of them. I hope they learn to share and don't mind being your third husband. There are some people I really don't like in this life - I hope they don't end up being my neighbors in Heaven. My idea of heaven might be to spend eternity with my wife, but hers might be to spend it with her first husband, or that cute quarterback from high school. One of us has to be in hell, I guess.
All our ancestors will be there too - every great-great-grandfather and -mother, going all the way back to - what? Our Neanderthal ancestors, Homo erectus? How about the first protozoa? Sure will be crowded. Oh, that's right, all that history and fossil stuff, physics and chemistry and astronomy and that other claptrap - that's just God's little practical joke, piling up overwhelming evidence in every place we look that there is an ancient history, when actually time started six thousand years ago, just a few hundred years after the first ziggurats were built in Mesopotamia. He must have a very good reason to have every shred of evidence point unerringly to the exact same incorrect age of the universe. But that's another rant.
No matter how long ago time started, there are billions of our ancestors up there with us. I certainly hope we all get along, even though their lives and beliefs were so radically different from those of us newcomers. Will they sneer at how easy we had it when we were alive? What will we have in common with our Egyptian or Celtic or African ancestors? We won't even speak the same language. We better not talk politics or religion, and current events would be a bit strange as well. I'd imagine we'd spend the first few millennia just getting the old ones caught up with the news. "Did you say the Goths sacked Rome, young feller?"
But let's put aside all these difficulties and questions - just ignore them like believers do - what would it be like to be in heaven? We won't have any of the things we like to do now - no football on TV, no rock'n'roll, no movies or books, no long walks on the beach, no great dinners with friends, no meeting new people. So what will we do? We'll all be as the angels - perfect beings. We will be perfectly static. Since we're perfect, there will be no need to strive, to travel, to grow, to learn, to improve ourselves. There will be no crime, no accidents, no stress, no disease, no worries - indeed, no news, no events, no change, forever. Not just for hundreds of years or billions of years, but forever and ever, amen. Sounds boring and pointless to me, but I'm only an unbeliever. I guess that sounds good to believers. There are those cool harps, though. Everybody likes listening to harp music.
When you look at it in any detail, any attempt to really grasp it, the whole concept of heaven doesn't work, no matter how ethereal and non-corporeal you try to make it. It can't be imagined. It only works as a concept if it's completely vague. Don't ask all those questions, just believe. It will be wonderful; everyone will be perfectly happy all the time. But that's not the kind of beings we are. I can't imagine a human being who is happy all the time; I can't imagine a large number of people in all the vast variety of humanity all getting along without any conflict.
To me, it's exactly like all the rest of religion. There is not one atom of evidence for any of it. And no, waving around an old book that says it's true is not evidence. There are thousands of mutually contradictory holy scriptures, with different creation myths, rules and regulations, and descriptions of paradise. Because they all say different things, they can't all be right. But they could all be wrong.
Why then do so many people believe in it so strongly? There is only one perfectly obvious answer: because they wish it were so. They see people doing evil and going unpunished, so they want to believe that they will be punished with eternal torment. They see good people suffering and being oppressed, and they want to believe that there is a perfect place where they can live in bliss. They see their loved ones dying, and they want to believe they will be reunited. They see wars and plagues and famines and natural disasters, a vast complicated uncaring universe with no purpose and no justice, and they want to believe in a loving father who loves us and watches over us and has a plan to protect us. And above everything else, they see death riding headlong toward them and they cannot bear the thought that they will soon cease to exist. So they imagine a perfect world in the sky where they will live forever. It is a perfectly reasonable fear and an understandable desire. Who would not want it to be so? Alas, wishing does not make it true. As Mark Twain famously remarked, "Faith is believing what you know ain't true."
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