Would you want to go to Heaven when you die?
I’m not asking: Do you believe in the existence of Heaven?
What I’m wondering is, if it were true that there is a Heaven - a paradise you enter into after death - would you want to go?
This may sound like a trick question. Right? I think a lot of people might be up for Heaven - eternal perfect happiness - if it were true. Life is difficult for everyone, and is tragic and traumatic for many. The idea of a big pay-off at the end such as infinite bliss and absence of all suffering, is a hopeful happier ever after.
Turns out, most people do in fact believe in Heaven. A ** study by the Pew Research Center **shows that three-quarters of U.S. adults believe in the pearly gates.
After Heaven, the top belief in the afterlife is where one’s spirit, consciousness or energy lives on after our physical body has passed away, or in a continued existence in an alternate dimension or reality. Reincarnation is also prominent as an afterlife narrative - the belief that people will be reborn again and again in this world. Still others believe that people’s energy rejoins the universe in some form.
Common beliefs about what Heaven is like includes:
eternal happiness
absence of suffering
reunited with deceased loved ones
can meet God
have perfectly healthy and imperishable bodies
reunited with pets or animals
can become angels
The notion of Heaven is complicated. Oddly, Jesus never taught or promoted the modern Christian conception of Heaven. A central message of Jesus was, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”
Most people would be shocked to discover that the modern Christian conception of eternal life in Heaven is conspicuously missing in the New Testament. Words attributed to Jesus in John 17:3 read, “Now this is eternal life: that they know God.” In other words, “eternal life” is not an afterlife location, but the experience of union with ultimate reality.
Perhaps not surprisingly, competing images about Heaven abound. Until around the end of the 17th century, Heaven was primarily about the ** Beatific Vision**, a theological concept that describes the future reality in which believers will get to see God face to face. The perfect happiness of eternity in Heaven consisted in the worship, praise and adoration of God.
Traditional Judaism was somewhat reticent about the life to come. But when it was spoken of, it was primarily in terms of the spiritual vision of God. As one third-century rabbi explained it:
“In the world-to-come there is no eating, no drinking, no mating, no trading, no jealousy, no hatred, and no enmity; instead, the righteous sit with crowns on their heads and enjoy the splendor of the divine Presence.”
Having been raised Catholic, I often heard this idea of Heaven, which was disturbing to a teenage boy. Who wants to sit around all eternity in a never-ending Catholic Mass, worshipping God. I could barely make it through the Sunday Mass at St. Mary’s, and that was only because I was imagining life with Cindy Cavalletti as my girlfriend, who sat with her family two pews up to the right.
Within Christianity, the image of a God-centered Heaven was to last well into the 19th century. As ** Bishop Reginald Heber** (1783-1826) put it in his hymn
Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore Thee,
casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;
cherubim and seraphim, falling down before Thee,
which wert and art and evermore shalt be.
But from the middle of the 18th century until the end of the 19th, there was a gradual transition to a Heaven centered on human activities. It became a continuation of material existence, only without the sufferings of this present life. The saved were increasingly active in a joy filled environment. Human love replaced the primacy of the divine love. Relationships between people became fundamental to the afterlife, and families were re-united.
By the 20th century, Heaven had received an epic makeover and became part of the modern mind. Heaven is widely regarded as a state after death in which we continue to have a consciousness of ourselves. There remains the conviction that we will be reunited with those whom we loved on this earth. Life there, as on this earth, will be one in which we laugh, love and grow ethically, intellectually and spiritually, but without human suffering. Heaven often has an additional majestic appeal with images of mansions, streets of gold, and abundance.
Revelation 21:4 describes Heaven this way:
“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”
It would be impossible to cover the diverse views, history, meaning and evolution of the notion of Heaven in this short essay. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a useful analysis of ** Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought**. I previously published an extensive article on the doctrine of Hell,
If you’re interested, a few books to explore this subject further would be:
📖* *by Bart D. Ehrman
**📖 The Early History of Heaven **by J. Edward Wright
📖* *by Alister E. McGrath
📖* *by Lisa Miller
It’s important to note that I’m not advocating any particular position or belief about Heaven. It’s true that I’m not particularly fond of the traditional Christian understanding of Heaven, namely because I deconstructed and left behind the theological edifice upon which this conception of Heaven was built. There are many different views of the afterlife, ranging from food for worms to streets of gold. I’m not here to talk you into or out of any belief. My lens on subjects such as these is the philosophy of religion, which in this case involves investigating the significance and meaning of Heaven as a religious idea.
That Heaven is an enduring afterlife narrative, isn’t surprising. The two things humans fear most - death and suffering - are resolved by the notion of Heaven, which is a ready-made paradise of perpetual and eternal bliss, and the absence of all suffering. We are fond of the idea of immortality and eternal paradise.
The traditional Christian concept of Heaven spares people of death anxiety to the extent that it offers the comforting notion that a person continues on into the afterlife, without the downside of our human imperfections and worldly hardships. Next to our own death, the loss of loved ones is perhaps the most traumatic reality of the lived human experience. The concept of Heaven mitigates our emotional anguish with the idea that they are “in a better place” and we will one day be “re-united” with them.
For people who leave religion, they often cease believing in large swarths of their former Christian beliefs. I previously wrote ** an article** on why religion-leavers question the Christian conception of God (Christian Theism). Before long, other beliefs such as belief in Heaven, start to fall.
In my work as a non-religious Spiritual Director, I work with people who left religion and are experiencing existential dread. At the core of this is often death anxiety or the fear of non-being. I previously wrote ** an extensive article** on the subject of the fear of death, and cultivating a healthy death acceptance. I also
One of the central reasons why I founded the ** Center for Non-Religious Spirituality**, was to support people in their deconstruction and reconstruction process. One of the gratitude perks for becoming a paid subscriber is receiving a free full membership to the Center, which includes copies of two books I wrote about religious deconstruction (
I previously published an ** article on the evolution of religion**, and how the religious imagination formed in order to cope with the givens of human existence, in the absence of modern science and psychology. One could argue that the conception of Heaven endures as an existential coping mechanism.
It's hard to say if the idea of heaven would be a natural longing within a human being or if it is inculcated within us through the influence of religion. For example, would a 6-year-old who never went to church suddenly have a moment after launching a projectile with their Stomp Rocket and say, “Please, please, please - let there be a place of eternal perpetual bliss and the absence of all pain and suffering that I will go to when I die!”
The typical idea of Heaven is that it’s a ready-made place one arrives to. There are several things you’d have to believe in order to embrace the traditional Christian concept of Heaven:
✔️ Eternal Heaven is the reward for the true believer, and Eternal Hell is the punishment for the unbeliever.
✔️ Heaven is a place or dimension located somewhere in the universe.
✔️ God is a supernatural being who resides in Heaven.
✔️ After human death, a true believer receives a new imperishable body to continue a human-like experience in Heaven.
✔️ Heaven assumes the continuance of human agency, but the possibility of thinking or acting in destructive ways is no longer present.
✔️ Heaven is the culmination of the narrative of God being the object of universal worship, adoration and glorification.
The challenge, and perhaps the value, of religion is that it attempts to make the non-material, spiritual, metaphysical, transcendent dimension accessible, practical and relatable in human terms. God is anthropomorphized into a supreme being, evil is personified in Satan, eternal truth is encapsulated in a book (the Bible), and the two ultimate destinations are the consequence of our choices, which are represented by two locations - Heaven and Hell.
Depending on how one interprets the Bible, one might take ideas like Heaven literally or figuratively. I can’t emphasize enough how one’s interpretation of the Bible is central to these matters. I ** devoted an entire article** to addressing this.
This is where it is useful to use rational and critical thinking to evaluate these literal interpretations.
Is it rational to conclude that God is a human-like supreme being?
Is it rational that evil is the result of a fallen angel, Satan?
Is it rational that all transcendent truth is contained in one book?
Is it rational that heaven is a location in the sky?
In my book, , I wrote:
“Heaven is the ace in the hole of the Christian religion. It’s the trump card. The promise of heaven is the hope that keeps Christians believing. No matter the hardships that befall their lives or the suffering they see in the world, believers derive a sense of comfort and justice from the idea that there will be a huge payoff in the end. Heaven is regarded as where things finally happen—where Christians’ hopes, rewards, and bliss will materialize. Heaven is the place where salvation is fulfilled and the good life begins—where all the believers are having a ball in their white nightgowns, walking up and down streets of gold and worshipping their God in glory. They have arrived!
Some things about this heaven just don’t add up. How can the “good news” be that we must endure a lifetime of difficulty, misery, and suffering only to get sick and die a miserable death so we can finally be happy and fulfilled? If you went to a restaurant that advertised exquisite cuisine, but said you had to first eat all the rotten food out of the back dumpster to get the good stuff, would you? I’m guessing not! Surely many people reach the end of their life and look back and wonder what the purpose of it was—especially as they leave all their grieving loved ones behind. That is cruel.
And there is something else that doesn’t add up about the Christian religion’s ideas of heaven. Up until now, no one has been there and come back and been able to authentically verify those ideas. While it is true that people have had near-death experiences and spoken of very real spiritual and mystical experiences, there is no scientific hard evidence that proves that heaven exists somewhere out there. It is still very much a theory that Christians cling to. If we were so certain that this belief of heaven as a perfect paradise is so infallible, then why not put end it all and go there now?! Woo hoo! We are out of here! Christians should be racing each other to see who can get there first!
But, despite all the misery of the world, most of us don’t want to die. Instead, we do everything we can to slow down, hold off, and prevent death. We fight tooth and nail to cling to life for as long as we can here on earth—Christians as much as anyone. We spend billions and billions on medical research, doctors, and hospitals. Dying is the last activity we want to take part in.”
What Ludwig, Nietzsche and Marx said
Throughout history, just as religion was advancing the idea of heaven, many philosophers questioned it. 19th-century philosopher ** Ludwig Feuerbach** wrote:
“Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires.”
In my recent article, ** What if Jesus went undercover boss at Joel Osteen's Church?**, I included several ways that I believe that the Christian religion has muddled the legacy of Jesus. One of them is that the vision of Jesus for a transformed society, got twisted into an afterlife fantasy about Heaven. This is the point that Feuerbach is making - that the afterlife Heaven narrative dulls a person’s vision for a meaningful and vibrant herelife in exchange for the futuristic fantasy of eternal bliss.
This was also John Lennon’s sentiment in Imagine:
Imagine there's no heavenIt's easy if you tryNo hell below usAbove us, only sky
Imagine all the peopleLivin' for today
It seems that Lennon’s point is that once we let go of the idea of a future paradise, we more vigorously embrace the potentialities and possibilities of what life offer us now.
Ludwig Feuerbach, in a series of lectures on religion, said the following:
“Man has many wishes that he does not really wish to fulfil, and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose the contrary. He wants them to remain wishes, they have value only in his imagination; their fulfilment would be a bitter disappointment to him. Such a desire is the desire for eternal life. If it were fulfilled, man would become thoroughly sick of living eternally, and yearn for death. In reality man wishes merely to avoid a premature, violent or gruesome death. Everything has its measure, says a pagan philosopher; in the end we weary of everything, even of life; a time comes when man desires death. Consequently, there is nothing frightening about a normal, natural death, the death of a man who has fulfilled himself and lived out his life. Old men often long for death. The German philosopher Kant could hardly wait to die, and not in order to resuscitate, but because he longed for the end. Only an unnatural, unfortunate death, the death of a child, a youth, a man in the prime of life, makes us revolt against death and wish for a new life. Such misfortunes are bitterly painful for the survivors; and yet they do not justify belief in a hereafter, if only because such abnormal cases – and they are abnormal even if they should be more frequent than natural death – could only have an abnormal hereafter as their consequence, a hereafter for those who have died too soon or by violence; but a special hereafter of this kind is an absurdity which no one could believe.”
Feuerbach’s main points are:
The idea of Heaven sounds good on paper but be…
