Sunday, May 11, 2014

What is Heaven like?

Ever since I was a child I have had only one question in my mind. What is Life?

I am a problem solver - I do that now even in my IT career. While I do have regular human male thoughts that run through my mind daily the biggest thought in my head I spend most of my brain power on is trying to figure out Life. I started with what most people do - I looked to religion first. When I was around ten years old my mother enrolled me in Catholic Sunday school where I became the faculties nightmare with all my questions.

"If God made us and the world, who made God?"

"How can dinosaur and other archaeological remains be explained if we originated from the Garden of Eden?"

"What happens to people that have never heard of God and Christianity?"

Some answers the nuns, priests, and staff gave me made sense, but most of my questions didn't get satisfactory answers. Eventually I pissed off a nun so much with my counter questions she just told me to stop asking so many questions and just have some faith.

Faith in something I believe in I have. Blind faith is something I don't.

I don't want to turn this blog post into an anti-Christianity issue - at least not this one. The point is if you are a logical thinking type person most religions are not going to give you the answers to Life questions since most depend on the follower having blind faith.

So from age ten to thirteen I went on a reading binge of religions. I have either read or skimmed (some of it is terribly written) every religious book from the Bible to the Book of the Dead. I am not an expert on all of them but I am familiar. This experience was great for opening my mind but still left me with many questions.

One thing every religion has in common is they have a paradise for the deserving to go to in the afterlife. That sounds great! But what exactly is Heaven?

I was told by Christian's that Heaven is a wonderful place where we will live forever rejoicing in the name of God.

OK, so what does that mean exactly? I get up at noon, roll out of bed and skip showering or brushing my teeth(it is Heaven after all I'm sure there is no body odor or tooth decay). And then eat a dozen doughnuts and a pound of bacon (again it's Heaven so no need to worry about getting fat). Then after putting my sandals (sandals are like Air Jordan's in Heaven because Jesus endorses them) on I head outside to join million's of others in what I imagine is the largest church choir assembled and proceed to rejoice in the name of God. Rinse and repeat times forever?

Yeah I don't know...

Now some of my beliefs do include making oneself better and what we do in this life dictates what happens after we die. I just don't believe it happening the Christian version.

All religions have a doctrine of being faithful and good (according to the religion) and one day we will be rewarded with a wonderful afterlife.  But I'm not sure I want to accept this offer until I know for sure what this said afterlife is like. And to me this has a completely wrong attitude and philosophy. Why do we have to wait until death to live in the world we want?

Why can't we have Heaven now?

Now before people start listing the hundreds of obvious reasons why we can't, I would rather start a list in a more positive way.

I would appreciate some comments left of people's opinions of what Heaven is like or at least what they think and/or want it to be like.

Then after collecting some feedback I will go on from there.