Not So Heavenly?

In the past, I've alluded to how perverse of a concept hell is and to how ridiculous it is for God and religious leaders alike to hold this as a threat over people. But, while I've held the common criteria for getting into heaven to be equally asinine, I've been fairly willing to go along with the idea that heaven would be a nice place if it actually existed. After further consideration, though, I'm not so sure.

Heaven is generally held to be the perfect afterlife destination filled with nothing but sheer joy and contentment. Paradise. Xanadu. Sounds quite fetching, doesn't it? But have you ever stopped to consider what it would take for such a place to be perfect for even one person, let alone untold billions?

Think about it. What would you want? I'm sure you'd want all your friends and family there, for starters. Well, we could have a problem already. What if some of your loved ones didn't make the cut? You'd miss them for all eternity. I suppose God could always make clones or illusions of them, but that wouldn't be the same. Or he could erase your memories of them, or simply make you not miss them. But then he'd be fiddling around with your mind, and you would no longer be you. Would you be okay with some alternate version of you getting to enjoy eternity when the real you had to earn it in the material world? Would you be okay with God deciding what makes you happy and what doesn't? Wouldn't that be nixing your free will?

Just gonna make a few minor adjustments...

Those are some of the problems that could easily arise when considering the desires of a single person. How rapidly would the problems multiply when you toss a crapload of other people into the mix? Each would face the same problems of coping with the painful absences. But what about conflicts of interest? To use a simple example of just one such conflict, imagine two men are in love with the same woman. Who gets her? Do they have to share her, and will their minds also be altered so that they don't mind the sharing? How does the woman feel about it? Does she prefer one? Both? Neither? Someone else?

What about sex in general? Is the desire for sex suddenly erased, or is it one giant orgasmic free-for-all? How would your spouse feel about you sexing everyone up? How would you feel about your spouse doing the same?

I suppose you could solve a lot of these conflicting desire problems by giving everyone their own personal, individual heavens. But then each person would be isolated, they'd be interacting only with fake versions of other people, and we start right back with that set of problems.

Well, dammit, it all seemed real enough just a minute ago...

As far as I can tell, any way you slice it, something would have to be fake. Either you would be fake, having your mind and desires altered, or your surroundings (e.g. the other people) would be fake. Heaven would be filled with illusions. Fantasies. Wouldn't it stand to reason, then, that heaven itself is nothing more than a fantasy?

This is a problem, of course, because fantasies never compare to reality. Ask Inception or Star Trek's holodecks. Hell, ask yourself. When does fantasizing no longer cut it for you? At what point do you have to have the real thing?

Now, believe me, I'm not at all against fantasizing. I do it all the time. It's a nice escape, and it can certainly be fun for a while. But it never trumps reality. And what I find most troubling about the heaven fantasy is that many people, "aided" by religion, try their damnedest to make it trump their actual lives.

In heaven, it never stops spinning

Yes, the world can be a rough place. Reality sucks sometimes. Retreating into fantasies can be a way of coping, but ultimately, it's only a delay. Sooner or later, you have to come back down to reality. Some people retreat so far into the heaven fantasy that they disregard their actual lives as meaningless. They allow the fantasy to become the true existence, effectively treating reality as the mirage. It's a total reversal--and a desperate one. Not only have they deluded themselves, but they also can no longer deal with anyone who challenges their delusions. They can only interact with people who play into their fantasies, and that may be the saddest state of all.

All of this fantasizing and enabling of others' destructive fantasies takes a lot of effort, and it's all in the wrong direction. Imagine how much better our lives could be if we concentrated those efforts on actually improving this world instead of trying to escape from it. Reality is often harsh, but it's not fixed. It can be improved if enough people focus their efforts in the right direction. Earth may never be heaven, but it could be a reality that isn't so terrible. And we know it actually exists. That's gotta count for something.