Using Me!

The contradictory nature of heaven

I mentioned this earlier but I thought that it would bear expanding upon into a whole article.

Is the nature of heaven not just self-contradictory?

Just a really simple example to get you thinking. Jim marries Alice and they love each other dearly. Very sadly Alice dies aged 25 and Jim after overcoming his grief marries Jane, when they are both 28. Jim dies ages 94 and a little later Jane dies aged 96.

Who is together in Heaven? Alice and Jim? Jim and Jane? All three? What kind of age are they as ’spirits’? How do they relate to one another? What happens with ‘rejoining your loved ones’ in heaven? Wouldn’t Alice and Jane be jealous of each other? Perhaps there are two Jims? What if they had a dog that made them much happier than just being together? But dog’s do not have souls so can’t be reincarnated? So if not then wouldn’t God be hurting them by not giving them the dog back? What if JIm lost an arm between losing Alice and marrying Jane? Would he have two arms, or one, or a variable number?

 I challenge any religious person to answer the above adequately to satisfy the wonderings, not of me, but of the merely dubious. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What about children who die in childbirth? Do they grow up in heaven or remain as babies? What about infants? Do they learn to walk? What about children with an inquisitive mind? Do they learn cosmology? What about blastocenes? Or Zygotes on their way to fertilisation? Where is the line drawn? Where does life begin and when does ‘being saved’  begin.

• How does the person who never encountered Christianity explain themself to God?
• If the Jews are right how does the Christian escape Hell for Idolatry?
• Never forget that you tell me that God is all-forgiving (except when he condemns me to hell of course).

What will I do if I die and find myself abased before a God? I won’t do anything because he or she will obviously know my heart and he or she will know that I have for the most part acted in good faith for the benefit of the species. But I do not trouble myself with such thoughts. I was dead for many billions of years before I was born and I will be dead for many billions of years afterwards. The universe doesn’t care and it doesn’t bother me that it doesn’t care.