Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven?
This leads to the paradox that heaven-believers can be held at gunpoint. Logic tells us that, if a thug pointed a large-calibre pistol at a heaven-believer and said, "I'm going to kill you now," the heaven-believer should reply, "Oh, thank you!" If I were standing in line for a concert I wanted to attend, waiting to buy a ticket, and a somebody offered me immediate entrance, I would be pleased. If a Christian really wants to join God in heaven and has done her best to live a good life, shouldn't she be delighted by the prospect of death now rather than later? Why is long life generally still desired?
Of course, some people do want to die, suicides, but most of the theology that promotes heaven-belief also discourages suicide. If you jump the gun and off yourself, the consensus is that heaven may not be your destination, so orthodox suicides aren't reaching for heaven, but rather fleeing life. Their goal is likely to be non-life or oblivion. So I'd bracket off suicides. The question is about people who have a normal, healthy, vigorous lust to live but profess to believe that heaven is promised and is vastly better than mortal life. Why don't these people, the apparent majority, act on their convictions?
The most obvious answer is that they are hypocrites. They don't really believe, only say they do, but this may be too obvious. It naively assumes that we are either all-in or all-out with respect to radical life transitions (which death is certainly analogous to), and that is seldom the case. Dying and going to heaven, even if absolutely real, is less like going to a concert than like emigrating to a foreign country, one with an alien language and culture, never to return. We may have read in brochures that it's a wonderful place, but we still might still be slow to board the ship, prone to delay departure. We'll hug friends and family, already missing hamburgers and sitcoms. Saints and gurus may achieve peaceful separation from life's trivialities before their deaths, but most of us hate to leave the familiar, however great the advertised improvement ahead.
Last night, with this on my mind, I took my dog out to the back yard to relieve himself before bedtime and looked up at the full moon. The night sky has evoked transcendence for me since childhood. The star-field isn't as clear as it used to be, either because of aging eyes or increased light pollution, maybe both, but the moon was clear, a sphere of plains and gleaming mountains. This, along with the breeze in my face and the buzz of cicadas, was a gift of the mortal world. All of this is bodily sensation, the product of meat organs sustained by a finite, beating heart, and must vanish along with redbirds, apples, and the little dog beside me, disappear forever and a day if my meat organs fail--lost even if I'm transported to golden streets.
Also, of course, however much people say they believe, there is uncertainty, maybe huge uncertainty, about an undiscovered country from which no traveler returns. Old books tell of legendary figures who returned from the dead, but nobody has done so recently, verified by science or even reputable journalism. All the descriptions were written by people who had never been there, who may not have known what they were writing about. People have recovered from periods of oxygen deprivation and reported spectacular visions, near-death experiences, but nobody has returned after the brain began to rot. Even Jesus was not, according to gospel reports, a decaying corpse or skeleton, a state that seems irreversible. If there is life to be reported the other side of putrefaction, nobody has reported it. It's one thing to emigrate forever to a well-reported country, but another to board a boat for a country from which nobody you know has ever returned. The absolute absence of first-hand descriptions is at best scary.
Back in the early 20th Century, with the movement called Spiritualism, there were many claims to demonstrate life after death, spirits of the dead speaking in seances, and to some extent the movement continues, but the jury is very much out. Many spiritualist demonstrations have been shown to be frauds, and the rest may result from mental dissociation and wishful thinking. Houdini and his wife famously shared secret code words to be spoken by the first one who died if he or she returned in a seance. That would have been impressive, but it never happened.
Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that all of our mental processes depend on a functioning material brain, suggesting that conscious existence ends when the brain dies. Localized brain damage certainly can change personality, destroy memory, and cause blindness or muteness, cutting away essential elements that we experience as self without killing us. Drugs create strange new realities simply by altering the chemical balance in the brain. All of this suggests that who we are, our soul, depends on our brain-state, so no brain means no soul.
The spiritualist answer to this is that the meat body is only one of a cluster of overlapping bodies, the next one up usually called the astral body. The bodies are resonant, synchronized if you please, but do not depend on each other. A person exists, not only on the physical plane, but independently on a parallel astral plane with a full set of senses and thought processes. Brain damage on the material plane merely blocks the material expression of processes that continue uninterrupted in spite of material injury or death. Astral bodies live on on the astral plane.
Charles Webster Leadbeater's charming little book, The Astral Plane: It's Scenery, Inhabitants, and Phenomena, gives a Cook's tour of this spirit-body world, said to be visited in astral projection. Unfortunately, the claims of Leadbeater and other proponents of the parallel soul dissolve into, "Trust me, I've had these experiences." No controlled experiments have detected this soul to the satisfaction of skeptics. In 1901, Duncan MacDougall put six dying patients on an industrial scale to weigh the soul but got no consistent results. All we have are living people with living experiences, so any claims about the life after death are speculative.
Most religious people admit it's a matter of faith, which Mark Twain defined as "believing in something you know ain't true." He exaggerates, of course, but faith certainly is believing in what you don't know is true. If you did, it would be knowledge, not faith. Vast swaths of life are encompassed by faith, areas that are a matter of taste and judgement, where no hard evidence is available.
Some people say that it's equally a matter of faith to assume no life after death, but the evidence seems uneven here. When somebody dies, when a body begins to rot, it's pretty obvious that they are gone, and they don't get any livelier the longer you look, unless you count worms. Outside of the evidence of ghosts and seances, which are far less obviously real, death seems pretty final--obvious even--and faith is more a matter of disbelieving the obvious than believing it.
Still, according to the Pew Research poll, a large majority of Americans have faith, not only that there's life beyond the obvious in a corpse, but also that this life involves eternal rewards for good people--not just ghosts, reincarnation, or free-floating consciousness in a void. Seventy-three percent of Americans believe in heaven for some reason, even if not passionately enough to make them welcome death. I think the simplest way to express this reason is to say that heaven is a healthy thing to believe in. There are at least three reasons for this.
First, if we believe, even half-heartedly, that God sees our behavior, wants us to behave, and has an enforcement tool, we're more likely to behave. Our neighbors, friends, and family, as a rule, prefer that we behave, so they encourage us to believe, or at least say we do--or, anyway, to teach the belief to others we all want to behave. This is a cynical process. Some religious people say that, without belief in eternal rewards and punishments, people would be totally immoral, but this is grossly cynical.
A much less cynical reason is that heaven gives meaning to life. In his classic essay, "The Absurd," Thomas Nagel asserts that human actions are meaningless when framed in infinite time and space. How can I imagine, trapped in six feet of skin and a few decades of life, that what I do can possibly matter in the great world, on a planet circling a sun destined to go supernova eons before the heat death of the universe? And I don't have to look at a frame so big to sense the pointlessness, against the stars, of filling my belly and yours. If "life's a bitch and then you die," only animal instinct can make me go on. And yet I do. And yet I want to. Isn't it better if I embrace an absolute, eternal reason that what I do somehow matters? Is the sense of absurdity a disease of thought that may be properly cured by a nostrum of belief? We are in love with passing things, and the heaven connection makes them absolute and eternal.
Finally, there's the instinctual fear of death, the ego's hunger for continuance, for another day of life. This animal appetite may be the main reason that heaven-believers can be held at gunpoint. In the Middle Ages, it was customary for a priest to hold a crucifix over a dying man's bed, telling him to gaze at it as he died to smooth his way to heaven, but this very practice, though based on faith in the power of the church, shows the weakness of faith itself. If faith in the promise of heaven and the reconciling power of the sacraments had been as strong as the sense of approaching death, the dying man would have needed no comforting crucifix. He would have been delighted to die anyway, but delight in death just isn't part of healthy human nature. Belief in heaven is a less material form of the crucifix held up by the priests. It works to soothe, if not to eliminate, terrors that may paralyze us, not only near death, but at junctures in life. Without the courage to to die, we may be unable to fully live.
So in three ways belief in heaven is good, which may be why it's so widespread. But is it true? The scientific evidence is against it, of course, and nobody knows for absolute, double-dog sure. It's tempting to add "either way," but, really, the silence of the graveyard is hard to shout out, and numerous contradictory accounts of the afterlife argue against assurance that any one of them is reliable. Still, life is more about living well than about being right, which may be something that the seventy-three percent understand. Given a strict binary choice of being good or being right, being good may be the wiser choice. You don't argue with a crying child.
*Seven percent more believe in another form of afterlife, so four out of five Americans apparently believe in personal immortality.
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