Thoughts

By Daniel in Thoughts ⋅ February 28, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

I don't believe in Heaven. The reason people do - in fact, the reason anyone believes in any kind of afterlife - is relatively clear to me, though. The simplest way to explain it, without meaning to be crass, is that Heaven is simply wishful thinking; it is an idea created by humans to fill a gap, popularised as a reward to sweeten the deal. I certainly don't want to die, which is a sentiment I would conjecture the majority of humans share - but if I'm not going to die, there has to be somewhere for me to go when I 'appear' to die, right? Not necessarily.

Naturally, any form of scrutiny renders the idea of heaven idea fallacious. Wanting something that is impossible on human terms will not increase the odds of it actually happening, however much we might persuade myself that it will. This is all by the by - the point I want to make is, can the idea of an afterlife actually be harmful? On a personal so-called 'spiritual' level perhaps not, but for humanity as a whole, it poses some interesting moral questions.

Consider the following thought experiment. You are presented with two beings, identical in all but their lifespan. The first is predicted to live for fifty years, the second for fifty thousand. Both are wrongly accused of a crime, the penalty for which is fifty years of incarceration, without compromise. You are allowed to select one to go free.

No genuine moral person would pause for thought at this point. The answer is most definitely that the first being, with the shortest lifespan, should be freed - his incarceration would take him up until his death, while the second being would only serve a thousandth of his life imprisoned unjustly.

One message that could be taken from this scenario is that we are more likely to take action to help a person in need when their suffering is all they will ever know, when there is nothing for them afterwards. The natural counter to this is that a religious believer considers any human worthy of heaven, if they earn their place; yet the fact is that without heaven, we are not given an excuse to allow unnecessary suffering of any kind. One only has  to look at the long list of celebrated religious martyrs (Jesus is the one example everyone knows - hanging on a cross for three days would have been slightly more difficult to bear if the place he was so damned eager to go didn't exist) to see that the idea of heaven is a moral brick wall - one which impairs the human ability for reason.

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