Heaven

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HEAVEN

Heaven to some is a peaceful Sunday morning, playing with children or animals, reading, exercising, and socializing. Such a heaven depends upon having time to pursue it.

Heaven to others is a reference to a physical place - Heaven - where, in an afterlife, one is destined to reach if he or she is a believer.

To some, Heaven is populated for eternity by angels, demons, gods and goddesses, and/or heroes (especially in Greek mythology). Heaven is generally construed as a place of happiness, sometimes eternal happiness.

The popular belief of most faiths is that one enters Heaven at the moment of death. This, however, is not part of the doctrine of all of Christianity. Swedenborgianism, for example, does have this doctrine. Some of Christianity along with other major religions maintain that entry into Heaven awaits such time as "When the form of this world has passed away."

Many views have been advanced concerning Heaven.

Contents

Heaven, Believe It Or Not

Revelation XXI states that Heaven measures 12,000 furlongs in length, breadth, and also height. Robert L. “Believe It Or Not” Ripley in 1925 figured that that comes to

496,793,088,000,000,000,000 cubic feet.

Or about 1500 miles long in each dimension, give or take a few cubes. If 10 cubic feet for each human is allowed (it being assumed that non-humans are to be excluded), Heaven can hold

49,679,308,800,000,000,000 beings.

However, Ripley then figured that, assuming 25 years as a generation, and that roughly 77 generations of humans have existed simply since the time of Jesus, the number in the human family will have reached

302,231,454,657,293,676,543 humans

which is more than all humans who have ever lived.

(Mathematicians note that Ripley’s calculations may not have taken into account that one’s relatives increase in number but never overlap those being counted by others. And he assumes humanity’s pool increases exponentially as one goes back in time, although the reverse is the case.)

At any rate, believe it or not, the good news in 1925 was that if almost all somehow made it to Heaven, they would be able to meet their father and mother and other family members (but not those relatives, of course, that were sinners or forgot us in their will). However, as for those bad folks, the sinners, who are not allowed into Heaven, Hosea Ballou (1771—1852) taught that Hell could not - logically or ethically - exist, that all men at death will be saved by the love of God. If God is the ultimate of good, how could He reasonably reject any human being! Ripley had no comment on this, except that like Ballou he also included the entire human family. Ripley’s bad news, believe it or not, was that your parents would have met theirs, and theirs would have met theirs, theirs theirs, and so forth. It also would mean that because of the space limitations everyone would of necessity be stacked on each other’s heads to a height of 113,236 miles, according to Ripley’s figures. That’s if they stand, not lie down. So to say hello to your dear oldest grandfather, who may be down toward the 113,000 miles bottom of the heap, assuming new arrivals are at the top of the heap, you will need to take about 39 years to descend, even if you are careful not to step on someone’s ear as you do.

Extrapolating further, Ripley figured that if we met one relative a minute, and took off no time for sleeping, it would take 575,000,000,000,000,000 years to meet the entire human family, not counting any human beings who would be born after 1925. In 1925, then, did Ripley believe in Heaven? Apparently not, and his 1929 book was popularly received, to the distress of the religious establishment. But philosophic naturalists and non-believers are distressed that religionists preach such an idea. Who is to blame, they ask, when a six-year-old Miami girl, having been told by her mother who was dying of AIDS that she was going to a wonderful place called heaven, sees her mother die, then calmly steps in front of a freight train in order to see her mother.

Experts, instead of blaming the heaven-preachers, argue as to whether or not a very young child can commit suicide. Can such a youngster possibly grasp the finality of death? Remarked a child-adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Miami when the deliberate act took place in June, 1993, “I don’t think we can ever know for sure what was on her mind.” Meanwhile, the girl’s adult cousin said the girl knew exactly what she was doing: “She said she’d seen an angel, and she was going to Heaven to be with the angel. So she just stood there with her eyes closed, and the train hit her.” Believe it or not! Others who have commented upon Heaven include the following:

  • • In heaven all the interesting people are missing. — Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
  • • If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons. — James Thurber
  • • Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside. — George Bernard Shaw
  • • Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous. — George Santayana
  • • Only that person is wise who finds everything in life but also finds nothing in death but death. To the intelligent person, life is its own end; for that very reason, it is preparation for nothing. — Ludwig Feuerbach
  • • Heaven, n. A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
  • • He: What do you suppose comes after life?
She: Just sort of a great merging with everything.
He: Oh, I hope not! I’m a very bad merger! — Noel Coward, Private Lives


(See entry for Edwin Powell Hubble.)

{CE; ER}

Opinions About Heaven

Barbara Walters, an ABC television reporter, on a 20 December 2005 program discussed Heaven with various individuals.

  • Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf said he believes "We will be in comfortable homes, reclining on silk couches. We will have people coming - servants, lovely servants, young youths to regale you, Barbara. Residing in gardens beyond which rivers flow." He added there will be sex and virgins, even for women. But he quarreled with the widespread misconception that Islamic martyrs get 72 virgins. Seventy-two, he said, is just an Arabic expression for "countless."
  • A convicted murderer from Islamic Jihad said he joined the group not for its promises of Heaven but because "I wanted to kill Jews."
  • For Jackie Mason, a comedian and rabbi, "There's nothing really more that I want," saying life before death is completely satisfactory. But in any hereafter he expects to eat pastrami without gaining weight.
  • Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor reportedly does not fear death because during a near-death experience she felt she had been reunited temporarily with her third husband, Mike Todd.
  • Cardinal Theodore McCormick, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, admitted that he hopes he'll get his hair back in Heaven."
  • Ted Haggard, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said that if a person does not accept Jesus Christ as his or her savior, he or she will go to Hell. Walters, who is Jewish, asked, "What if the God is not Jesus Christ? What if it's a different God? Do they go to Hell? "I think so, unfortunately," he responded.
  • Sports columnist and author Mitch Aboum, author of The Five People You Meet in Heaven, said he finds the idea of Heaven makes life better by making us feel there is something more than the meaningless of daily life.

Walters, who is Jewish, said nearly 90 percent of Americans believe Heaven exists. Interestingly, she did not interview eminent non-believers.

Heaven or Paradise?

Males doing comparison shopping might note the differences between the Christians’ Heaven and the Muslims’ Paradise. According to the Hadith, which is the Islamic tradition of the sayings and the practices of the Prophet:

  • Every man who enters Paradise shall be given seventy-two houris, [and] no matter at what age he had died, when he enters Paradise, he will not age any further.

Some have interpreted Muhammad's views differently, saying in Paradise all will be in their twenties, that a frail centenarian would surely not have to spend eternity at that age.

Antony Flew has suggested that “any man who fears that even as an everlasting thirty-year-old he would not be able to do justice to the attractions of this eschatological brothel may be encouraged to learn that ‘A man in Paradise shall be given virility equal to that of one hundred men.’ ” {New Humanist, October 1998}

Heaven, a Dead Certainty

A 1997 poll by U.S. News & World Reports found that 67% of Americans are certain that Heaven exists. Further, 87% think they are likely to go there. Just 18%, however, thought all their friends would join them in Paradise.

{Reuters, 23 March 1997}

Heaven, Muslim

In Muhammad the Prophet’s day, belief in an afterlife was virtually nonexistent. To him, however, the Qur’an was “revealed,” and the book contained eloquent descriptions of the dread day when resurrected bodies are joined with their souls and brought before the throne of God’s judgment. First, a trumpet is blown; resurrection occurs; there is an ingathering of all persons for the judgment; an actual reckoning (hisab) is made; then comes a crossing of the Sirat bridge, the possibility of intercession (shafaah), and preparation is made for the final consignment either to the fires of hell (al-nar) or the garden of bliss (al-jannat). Hell is a place where the tortures of the fire are fearful, the flames crackle and roar, fierce boiling waters are all around, the wind is scorching, and black smoke is everywhere. People sigh, they wail, their scorched skin is exchanged for new skin so they can experience the pain again and again, they drink foul liquids, boiling water is poured over their heads, and if they try to escape they are dragged back by iron hooks. Heaven, however, is a Paradise. Here is found peace, contentment, gentle speech, pleasant shade from dark green foliage, fruits, cool drink, and the meat and wine one desires. In Heaven, one can recline on couches and be waited upon by manservants. Males have huris, young virgins said to have eyes like guarded pearls. Some contemporary Muslims are in disagreement as to whether the descriptions are meant to be literal or figurative. “Literal” is the view of the majority, particularly those with little education.

Heavenly Plain

See entry for Shinto.

Epiphenomenalism

Epiphenomenalism consists of a group of doctrines about mental-physical causal relations. These are defined in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy and, as Paul Edwards has observed, T. H. Huxley was a pioneer proponent of the idea. The theory implies that human beings do not survive the death of their bodies in any form whatsoever. {PE; OCP}

(See Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not A Muslim [1995] and the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (1995)}

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