Will Momma be Blonde in Heaven?

Heaven, everlasting life - what a crock.

Heaven is pie-in-the-sky. Nobody has a consistent view of what awaits in "the afterlife". Christians cannot even resolve the simple question as to what the timetable is. Do bodies await in the grave until the last trump or do souls start to follow the light down the tunnel to heaven when the heart stops beating? Christians will try to have it both ways, the Bible is literally true and yet accounts of near death experiences which suggest something beyond the ordinary are taken to be proof of the accuracy of stories which actually contradict such accounts. This matter really can't be fudged, do souls go to heaven immediately or do they sleep in the grave and await full bodily resurrection? You can't play it both ways like Schrödinger's cat both in heaven and sleeping in the grave, at least one of those contradictory stories must be wrong.

Biblical literalism is a non-starter because the Bible is so contradictory. God cannot be all wise and all knowing and yet take a walk in another part of the Garden and avoid witnessing the original unforgivable sin which he redeems by allowing himself to be killed to placate his own wrath and/or commitment to something above and beyond him which could not exist but he is jealous of. Yes that sentence is too long and it doesn't make any sense, but that's religion for you, it is fundamentally contradictory but is constructed in such way that it is just that little bit too big to take in and attempt to parse in one go, because if you ever did manage to hold the entire thing in your conscious mind at the same time it would collapse under its own inconsistency. It survives merely because everybody thinks somebody else understands it better than they do and trusts that they have satisfied themselves that it does all hang together. Of course once a person has committed themselves to the cause and identified themselves with it 100% then to admit that they cannot fully make sense of it is to declare their entire life futile and themselves a failure. All you have to do is believe, if you can't even do that then what kind of a worthless wretch are you? Stepping back is not a viable option, true honesty becomes impossible so they make a new kind of truth, the truth that must be true, the truth that cannot be allowed to be doubted: they learn the secret of faith. You cannot doubt that which you cannot doubt. You cannot doubt that which you have committed yourself never to doubt. A failed believer is a total failure. Such failure is unthinkable so don't think, just believe and have faith that faith is good. People who say the opposite are just bloody-minded people who don't deserve to be saved.

Will Momma be Blonde in Heaven?

Preachers always suggest that whatever you want heaven to be that's what heaven will be. They are worse shysters than politicians.

Just think about it for a few moments. Full bodily resurrection. Bones grow flesh and the dead come to life. But do they take on the body they left or a younger body? Will momma be blonde like she was when she was six or will she be have the mousy hair that nature (God) intended?

Will you be re-united with your loved ones in heaven? How will that work? I would like to meet my grandparents as I remember them, but I have no doubt that they would prefer to be embodied how they remember themselves, much younger. And would they want to meet their grandparents? Of course they would. But that introduces more problems. Some of my ancestors had more than one family. How will God sort that one out? Two loving Christian wives. Will my great grandfather have two wives in heaven? If so what will he do with them? This is another question that doesn't get answered very well. It seems the answer involves doing a lot of being happy and praising God, for ever and ever. Am I alone in thinking that this offers a rather dubious prospect of satisfaction? Isn't the whole point of being human about striving to make things better?

People are never satisfied, that is a truism, so how can sitting on a cloud praising God, for ever, ever hope to be satisfying? Just imagine Einstein having a ten minute chat with the personal God he didn't believe in, ah, so that's how it works... That isn't going to very satisfying is it? There's the answer, listen, read it, understand it, OK, get back on that cloud and pluck that harp. Is that Scientific Heaven or Scientific Hell?

Imagine Rockefeller, Getty, Edison, Charlemagne or Alexander the Great in heaven. It doesn't work, does it? Nobody with any drive would ever be happy in a paradise that involved no struggle. Heaven has been designed to appeal to farmers, labourers and slaves. It isn't an appealing prospect to people who have invented, discovered, pushed back boundaries or created new paradigms. Heaven is for nobodies not for people who live full lives.

Heaven is designed to appeal to the put-upon and the exploited. A place of no pain. A place where wrongs will be righted and our side will live and their side will be somewhere else. Heaven is for losers. A place where those who came last can come first and yet those who came first can also look forward to going. Heaven is a place where everybody wins and yet still feels satisfied. It doesn't work, does it? It's a crock. A transparent fiction designed to take the sting out of both death and a life that is unfair. All you have to do is turn off your critical faculties and believe it. Don't be a jerk, follow the flock.

I have no doubt that this page will yield angry replies from Christians who don't want to look like fools. People who will say that I am the fool and the Bible says so. Don't bother, I have had that quoted at me by Christians dozens of times. The Bible is of no greater significance to me than any other old book. I do not regard it as Holy, inspired or devoid of artifice. Of course it contains warnings to take its own words seriously but a religious book cannot validate itself any more than a forged banknote can validate itself with its forged copied signature and forged copied seal. The Bible, the Book of Mormon or the Koran cannot be proven to be the word of God by looking up their authority in the book of the Word of God any more than a man can prove himself to be telling the truth by telling you he is telling the truth or identify himself by pointing himself out in a mirror.

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