Which Heaven and Hell Exists?

[Soph0571]

For most religious people, belief in heaven and hell is a matter of faith. Faith by definition is a belief in something where there is an absence of evidence to prove its existence.

Mathew chapter 25 reveals how the Son of Man will come in all his glory, surrounded by the holy angels and will divide the nations of the world as a shepherd divides his sheep from his goats. The sheep will go to heaven; the goats are destined for hell, described in the Bible as a place of everlasting fire and eternal punishment, designed by God for Satan and his demons.

Some people of faith would argue that both Heaven and Hell are a physical place. Hell is a place of Torment. Heaven is a place of Love and Peace. That as there is evil in this world, not having a place where a loving and just God could punish that evil would be impossible.

Many people, across faith structures, fervently believe in heaven as a real place, but differing belief structures leads to the exclusion of other faiths accessing their heaven in most circumstances. So do different heavens and hells exist for different faiths? Or is only one heaven available and if you do not follow the tenants of that faith you are excluding yourself from heaven, and ergo condemning yourself to hell, for all eternity? Does that not seem a bit harsh??

Hawkings has said that death is the same as a breakdown of a computer when the components fail. If that is the case, perhaps the best heaven we can hope for is akin to a trip to the recycling centre??

There is a clear difference between the Islamic and Judeo-Christian views of heaven and hell. Heaven for Muslims seems a rather opulent affair. The Koran is very descriptive and goes into a lot of detail, with regards to age, beards, maidens and virgins and every man will have 2 wives! Rivers of wine, rivers or milk, rivers of honey. Women are compared to gem stones. It is a very paternalistic view of heaven. Hell is also rather different. Muslims do not believe that hell is a place of eternal damnation, of fire or brimstones. Rather it is a place where you do penance before moving onto a place of final abode.

Heaven from a Judeo – Christian standpoint it somewhat different. With a belief structure centred on a moral god, there is a fundamental tenant of faith that God will judge us. Scriptures talk about spending eternity with God, being in the presence of God, that if you make it to Heaven you will make it to a place where the old order of things has passed away. No more tears, sorrow or death. A new Heaven and a new Earth. Condemned for eternity into the lake of fire if you do not get through the Pearly Gates, there is no redemption in the after life if you got it wrong in this life.

So who’s Heaven and Hell is the right Heaven and Hell? What if you get it wrong? What do you do then?

[safeinOhio]

1. Universalism goes way back.

[Jim__]

2. Aeon has an essay on the gospel of Paul that gives his view of heaven as very different from ...

... your description.

The essay is by David Bentley Hart:

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion, and a philosopher, writer and cultural commentator. He is an associate at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, and his latest book is The New Testament: A Translation (2017). He lives in South Bend, Indiana.

An excerpt from his essay:

This past year, I burdened the English-speaking world with my very own translation of the New Testament – a project that I undertook at the behest of my editor at Yale University Press, but that I agreed to almost in the instant that it was proposed. I had long contemplated attempting a ‘subversively literal’ rendering of the text. Over the years, I had become disenchanted with almost all the standard translations available, and especially with modern versions produced by large committees of scholars, many of whom (it seems to me) have been predisposed by inherited theological habits to see things in the text that are not really there, and to fail to notice other things that most definitely are. Committees are bland affairs, and tend to reinforce our expectations; but the world of late antiquity is so remote from our own that it is almost never what we expect.

...

Questions of law and righteousness, however, are secondary concerns. The essence of Paul’s theology is something far stranger, and unfolds on a far vaster scale. For Paul, the present world-age is rapidly passing, while another world-age differing from the former in every dimension – heavenly or terrestrial, spiritual or physical – is already dawning. The story of salvation concerns the entire cosmos; and it is a story of invasion, conquest, spoliation and triumph. For Paul, the cosmos has been enslaved to death, both by our sin and by the malign governance of those ‘angelic’ or ‘daemonian’ agencies who reign over the earth from the heavens, and who hold spirits in thrall below the earth. These angelic beings, these Archons, whom Paul calls Thrones and Powers and Dominations and Spiritual Forces of Evil in the High Places, are the gods of the nations. In the Letter to the Galatians, he even hints that the angel of the Lord who rules over Israel might be one of their number. Whether fallen, or mutinous, or merely incompetent, these beings stand intractably between us and God. But Christ has conquered them all.

In descending to Hades and ascending again through the heavens, Christ has vanquished all the Powers below and above that separate us from the love of God, taking them captive in a kind of triumphal procession. All that now remains is the final consummation of the present age, when Christ will appear in his full glory as cosmic conqueror, having ‘subordinated’ (hypetaxen) all the cosmic powers to himself – literally, having properly ‘ordered’ them ‘under’ himself – and will then return this whole reclaimed empire to his Father. God himself, rather than wicked or inept spiritual intermediaries, will rule the cosmos directly. Sometimes, Paul speaks as if some human beings will perish along with the present age, and sometimes as if all human beings will finally be saved. He never speaks of some hell for the torment of unregenerate souls.

The new age, moreover – when creation will be glorified and transformed into God’s kingdom – will be an age of ‘spirit’ rather than ‘flesh’. For Paul, these are two antithetical principles of creaturely existence, though most translations misrepresent the antithesis as a mere contrast between God’s ‘spirit’ and human perversity. But Paul is quite explicit: ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom.’ Neither can psychē, ‘soul’, the life-principle or anima that gives life to perishable flesh. In the age to come, the ‘psychical body’, the ‘ensouled’ or ‘animal’ way of life, will be replaced by a ‘spiritual body’, beyond the reach of death – though, again, conventional translations usually obscure this by speaking of the former, vaguely, as a ‘natural body’.

...

The essay claims that John's gospel contains similar views of the cosmos.

[gtar100]

5. Thanks for posting that. Fascinating (n/t)

[qazplm135]

10. So basically...

Ascension from Stargate? lol

[MineralMan]

3. For many, the concept of Heaven and Hell are well illustrated

during their actual lives. That's how atheists view it, as well. There's no need for a supernatural afterlife, and no belief that any such thing exists at all. We make our own heavens and hells, or they are thrust upon us, while we live. Expecting something different after we die is at the core of religious belief, I guess. I can't see it as possible or even necessary. One pass through life is the only thing we can be certain of having. Make the most of it is my advice at age 73. Don't wait.

[Igel]

4. Tanakh and NT have different descriptions.

I can't reconcile them without making them so abstract as to be meaningless. "Hell is separation from God" sort of pabulum.

There are different descriptions of heavens, too. The birds fly in the heavens. God's in heaven. I have yet to see God flitting from branch to branch or flying to a power line to roost.

So when you die, you're in hell. The Tanakh has a nifty "gathered to his fathers," which I always thought was a nice metaphor. Then I saw that in the area around current Israel they usually lay bodies in tombs to decompose, and clear out the bones to reuse the tombs. In some cases prominent people's bones would be kept separate in ossuaries. In other cases, there'd be a hollowed-out chamber under the tomb where the bones would be chucked. Literally gathered with their fathers' bones. I say when you die you're in the grave. For my father, hell is apparently the corner of my office, in a metal urn.

Then there are metaphorical extensions. Lazarus was alive and talking in hell. Meh. Nice analogy. Don't see a necessary assertion there. "Living hell" is the same kind of metaphor.

Gehenna is a koine word for 'hell'. It was literally the trash dump outside of Jerusalem. You put things there to burn them up and be rid of them. So I figure gehenna for the damned is where they're put to be burned up and rid of.

At that all the hells that people are consigned to are at an end. I don't see one where the dead are placed to suffer interminably. Some days I'm of the opinion that god's a dick, but not that much of a sick f**k. (Other days I'm not of that opinion. It's complicated.)

Same for heaven. God's in heaven. Angels get there, too. In 50 AD somebody claiming rights to say the truth said of all humans, only Jesus had gone to heaven, and that's because he came from there. Jesus said nobody had gone to heaven. That included Moses and David, so the standard for entrance had to be pretty high. 20 years after the crucifixion nobody had qualified, so the standards must be very high. Stephen didn't make the cut, and he was killed for his faith. (Apparently everybody now goes to heaven, so Stephen got a raw deal, if you believe most ministers. Hell, many think their cats or goldfish are higher priority than poor youngish Stephanus.)

But there are birds in heaven, so either there are two heavens or things are very confused. Yet English has the same distinction: The heavens are the atmosphere; the overarching 'vault' or sky, i.e., the welkin in its etymological meaning; or the abode of the god(s), wherever that is.

The New Jerusalem, where the saints are with God, is explicitly said to descend from heaven to Earth for habitation, not to be in heaven. The entire "we go to heaven" is rationalized by the same 'book' in which the souls of the dead are under an altar in heaven. That nicely follows the thinking that the Tabernacle and Temple were made after a model of what exists in heaven; when animals were sacrificed, their blood, their lives, were poured on at the base of or under the altar; and it says those are those who were martyred or sacrificed for their faith in God. But if you don't know the context as to how a likely reader would interpret it, it could mean anything.


Then there's purgatory. For those that we don't sentence to hell because we like them too much or feel sorry for them, but really can't say are going to heaven quite yet.

[edhopper]

6. Imagine there's no Heaven

it's easy if you try.
No Hell below us
above us only sky

[NeoGreen]

7. None of the Above (NT)

[Voltaire2]

8. When you die you are dead.

I know, it’s difficult, but there it is. And there you aren’t. Grow up. This is the life you have.

[NeoGreen]

9. Close you eyes for 1 second...

...you just experienced the forever after you die, with no pain, no worries, no heaven, no hell.

Human existence is scary...

[qazplm135]

11. closing your eyes doesn't do it

you can still feel, think, smell...nonexistence is a hard thing to imagine. And it is legitimately scary. It's almost the entire reason w hy religion was created to deal with the scariness of nonexistence. Pain and worries are preferable, and life is a mixture of that and joy and happiness and laughter (unfortunately some get a crap balance of those things but almost everyone gets some of all of it).

I don't think there's an afterlife either, but the whole "grow up" mindset over it is ridiculous. It's not an immaturity thing, it's a quite natural reaction to one's own personal extinction.

[NeoGreen]

12. The "Grow Up and Get Over It" is for those adults who...

...pine for Skydaddy-Santa after their body become a corpse.

It's not a ridiculous statement in response to the Wings-In-Heaven crowd
(I'll have mine with BBQ sauce and a beer, please).

And the close-your eyes test is merely an approximation,

jeeze, are you a grammar-nazi too?

[qazplm135]

13. no, it's not an approximation

are blind people approximately dead? It's a silly approximation. As is the disdain for those folks who believe in an afterlife.

[NeoGreen]

14. Cool story bro...(nt)

[qazplm135]

15. yeah I liked the part

where blind people already experience the afterlife on a daily basis.