I suppose most people do wonder about it at one time or another. Regardless of your religious beliefs or lack thereof, how do/did you imagine heaven? A physical place with multitudes of people? Absolute control over your own universe? Something else entirely?
How about human relationships? Sharing the afterlife with your earth spouse or not? What about your parents? Is every human there going to be young and attractive? What about your ancestors? Is it still incest to have sex with your 12th generation grandma/pa? You share less than 0.013% of your dna with them. A lot less than you share with an 8th degree cousin right?
Ah, the pointless questions in life. There ain’t nothing like them.
I have what I believe to be a rather unpopular view of heaven. It comes about because I believe that, if we do indeed have a soul, it is something quite ‘separate’ from our bodies. What would heaven be like? A paradise for the soul. To describe it in terms of physicality, or even things familiar to physicality (pleasures, space, company) would be somehow devaluing to what it is. It is, to me, much like trying to describe G-d. Pointless, as any description would be limited to concepts of the physical world, which, if G-d is indeed omnipotent (a subject for another thread, to be sure), would be limiting him (or insert gender pronoun of your choice here).
To make it shorter: Physical humans don’t have the capacity to trully understand a non-physical world. Thus, to me, heaven is indescribably.
Of course, another theory I had when I was younger: Think of all the things one is supposed to do to get into heaven, which is supposedly paradise. Who’s going to make it there? How would people who follow every one of those rules see paradise? Envision that. Now think that you don’t follow those rules, and don’t like them, but are somewhat forced to in the afterlife. Wouldn’t that be, in a sense, hell?
All that matters to me is that current we see through a glass darkly, but then we will see clearly. There will be no need for lamps because heaven is lit up and there is no scary darkness. Maybe we’ll get to be with God all the time, or we’ll get to see a glimpse of Him but know that we’ll get to see a glimpse of Him forever. So there is not only hope but assurance.
In Catholic dogma the body and soul are connected from creation of the person through forever. I don’t know how that works and I don’t worry about it. I don’t care about seeing other people but if I do I know it won’t cause any pain the way it does now. I don’t care about controlling the universe; I just want to see God even for a glimpse even now and then.
Well, you did ask for the opinion of “unbelievers” so here goes.
There is no heaven. When we die, we die. I know I’ve stated this before in a previous thread, but we are merely animals. There is no afterlife. Would you expect chimpanzees in heaven? How about platypuses? Polar bears? Squirrels? Dolphins? Spiders? Mosquitoes?
We’re just one of them, with the ability to reason.
Heaven, to me, is not universal in that the way everyone experiences it will be different. My heaven will be different than yours, based on what we individually expect it to be like. I’m not exactly sure what I expect.
I expect heaven to look like Books & Company in Kettering, OH, and I told the owner exactly that one day.
Of course, since then, they’ve been absorbed into the corporate collective by Books-A-Million.
I remember when I was about 4 or 5 years old, I was surprised to learn that the Christian God was male, not female. I wasn’t from a very religious family, but I had a bit of exposure, so those Sunday school lessons were a real shocker.
At that point, I had imagined heaven as a happy, fluffy place, where you chilled with this motherly God.
Now, I’m an atheist nearly as strongly as Dawkins. When we die, we go into a small plot of dirt. We stay there for quite a while.
I think you will find unbelievers pretty much unified on the non-heaven angle.
Once you really UN-believe how can you expect heaven to exist?
OK, maybe you can but that is just not quite un-believing.
and no dig at ArrMatey!, but why the spelling G-d instead of god? or do you mean Gad? or maybe Gid or, anyway I don’t understand this.
As an unbeliever picturing heaven I mostly see the clouds and white robes from all the cartoons I’ve ever seen, both animated and paper. There’s a gate and a bearded guy with a book on a podium. Sometimes there’s a big line.
Heh, I must not have expressed myself clearly. When I asked for the opinion of the unbelievers, I meant those who grew up believing in such things and perhaps wondering about them every once in a while.
If you’ve never believed in heaven nor wondered about it, you’d have to suspend your disbelief and treat it as an intellectual exercise of dubious value. Kinda like math.
I don’t think we have the concepts available to describe or understand it. It would be like asking a fetus to describe adult life. And all the descriptions in the Bible are either figurative or literary.
I sometimes wonder if this is deliberate on God’s part.
I grew up going to Sunday school, altar boy, the whole nine yards. But my family was Episcopalian, which meant heaven was a concept along the lines of ArrMatey!'s indescribable soul dimension.
But I did have a mental framework that was sort of a stepping stone to that ineffable idea. I had a painted wood jigsaw puzzle depicting Peter Rabbit cavorting in Mr. MacGregor’s garden. Lettuce, carrots, happy bunny face, etc. But up in the corner was a small gray piece that formed the vague outline of a man wearing a hat - Mr. MacGregor looming in the background! That remained my “substitute” imagery of heaven until the whole idea eventually lost steam for me.
A few years ago I came across some recruiting material for an evangelical group which used elaborately colored, vividly fantastic depictions of beautiful mountains, gushing rivers, spectacular sunsets, flowing robes, etc., an over-the-top earthly paradise of milk and honey. I was astonished, the idea of trying to convey heaven as such a place of material senses was quite alien to me (although I’d lived among muslims in the middle east for several years, even they didn’t try to give their notion of heaven such an anthropomorphic focus).
All those years in church and I never could make any sense out of it. I tried, I really did. My father was a seminarian when he died, and I got to know a lot of very bright people through the church. But the whole “let’s use mythology to convey moral principles” bit never really resonated for me. The concepts of heaven and hell seem unnecessary and counterproductive to me now.
I’m an unbeliever, though the heaven I always fantasized about can really best be described like the Nexus on Star Trek Generations. When you’re there, you’re in a situation surrounded by all those who make you happy. If you’d like to see somebody, you can see them. If not, you’ll never run into them. There’s no one single way heaven looks… everybody shapes it for themselves.
Yeah, I’m an unbeliever, but a lot of times I really wish I wasn’t.
Adam
Oooh baby do you know what’s worth? Oooh heaven is a place on earth. They say in heaven ‘love comes first.’ We’ll make heaven a place on earth; oooh heaven is a place on earth!
I dont literally think that, but I do think heaven will be extremely similar to earth. What will be different is that sin, pain, death, and all the nasties in this world will be gone. We’ll be free to live as God intended, in perfect harmony, each following his or her calling, and all in all good times will be had by all for eternity.
As an ADULT believing person, I don’t think on the specifics too much, but figure I’ll find out when/if I get there.
As a kid, I had a very clear picture of heaven being like the suburbs, where everyone gets his or her own house. Of course, because there are many, many people in heaven, the houses are rather small because you have to fit a lot of them in. So I figured that instead of real houses, each person would have a mini-house, like one of those cute children’s playhouses or a deluxe tree house.
Then, you would spend all your time visiting people or receiving visitors at your cool playhouse or tree house.
This probably says less about heaven and more about the fact that I was very, very, very jealous of the neighbor children who had a deluxe tree house. My vision of heaven came directly from breaking a commandment and committing one of the seven deadlies!
If there are no platypuses in heaven, WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT? Besides, artistic depictions of heaven usually include animals, although usually not platypuses in particular.
Unbeliever here, but what I’ve always figured is that if there is such a place as heaven, it must be based on the removal of one very basic characteristic of humans: the inability to be perpetually happy. I mean, we always want something different than what we have, and when we get that, we want something else. A heaven where we got whatever we wished for would in reality be hell, unless we were changed so we could appreciate it forever and ever. So that’s my guess: if there is a heaven, it has a mindchanger in the doorway so that happiness never dulls.
Well, I hope so.
I expect a cross between the end of George MacDonald’s Lilith, Aslan’s Country, and Dante’s Paradisio. What I expect is the place where what C. S. Lewis calls Joy- the unutterable stab of sweetness and longing- will be fulfilled. I expect to go home. What that home will look like, I have no idea, except that God will be there, and I will be with Him.
