Toward an Updated Christian Cosmology (or, One-Upping Dante)

Great Debates
1

I’m tired of political threads. Time for some abstract amateur theology!

IANA Christian, or at least I have not been one for some two decades. Still, the mythology fascinates me. And trying to place it in reality is a fun game.

The classic orientation of the religious universe is: Heaven=up, Hell=down.

But we’ve learned a lot about what is beyond “the firmament of heaven”, have we not? Once you get beyond Earth’s influence, there is an entirely new perception of “up” and “down”, relative to the Sun, with enticing possibilities.

First stop “below” the Earth, in this scheme, is the planet Venus, or at least its orbit. Its lead-melting surface temperatures, rock-crushing surface pressure, and thick, highly acidic, lightning-studded atmosphere led astronomer Carl Sagan to dub it “a fairly good approximation of Hell”.

But forget approximation! As long as it’s “down”, maybe it IS Hell!. Or at least its vestibule: Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here, and all that.

For those sinners of a more evil bent, we have Mercury, where every 120 days or so you go from Ice to Fire and back.

The very worst souls “descend” all the way to Lucifer himself, whom our (I’m using the Judeo-Christian “our” here) captors in Egypt misguidedly took for a God, Ra.

Where then, is Heaven? Perhaps Mars, Jupiter, etc? Or the core of the Galaxy? Lucifer has been cast out to an outer spiral arm, and only the truly enlightened can find their way to heaven?

Perhaps this isn’t just pointless noodling, but a necessary re-examination of the theology, in light of the possiblity that traces of past life may be found on other planets, leading to the possibility that Earth’s Creation was not unique?

Can you tell I’m on vacation this week?

2

I’ll put in my $.02, and at least give this interesting (to me) topic a bump.

  1. Presuming that heaven exists, and is a distinct place from here (neither are usual working assumptions for me, but for the sake of discussion), it’s got to be somewhere.
  2. A poll (wish I had a cite) said that a majority of Americans believe that heaven is a physical location, i.e., something you can reach in a space ship.

So - maybe, just as science has made deities seem more and more distant from natural phenomena, heaven is just much, much further away.

OR - invoke extra dimensions. One book I read years ago, which I thought was kind of a joke (I know somebody can tell me what the book’s called and who wrote it), said it was a matter of time - Heaven is an event at the end of the universe.
Or maybe it’s in some other direction, mutually perpendicular to the three we’re used to - could be a centimeter or so away, but it’s invisible to us. Respectable brane theorists might brain me for spreading this rumor, though.
And then maybe hell is contained inside one of those curled-up micro-dimensions of string theory. Could be hell is everywhere around us, then… again, not something that I seriously believe, but if one absolutely must put hell somewhere, why not abuse string theory?