Beautiful, with clouds and the like but nothing really happening, and possible to get board, however also the ability to visit the world, or other worlds, or even hell to help others, well maybe not so much help for those in hell, as I thought that eternal back then for those sent, but possible to visit. Through those visits it was possible to answer any question one might have by observing it and even somewhat interacting with it.
Food. A big banquet of fried chicken and ice cream and candy, every thing I liked to eat.
I’ve been a glutton from the get-go, it seems.
White clouds and dogs. We had dogs and cats growing up but no cats in my heaven. Play like recess every day. No sleep time, just fly about.
Exactly! As a kid, nothing scared me more than death than eternal life.
I imagined it as pure consciousness without any corporeal element, and a perpetually blissed out state, like you would expect from really good pain medication. It wasn’t really a “place” in my mind so much as a state of mind.
I remember I had a friend who was a Jehovah’s witness and his idea of paradise had people walking around on Earth hugging lions and stuff. I thought, “Well, that’s just silly.”
But actually his version was probably closer to what Jesus and early Christians believed in - physical resurrection of the body and earthly paradise. (I recently read this book called Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife which talks about how these concepts developed… strongly recommend for anyone interested in this subject!)
Like sitting through a church service, except it lasts forever.
I would love that!
One of my teachers said that he had been told that the greatest joy of the afterlife was being in the presence of God. It made him think that Heaven was a sort of giant sports stadium, with all the souls sitting in the seats, all staring throughout eternity at God , seated on the fifty yard line. True ecstacy.
Probably had the Jumbotron to end all Jumbotrons.
You see, Jesus loves every living thing, so he would never mow the grass. It would just grow so much, and stop.
A thought that has stuck with me is one from a book where Jesus lived on earth, and was a crop duster. His plane was the only one with no dead bugs. And I thought, of course. God loves the bugs, too.
One night, as a good young Catholic boy, I was contemplating eternity, and unlike some Christians that seem to think 100 years is forever, or something, I was thinking millions of years and millions more doing nothing, being forced to praise god all day. And i thought about how there wasn’t even the promise of death to escape FOREVER. And it freaked me out.
I think that’s when I developed what I called in a different thread “situational claustrophobia”, where it isn’t the small space, but the inability to leave.
Oh, and Heaven looked white, but not cloud like, and God, Jesus and the poor forgotten Holy Spirit (what does he look like, anyway? And does he get capital letters?) sat in big chairs in the middle and collected worship all “day”.
Thats just it. You’re not forced to praise him, you want to.
As a child that was the scariest part of the whole thing
I don’t remember ever thinking of what heaven looked like, geographically, but I had this idea that when you died, you suddenly got ALL the answers. Every question you could think of was a question no more. That’s paradise.
StG
I think I imagined the walking on clouds wearing wings and holding a harp thing. I do remember wondering what was so great about harps. It’s not a very popular instrument on Earth; why does everyone want to play it after they die?
I was not exposed to much talk of religion when I was young. Around age 10? I went to Sunday school, because the place I was living at then, the person in charge thought it a normal thing. After a few sessions I was asked not attend again. I thought religion and Heaven was imaginary. I never imagined Heaven other than the various ways it was described to me. That only prompted skeptical argument from me.
So I have always imagined Heaven to not exist.
My gf went to a catholic grade school. She questioned the nun about dead babies going to LIMBO and the nun freaked out on her, beginning her move away from religion.
Probably because when the myth was created, there were no complex instruments. A harp was about the highest level of instrument sophistication.
Now if Heaven had been defines in the 1800s, maybe everyone would have violins. And still, the lesser heaven-ites would get violas. But, I can imagine everyone in heaven with a Fender Strat and a Marshall stack. THAT would be something!
I don’t remember giving heaven too much thought. It was just the only alternative to HELL and I knew what that was. Eternal pain by fire.
I couldn’t figure out how my body could live forever being on fire, but I wanted no part of it.
Same for me, but add: standing around, listening to harp music.
I read Dante’s Purgatorio for one college class. (The professor said that everyone read the Inferno, so let’s mix it up.) In it, purgatory was a mountain. You climbed the mountain and at each level you worked on purging one of the deadly sins from yourself. I will probably never forget that when you were in the middle level, for sloth, you were forced to jog. Jogging had been a big fad some years before and the idea tickled me.
I had no real idea of heaven as a child and had never heard of purgatory. I think I first heard of purgatory in junior high. One visiting pastor brought astronomy pictures (the only picture I remember is the crab nebula). He was sure that after death he would be able to visit it, and any other wonderful place in the universe that he cared to visit. I approved of his choice, but didn’t feel that he was speaking for anyone but himself.
In the cemetery where most of the Baltimore side of my family are buried, there’s a separate section for the unbaptized babies. So it’s kinda like “Well, you can’t join our club, but you can hang out in the parking lot.” It seemed unfair to me - it’s not their fault that they died before they were sprinkled. Yet another thing about the Catholic church that led to my lapsing.