Frankly, that’s the best depiction of heaven I’ve heard yet.
You know they’ve got a hell of a band!
I thought you got to lounge around on clouds. I had no worries about falling through the clouds because I wouldn’t have a body. I also assumed that some sort of transformation would happen so you’d WANT to listen to harp music all the livelong day.
Re: Purgatory, I went to a Catholic school. The nuns frequently told us that ejaculations like, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph” would get you X number of days out of Purgatory. My sister was the only person I knew who thought to ask how many days IN Purgatory each sin would get you. The nuns were stumped.
That would be a great spin on the Wilson cartoon. A bunch of older guys on harps and one dude with a sweet electric guitar. One of the old guys is saying to another “This place just hasn’t been the same since the rock stars started dying.”
I had similar images to most of you when I first heard of heaven, but when I heard the only thing you got to do was praise god, I remember thinking “how boring.” And it made me think god was something of an a-hole. It started my very early split with religion…in spite of 9 years (includes kindergarten) of Catholic school.
I didn’t have much concept of heaven/hell, apart from having to go to Sunday School where I was bored rigid and decided heaven must be similarly boring. Then I discovered Norse mythology where they have a god for absolutely everything, and Valhalla too. Sign me up!
There’s a great Stephen King short story with that name.
Greek architecture with lots of gold trim. The ground is covered with clouds which at time waft away to reveal a gold-leaf pavement. Everybody’s carrying a harp around but they never really play it. Having little to do all day except carry a harp around and sing God’s praises, people get incredibly bored, but nobody says anything openly, because they don’t want to get sent somewhere else.
Now that I think of it, this is how I imagine being in middle management at a place like Amazon.
I don’t think I had a clear idea of any of it. None of it was properly described to me, and all I had to go by were single panel cartoons about angels with rings around their heads.
We were never a very religious family. We went to church, because that’s what everyone did back then, but nobody really talked about what it was for or how the whole system worked, so my imaginings were so vague as to be meaningless. By the age of 10, after we stopped regularly doing any churchy things as a family, I had already decided it was nonsense, and never really thought about it as a real place after that time.
Now it seems like whenever I hear someone talk about it like it’s real, each person will describe something different from one another.
Also, eternity sounds boring.
Ditto. But at some point i ran into the meme that Christians believe you stand around in flight white clouds wearing white robes and playing a harp.
But i never really believed in it, or thought about it much.
I was much more intrigued with the idea of reincarnation, when i ran into that. But i was older, then. Maybe 12.
23 On that day some Sadducees (who say there is no resurrection) came to [a]Jesus and questioned Him, 24 saying, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies having no children, his brother as next of kin shall marry his wife, and raise up [b]children for his brother.’ 25 Now there were seven brothers among us; and the first married and died, and having no [c]children, he left his wife to his brother. 26 It was the same also with the second brother, and the third, down to the seventh. 27 Last of all, the woman died. 28 In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife of the seven will she be? For they all had her in marriage.”
29 But Jesus answered and said to them, “You are mistaken, since you do not [d]understand the Scriptures nor the power of God. 30 For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.
Back from the dead, and ready to party!
A guy dies and finds himself in Heaven. Before long he hears a terrific guitar in the distance and realizes it must be Duane Allman. So he asks a nearby angel “Is that Duane Allman? I have to see him!” The angel answers “No, that’s God. He only THINKS he’s Duane Allman.”
I basically imagined it as this vast, out-of-focus expanse of bright light and clouds. With no consideration of what it was actually like to be there, outside of the vague idea being there was “good”. I would have probably fleshed the idea out eventually if I’d stayed a believer.