Imagine There's No Heaven

Can you imagine a world where we don't judge each other according to the rules of our own ideological belief system? Can you see it? I can, but it's not easy.

I grew up in Texas, in parts of the state where one of the first questions children asked each other was which church they belonged to. I know because I was one of those children. And I can tell you that by an early age, we knew which churches were the “weird” ones, and which ones were the more standard protestant branches. It was my family’s practice to steer clear of the evangelicals, save one occasion I can remember where, during the church service, several people engaged in the act of speaking in tongues. If you’ve never experienced that, I’d encourage you to seek it out because it’s a pretty unique, if not jarring, thing to watch. But that’s not what I’m here to talk to you about this morning, nor am I here to make fun of religion, as I believe all things can serve a purpose.

I am asking a simple question: can you imagine a world without a goalpost that you can only attain if you’re dead?

A lot of people can’t. I’ve had many conversations where I’m asked what religion I am, the answer to which has evolved over the years from non-practicing generic protestant, to agnostic, to atheist, depending on how much patience I have on any given day to absorb being preached at. I often get the question: How do you deal with morality if you don’t have the Bible in your heart? People who ask that question often can’t imagine that I could want to not hurt others just because they are other human beings, and have chosen to be alive exactly as much as I have. And yet, I do try not to hurt people, and I try to improve the world in what little ways I can. I do this because other humans deserve dignity and respect.

Imagine the Middle East, without that lingering promise of an afterlife. Can you? Jericho would just be another city. The Gaza Strip would just be a strip of land that people live on, because it wouldn’t matter; there would be no Jewish state, and no Muslims. Taking that back further, the holocaust wouldn’t have happened the way that it had, at least not directed toward the Jewish people. (Nazis were Christian Nationalists, after all.) More importantly, to the present, we wouldn’t have a Christian Nationalist problem in this nation. Can you see that in your mind…what that would look like?

Imagine no World Trade Center bombing, because there would be no Jihad without religion. Crusades would not have kept on as long as they did. The Spanish Inquisition, to go back through Western culture, and a thousand other examples around the world that we’ve relegated to a history so distant we no longer learn from it.

The lack of an afterlife goal in itself doesn’t tamp down on the very human need for power, but it takes away one way of accumulating it. However benign the religion, having an afterlife involves having a very prescribed way to get there, which creates by default, in-groups and out-groups, in all of its forms. This means that it’s easy to identify “others,” as they are the ones not attending your church, your synagogue, or your mosque. And it’s easy to badmouth the same group, and to denigrate the non-believers, to chastise the heretics, and the blasphemers. They are going to suffer eternal damnation after all. There’s very little evil that you can do to them that they won’t suffer in death, so there’s a lot of room to excuse many sorts of torments to “save their immortal soul.”

There’s very little daylight between having a built-in ‘other’ group and doing violence against others in the name of a God you’ve never met.

That’s the thing about religion: if you can convince someone that you are the voice of God, then there’s nothing you can’t get them to do. Look at Jim Jones in the sixties, or when I was in high school in College Station, Texas, look at the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and David Koresh. Look to the once massive and dominant Church Universal Triumphant, which stockpiled weapons in Montana to try to install a Christian Nation.

Believe me when I say they’re not the only ones. Not by a long shot.

But imagine if they were, and their decline was the herald of a new age wherein we all stopped focusing on what happened after we died and started focusing on making this a world that we could all live in together.

Imagine a world where, instead of “what church do you go to,” children in East Texas asked whether or not your family has enough to eat, or what playground is your favorite. I admit, at times, it’s hard for me to have the courage to side-step the truth of the current situation we’re in as a nation, and imagine something brighter, something worth pursuing, and something worth fighting for.

There’s a better future out there, and I don’t mean an afterlife. I mean a future right here, on this planet, not Mars or any other pipe dream that these thieving billionaires are pursuing. There’s a future to be had here where children don’t wake up hungry. There’s a future to be had here, right here, where churches aren’t attacked because of ideological differences. It doesn’t even have to be a no-religion world, just one where the needs of today aren’t supplanted by the ideas of some post-apocalyptic or post-mortem future that’s unprovable until after you die.

Now is the time when children are suffering, and now is the time when families are going into medical debt. Now is the time to focus on the living, and not the dead.

This is what I mean when I repeat the mantra: imagine there’s no heaven.

Imagine instead a better world, where we can all co-exist in peace.

It’s possible. Believe it.