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This is our heaven - or hell

 

 


<<...The great world faiths all insist on the prime importance of compassion, humility and selflessness.

  But some people would be appalled, on arrival in paradise, if they found everybody there. Heaven would not be heaven if you could not peer over the celestial parapet to watch the damned roasting below.

  If the good life becomes simply a means of getting into heaven, it is no more religious than paying into one's retirement annuity to ensure a comfortable existence in the hereafter.

  And religion is supposed to be about the loss of ego, not its survival in optimum conditions. >> --Karen Armstrong
 
This is our heaven - or hell
by Karen Armstrong
Saturday October 18, 2003
The Guardian

The Bishop of Durham has recently suggested that a belief in heaven or hell is not a core tenet of Christianity. This will be shocking news to those who imagine that the chief function of religion is to give us intimations of immortality. Human beings are the only animals who have to live with the knowledge of their inevitable demise. We are also meaning-seeking creatures, and as soon as we fell out of the trees and became recognizably human, we created religions at the same time as we began to produce works of art, in order to convince ourselves that, despite the crushing burden of our mortality, our lives had intrinsic meaning and value. What could be more consoling than the knowledge that death is not the end, and that we will enjoy a richer and fuller existence in
the hereafter?

Yet, surprisingly perhaps, the panacea of eternal life has not been a feature of the religious quest, which has generally focused on living more intensely and humanely here on earth. In the ancient world, immortality was usually the prerogative of the gods. Homer calls the Olympians the immortals, to distinguish these divine beings from humans, who can expect only a shadowy, diminished existence in the underworld. In the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1200BCE), the king of the city of Uruk, appalled by the prospect of death, embarks on
a search for eternal life but learns that only the gods live forever. The only immortality Gilgamesh will enjoy is the magnificent fortification that he must build around Uruk and the archives that will recount his deeds for future
generations. The prospect of an afterlife is a chimera that distracts us from our duties in this world.

The old pagan religions were reformed in what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age (c. 800-200BCE), because it proved pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. During this period, all the great world religions that have continued to nourish men and women came into being: Confucianism and Taoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in the Middle East and Greek rationalism in Europe. But even in these more advanced religions, eternal life remained a minority interest. In their pristine "axial" form, none
of these traditions shows much interest in eschatology.

Buddhists, for example, may have believed in reincarnation, but they regarded the prospect of future lives as an intolerable burden. It was bad enough to have to endure the pains of old age and death once, but to be compelled to do so again and again was an appalling prospect. Instead, Buddhists sought liberation from samara, the wearisome cycle of death and rebirth. The attainment of nirvana (extinction) was not like going to heaven. Enlightenment was the discovery of a sacred realm of peace in the depths of one's own self and thus finding the strength to live creatively in this world of pain and sorrow. The Buddha refused to speculate on the prospect of a future existence, seeing it as an irrelevance to the problem of suffering here below.

Confucianism is also a this-worldly religion, designed to cultivate an enhanced and more compassionate humanity in this life. Even the prophets of Israel, who created the religion we know as Judaism, were more concerned with current events than with some future paradisal state. They may have looked forward to a period of peace when the lion and lamb would lie down together, but this utopia would be inaugurated in the earthly city of Jerusalem, not in heaven. To this day the afterlife is not a major preoccupation in Judaism.

When Jesus described the Kingdom of Heaven, he too expected its inauguration in this world. Indeed, in St Mark's gospel, he began his mission with the news that the Kingdom of God had already arrived. People would find it within themselves. St Paul called it the Parousia, the presence of God, who would reveal himself irresistibly on earth. Even the book of Revelation should probably not be read, as modern fundamentalists do, as a timetable for Armageddon. It is an apocalypse, an unveiling that enables us to see the divine dimension that is normally hidden, and at the end, the New Jerusalem descends to earth.

Western theology has focused on the doctrine of original sin, which was framed by St Augustine in the early fifth century. According to this interpretation of Christianity, the sin of Adam damned us all to everlasting perdition and
God became incarnate in Jesus precisely to save us from hell and to enable us to live with him for ever in heaven. But the Greek Orthodox tradition has a more Buddhist conception of the salvation wrought by Christ. The great Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662) believed that God would, in some sense, have become human even if Adam had not sinned. Just as the Buddha was the first fully enlightened man in our historical era, Jesus was the first deified human being, and Christians could also be suffused by divinity in the
same way, even in this life.

Like the Buddha or Confucius, many of the great masters of the spiritual life remained deliberately agnostic on the subject of personal immortality. As St Paul put it: "Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, nor has it entered into
the heart of man what things God has prepared for those that love him." It is pointless to speak of it, because it is literally beyond our ken. Even though many Christians have imagined highly detailed celestial and infernal scenarios, the most insightful have always known that too great a preoccupation with our eternal destiny is a waste of spiritual energy.

If properly understood and kept in proportion, a belief in the afterlife can be beneficial to the religious quest. It expresses the important insight that each human being has a sacred, transcendent value that goes beyond his or her material circumstances, and must be treated accordingly. Those traditions that do look forward to a life after death usually emphasize its relevance to this world - in particular, our behavior to other people. The imagery of judgment reminds us that our actions have crucial significance and lasting consequences. The Koran warns Muslims that on the last day their wealth and power will be no help. Every single human being will be asked why he or she has not taken care of the orphans or attended to the needs of the poor. Why have they selfishly accumulated personal fortunes and not shared their money fairly?

But all too often, the quest for immortality becomes profoundly unreligious.
The great world faiths all insist on the prime importance of compassion, humility and selflessness. But some people would be appalled, on arrival in paradise, if they found everybody there. Heaven would not be heaven if you could not peer over the celestial parapet to watch the damned roasting below. If the good life becomes simply a means of getting into heaven, it is no more religious than paying into one's retirement annuity to ensure a comfortable existence in the hereafter. And religion is supposed to be about the loss of ego, not its survival in optimum conditions.

· Karen Armstrong is the author of A History of God
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courtesy: The Guardian

 

 

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