Heaven and Hell

I was very surprised to learn recently that a close friend of mine believes in Hell: a place in the afterlife where sinners will be tormented for an eternity.  Hell is a concept that I have never been comfortable with, and for much of my life I have adopted a rather smug attitude toward those who believe in it.  But over the years, as I have encountered – both in writing and in person – others who ardently believe in it, including not only people who are good, but also people who are extremely intelligent, I have felt an increasing sense of discomfort over the acceptance that these others have of the idea.  Could I be wrong?  Is my smugness a symptom of an impious pride that is blocking me from the truth?

Several years ago, I happened to meet a woman who was a devout Christian, who had five children.  Somehow or other, the subject of the afterlife came up, and I asked her if she believed in Hell.  She replied that she did, declaring that this fate would befall not only those who had been wicked during their lifetimes, but also those who had rejected the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith.  I pointed out to her that, with five children, there was a rather significant probability that at least one of these would be among this class of sinners, if for no other reason than that he or she would not choose to follow her religious beliefs and practices.  Could she find true happiness in heaven, I asked, knowing that one of her own children was being tortured for all eternity?  Oh yes, she replied, because in that case the Creator would erase from her memory all traces of the existence of that particular child, thereby enabling her to enjoy her eternity of bliss completely undisturbed.  It was a reply that I found to be both horrifying and humorous at the same time.

I have always thought that the concept of Hell is particularly incongruent with the Christian religion, which counsels that one should have compassion for all living beings, including one’s enemies and oppressors.  It seems rather strange to me that the practice of such compassion and sympathy should end as soon as one passes into the afterlife.  And yet, very wise and very good persons such as St. Augustine insist (as he does in City of God) that there will be eternal torment for the damned, that in fact this will probably be the lot of the majority of humanity, and that such a condition will not disturb the happiness of the saved.  I have never read Thomas Aquinas – another very good and very intelligent man – but I have heard that in his writings he goes so far as to contend that one of the sources of pleasure for the saved in Heaven will actually be that they will be able to watch the torments of the damned.

Should I be a member of that fortunate minority who makes it into Heaven (and I am certainly not claiming that I believe that I have a good chance of doing so), I couldn’t imagine myself being happy there if anybody who I had known in this lifetime was being tortured for all of eternity: even those who had generally been causes of unhappiness in my life.  Eternity, after all, is a very, very, very long time.  I think of the most horrifying, miserable conditions that human beings have been subjected to in their lifetimes, such as being prisoners of war in the camp of a brutal enemy, and even in those circumstances, the victims could at least take consolation in the knowledge that a final release from their suffering would come at the end of their lives, if it didn’t come sooner, with a release from their captors.  Civilized human beings generally believe that there is such a thing as cruel and unusual punishment, which should be prohibited, even for the most heinous crimes.  It is a standard of mercy that all of us – or nearly all of us – subscribe to.  But I cannot imagine a more cruel and a more unusual punishment than one that would last for an eternity.

How is it that persons who are very scrupulous about the humane treatment of the most violent criminals in this lifetime can suddenly cast this sympathy to the winds in matters of the afterlife, and believe with no reservation or discomfort that intelligent beings will be tormented for a time without end?  Many of these persons are quite ready to accept such a fate for beings who were not even evil in the commonly understood sense, but rather whose greatest sin had merely been that they had not had belief and faith in the appropriate religious doctrine.

Now I am not above taking consolation myself in the idea of some higher form of justice, meted out to all rational beings.  I have observed with just as much bitterness and frustration as everyone else the phenomenon of persons who had been immoral, abusive, exploitative, and wicked during their lifetimes, and who seemed to have been able to engage in these behaviors with little or no negative consequences upon themselves, and in some cases even enjoyed great material success.  Conversely, I have seen good, charitable persons suffer during their lives, and never gain the reward to which they seemed entitled.  I want to believe that there is some sort of process beyond the mortal confines of our existence that will mete out rewards and punishments fitting for the behaviors practiced by each of us while we were on earth.  But at the same time, I have to believe that such rewards and punishments will be grounded in similar standards of justice as those practiced by temperate, moral people in this world.  Is it unrealistic to believe that a perfect being – as we understand the Creator to be – will be a perfectly just one, and a perfectly compassionate one as well?  And is it my own limited capacity to understand and comprehend such perfection which causes me to regard a perpetual, never-ending punishment as both unjust and uncompassionate?

(There is, admittedly, a great comfort in the idea that not just death, but an afterlife as well, will serve as a great “equalizer”, bringing down the proud, wealthy and powerful, and bringing up the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden back to a common level.  I have known persons, however, who have been a little too enamored with this idea: who want to believe that a reckoning awaits not only those who were evil, but also those who had been able to enjoy life much more than they had.)

It is not just traditional conceptions of Hell, however, but those of Heaven as well which have given me problems.  Will an existence without goals to achieve, or problems to overcome, be a truly happy one?  As I pass my time in Heaven (again, assuming that I merit such a reward), will I truly find happiness by looking upon each new day as one that will be empty of complications, or conflicts, or challenges?  “Ahhhh, another blissful, trouble free day, where I can love everybody unconditionally and be loved in return in exactly the same way.  And after this, another just like it, and one after that, and another after that, and . . .”.  Now I must admit that when I have shared reservations such as these with others about Heaven, I have encountered some potent and potentially valid criticisms.  My complaints about Heaven, after all, are based upon my current, mortal conceptions of time and of experience.  Beyond this present, earthly existence, how we relate to time, and the nature of our experiences, might be something that is entirely different, and well beyond our capacity to understand it now.  My conception of happiness is at present an earth-bound one, and may be incongruent with the type of happiness that beings in an afterlife will experience.

And yet, one cannot resist wondering what the source of such happiness will be.  I would like to think that there is at least some congruence between what will make me happy there (in Heaven) as what has made me happy here.  The wonderful Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life comes to mind, where, upon passing on into the afterlife, his character discovers that one of the pleasures there is that he can eat as much of his favorite foods as he likes, with absolutely no guilt or fear of consequences.  Of course, if the sources of pleasure in heaven really do reflect the sources of pleasure on earth, including the sensual ones, then one can’t help but wonder why we were adjured during our lives to abstain from them, or at least practice them in moderation.  Why hold back from enjoying them during our lifetime, if the goal of our existence is to enjoy them in an unlimited way for an eternity in the afterlife?

I am reminded of a joke by the Irish comedian Dave Allen.  A businessman is taking a stroll and encounters a young vagrant, loitering in the park.  “Young man,” he says, with irritation, “why don’t you get a job?”

“Why would I want do to that, sir?” the vagrant replies.

“Because then you could make money, and if you work hard enough and long enough, you will be able to put away savings, so that someday you can retire and live a life of leisure, lying around and doing whatever you want,” the businessman explained.

“But I’m already doing that now, sir,” said the vagrant.

If the sources of happiness in this life and the next are incongruent, so that we should shun or at least limit the first kind, and look forward to an unlimited helping of the other, then why are they incongruent?  Why should any source of happiness (aside, of course, from those which are derived from the sufferings of others) in this life be toxic?

Recently, the wife of a popular American television preacher ran into controversy, after she declared that if we focus on making ourselves happy, then this will make God happy.  She was roundly criticized by more traditional clergymen, such as the pastor of a church who, when invited to come on television and share his views on the matter, said that we should focus instead on making God happy, and by doing so we will eventually find true happiness for ourselves.  Now as I watched this controversy unfold, I realized that I had some fundamental difficulties – not just with the remark that the preacher’s wife made, but also the one made by this self-proclaimed expert on theology who was publicly rebuking her.  If God is perfect, omnipotent, the uncaused First Cause, etc., then how can God’s “happiness” or other mental and emotional states, whatever these are, be contingent upon anything that we do?  We can no more “make” God happy or unhappy than we can make God roll over, or jump up and down.  Of course, this implies that there is really no way that we can ever please God, no matter what we do, which would seem to make much of the rest of this discussion about Divine reward and punishment mute.  One possible way out of the conundrum is to engage in a little wordplay, and say instead that God can “take pleasure” in our actions.

Still, if God is merely “taking pleasure” in our actions – preferring that each of us lives our lives according to a certain moral code – in a way that involves no real stake in the matter for God (else this would take us back to the contingency problem), then what is the purpose in that?  It would seem to make of each human life the equivalent of a television “game show”, with those who acted correctly (or, according to some religiously-minded people, those who believed correctly) winning a prize, and those who failed the test not winning a prize (or worse, being punished, perhaps for an eternity).  This idea – of each human life getting a final “pass” or “fail” – seems rather unfair, given the diversity of circumstances, both innate and situational, that predispose a human being to one mode of conduct (and belief) rather than another.  It is rather naïve to assume or believe that every human being, regardless of their unique life circumstances, has an equal opportunity (let alone probability) of choosing and living the right path rather than a wrong one.  Even St. Augustine, in his City of God, wrestled with the problem of what would happen to human infants who never had the opportunity to commit to any form of behavior or belief.  And to the extent that these opportunities are not equal among all human beings, then the idea of a perfect, divine justice underlying all existence is seriously undermined.

It is for this reason, I think, that the idea of reincarnation has become a tenet among various spiritual disciplines.  If the Creator desires (another awkward verb to use in conjunction with a perfect, omnipotent being) that all of Its sentient creations achieve some sort of moral perfection, then it is much more just and reasonable to assume that more than one lifetime will be allotted to each sentient being to attain this goal.  Whatever mistakes we make in this lifetime can be corrected, and atoned for, in one or more future lifetimes.  Hell, in such a case, may not exist, or may not need to exist.  There is, for example, a particular type of saint in eastern religion called a bodhisattva: a saint that refuses to enter Heaven until all other sentient beings are saved.  Such a saint could never bear the idea of some fellow soul being barred from Heaven, let alone being tormented for ever in some form of perdition.  Hence, there is no contradiction between the compassion practiced by such a saint during life and that saint’s capacity to exercise similar compassion in the afterlife, as there so often seems to be in western religions.

But while reincarnation seems to be a more “humane” system of religion, I no longer believe that it is a more personally satisfying one to believe in.  There was a time when I warmed up to the idea of being able to attend to “unfinished business” in future lifetimes, correcting personal flaws and somehow atoning for past sins, and in particular found it appealing to believe that I could survive beyond the limits of my present life into those future incarnations.  This consolation, however, lost its allure to me many years ago after I read a discussion of the idea by the American philosopher Hazel Barnes.  In her book, An Existentialist Ethics, Barnes observes that a characteristic of reincarnation, as it is generally understood, is that a person living now has no conscious recollection of any of his or her prior incarnations.  Where is the comfort, Barnes asked, in believing that my soul essence will survive beyond my death into the existence of some yet to be born person, if that person will have no active memory of me?  Everything that made my existence important to me – my experiences, my feelings toward others who were close to me, my goals, accomplishments, and challenges – will be gone from the conscious memory of that future incarnation.  That person, in their day-to-day existence, will no more care about me and what had happened in my life than the typical person who I encounter in the street today.  Under such circumstances, how can I feel any kind of genuine satisfaction in the belief that I will “live on” beyond the end of this present life?  Everything that makes up “me”, in any meaningful sense of the word, will still be very much dead and gone.  (It seems to me – if current popular accounts of reincarnation are true – that the best I could hope for is that some future incarnation might dredge up fleeting mental images of my life in “past lives” hypnotic regression therapy.  Surely I would stand a much better chance of having my experiences make a tangible mark on the conscious minds of future persons if I just left behind a journal!)

And, Barnes added, there is another problem with reincarnation.  If the purpose of mortal life and existence is indeed to somehow “fix” ourselves, by growing spiritually, correcting our faults and shortcomings, and atoning for any wrongdoings that we have committed, then an endless (or nearly endless) cycle of births and rebirths will remove any sense of urgency to the project.  If the western religious concept of one life, one opportunity, seems too harsh and unforgiving, then the eastern one seems to err in the opposite extreme.  One can keep throwing the dice, so to speak, over and over and over again.  Why should I bother correcting a particular vice in this lifetime (particularly if I enjoy it), if I can fix it in the next life, or the one after that, or the one after that?  The finitude of time, Barnes observes, is what gives it its value, and it is also what confers an importance upon the choices we make.  If I truly believe that if I don’t fix a particular mistake now, then another opportunity may never arise in the future to fix it then, it will motivate me to take the proper action – now.  But if I believe that I will have a limitless stream of opportunities to do so, the motivation is diminished, perhaps entirely.  Even the capacity to enjoy life itself may be diminished, if I believe that I have an infinite store of time in which to do so.  “You only live once,” is a popular expression, and implicit in that expression is an exhortation to savor life, and live it to the fullest, because you only have this one chance to do it.  Every moment is precious, because it is part of a finite collection of moments allotted to us, and though these may seem uncountable (particularly in our youth), we develop a growing appreciation of the fact that our time here on earth is limited.  Another popular expression of late is “bucket list”: the idea that as we become more cognizant of the limited number of days still available to us, we want to rush out and have those “once-in-a-lifetime” experiences that will give us a greater sense of a fully-lived life.  The underlying message of the aforementioned movie, Defending Your Life, in which the recently deceased main character is literally put on trial, with lawyers for the prosecution and defense, is that the real purpose of life is to honor it by boldly “seizing the day”, and having the courage to strive for what (or whom) one truly loves and cares about.

In Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, the main characters learn only too late – after death, in fact – how truly priceless the seemingly commonplace moments in their lives were, when they were spending time with their families doing ordinary things, such as sitting together at the dinner table.  The gravity of the realization that those moments are now gone forever is painfully apparent to the deceased characters, and they regret that when they had lived them, they had been preoccupied with other things, and did not relish them and treasure them as they had experienced them.  The deceased want to shout out to the still-living and exhort them not to make the same foolish mistake by squandering their own precious moments with the loved ones in their lives, but cannot communicate with them from beyond the grave.

What if the dead characters in Our Town were given that second chance, and each could live their entire life over again, with a full memory of their previous pass through that life, and the ability to live parts of it differently, if desired?  What if they could live just one day of their life over again?  In the movie Groundhog Day, the main character finds, upon visiting a town as part of a work assignment, that he is living the same day over and over and over again in that town.  He initially rebels against the experience, acting in absurd and even destructive ways during repeats of this day, but eventually settles into the phenomenon, using each repetition as an opportunity to improve himself (he learns, for example, how to play the piano proficiently), and also to become more fully engaged in the lives of those around him – most of whom had merely been strangers to him during that very first passage through the day.  When he is finally liberated from this recurrence, and finds himself passing into a genuinely new day, it is apparently as a consequence of the fact that he has finally lived that previous day perfectly.  Perhaps this really would be the result of an ability to relive one’s experiences in an endless cycle of repetition: an ultimate perfection of those experiences by correcting, broadening, deepening, and savoring them, along with a perfection of one’s self as well.  On the other hand, it seems just as likely that the phenomenon of eternal recurrence would eventually leave one in a state of catatonic apathy, unwilling to engage with the world at all.  Perhaps, in time, both of these results – the positive and the negative – would occur.  Is this what the eastern concept of “nirvana” really means: the perfection of oneself through a seemingly endless cycle of births and rebirths, followed by a profound world-weariness in which one willingly ceases from engaging in any future rebirths, and chooses, instead, a complete detachment from existence?

Of course, in the traditional concept of reincarnation, we are not living the same life over and over again, but a different one each time.  But if the purpose of reincarnation is to “fix” ourselves, by atoning for wrongs committed against others, and learning better how to react to certain situations, then there has to be some sort of congruence between each life.  If I have wronged somebody in this lifetime, and need to atone for it in some future one, then it must be the case that my future “incarnation” will encounter that other person’s future “incarnation”, even if neither of us remembers our first encounter in a previous lifetime.  Similarly, if I need to perfect myself by learning better how to act and react in certain situations, then it has to be assumed that I will encounter identical or at least similar facsimiles of these situations over future lifetimes.  (And if I don’t remember what I did wrong or incorrectly the first time, then how will I be able to atone for it or improve my behavior the next time?  Are my actions being guided by some unconscious force which does have a memory of all of my previous incarnations?)  The very fact that my future lives will not be identical to this one really complicates things, because with novel experiences come novel challenges, and completely new ways to make mistakes that I could not have prepared for (unconsciously, it is assumed) through the benefit of living those previous incarnations.  But there’s an even bigger technicality.  The human experience has become more complicated over time, as a result of the evolution of civilization and the technological development that supports it, and its problems and challenges have become more complicated as well.  If, for example, as a caveman in a previous lifetime, I bonked somebody over the head with a club, I may find it easy to make amends for that particular transgression in this lifetime, but may find myself committing all sorts of new sins that were unimaginable back then (like making an unsavory remark about somebody on Twitter).  If my challenges and potential transgressions are becoming more complicated with each new incarnation, will I ever be able to completely settle the balance sheet, or will I constantly find myself stumbling over some new problem that I could have never possibly prepared myself for in a million previous lifetimes?  Maybe reincarnation was intended to be like a television soap opera, with problems arising and eventually being solved, but new challenges arising in their wake, along with the occasional introduction of new characters never encountered before, to keep the ongoing drama vibrant and interesting, and perhaps even never-ending.  (This strategy, after all, has enabled some television soap operas to last for a very, very long time.)

It is certainly a lot less complicated (and less mind-numbing) to simply believe that there is a Heaven and a Hell, and that our lot is determined after one shot at life.  But that idea has always left me with a much more fundamental underlying problem:  How could a perfect Watchmaker possibly make an imperfect watch?  If existence – not just mine, but existence in general – is a product of a perfect Creator, then how can it be less than perfect?  The solution to this paradox, for me, has always been a rather simple and obvious one: imperfection is a prerequisite of existence.  Existence in any meaningful sense involves hope, desire, and growth through the overcoming of obstacles and the meeting of challenges, and all of these imply that the present state is not as good as one would like it to be.  If we were all perfect beings in a perfect world, there would be nothing to do, because there would be nothing that had to be done.  

Perhaps each of our lives is like an individual dream of the Creator’s.  As in each of our own dreams, in which we exist as self-contained entities living out particular dramas with little or no memory of our waking, wider existence, perhaps each of us is living a part of the Creator’s existence, and doing so by “forgetting”, in the brief relative moment that our lifetime lasts, that we are something more than this individual person living this particular life.  Through death, or “nirvana”, we wake up to that wider sense of being – that being that transcends the imperfection of transient existence and embraces all of the lives that it has lived through the “dreams” that collectively make up existence in time.  This has always been a comforting belief for me, and admittedly a convenient one.  It is convenient, after all, for a middle-class American who has never known hardship, deprivation, or catastrophic turmoil to believe that life is imperfect because that’s what makes it interesting.  I wonder how comforting or convenient such an idea would be for someone who was poor, abused, or suffering from painful, crippling disabilities or infirmities.  And even I would like to believe that somehow, some way, it matters whether we are good rather than not good, and that our actions have genuine consequences.

Who knows which of these views, if any, are close to the truth: close to reconciling the existence of this imperfect universe with the designs of a perfect Watchmaker?  We can only wait, and hope, that the answer will be made known to each of us - someway, somehow - in the course of our unfolding existences.  Time will tell.