Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
- John Lennon, Imagine
Imagining there's no heaven has become remarkably easy for modern people, many self-identified Christians included.
Why it is easy for self-proclaimed materialists and atheists to reject the reality of heaven is simple enough to understand. Why the same is also easy for Christians becomes a bit trickier and the subject of another post.
John Lennon got one thing right in his insipid communist utopia anthem— the unreality of heaven is easy to imagine, but only if one can imagine the reality of creating a brotherhood of man utopia where hunger, greed, and killing are all eradicated by the world living as one.
In this sense, imagining no heaven offers some potential solutions to this-worldly problems; however, it does not and cannot address death.
And what happens if one can imagine neither heaven nor this-worldly utopia? What then?
I suppose you could downgrade the utopia from a worldly scale to a more individual scale and strive to carve out your personal heaven-on-earth amidst the backdrop of the much more encompassing not-heaven-on-earth.
However, what happens if the grand this-worldly utopia makers actively destroy and deny your chance at your individual heaven on earth in favor of their more global plan?
What are you left with then? Well, the three D's—destruction, despair, and death—and not much else, I'm afraid.
If Zdzisław Beksiński's oeuvre of mostly untitled nightmare visions attests to anything, it attests to the despondency of imagining no other-worldly heaven and the peril of imagining only a this-worldly one.
It's easy if you try
- John Lennon, Imagine
Imagining there's no heaven has become remarkably easy for modern people, many self-identified Christians included.
Why it is easy for self-proclaimed materialists and atheists to reject the reality of heaven is simple enough to understand. Why the same is also easy for Christians becomes a bit trickier and the subject of another post.
John Lennon got one thing right in his insipid communist utopia anthem— the unreality of heaven is easy to imagine, but only if one can imagine the reality of creating a brotherhood of man utopia where hunger, greed, and killing are all eradicated by the world living as one.
In this sense, imagining no heaven offers some potential solutions to this-worldly problems; however, it does not and cannot address death.
And what happens if one can imagine neither heaven nor this-worldly utopia? What then?
I suppose you could downgrade the utopia from a worldly scale to a more individual scale and strive to carve out your personal heaven-on-earth amidst the backdrop of the much more encompassing not-heaven-on-earth.
However, what happens if the grand this-worldly utopia makers actively destroy and deny your chance at your individual heaven on earth in favor of their more global plan?
What are you left with then? Well, the three D's—destruction, despair, and death—and not much else, I'm afraid.
If Zdzisław Beksiński's oeuvre of mostly untitled nightmare visions attests to anything, it attests to the despondency of imagining no other-worldly heaven and the peril of imagining only a this-worldly one.
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