The Rich Man and Lazarus (and Atheism)

Artwork showing the rich man enjoying a feast in his home, with Lazarus outside his door. Image source. 

In Luke 16:19-31, Jesus tells this parable:

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

“The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

“But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’

“He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

“Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

“‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Reading this parable now, I'm astounded at how the meaning of it is so completely different from how I understood it when I was evangelical.

Here's how I interpret this story now: Jesus introduces us to 2 characters, a rich man and a very poor man. The poor man, Lazarus, begs outside of the rich man's house, for years, but the rich man does not do anything to help him. In the afterlife, Lazarus goes to heaven and the rich man goes to hell- Lazarus goes to heaven because he suffered so much on earth, so he deserves to have a better life, and the rich man goes to hell because he had a good life on earth but didn't help the poor. Jesus doesn't directly state that these are the reasons they went to heaven/hell; it's treated like it's just obvious. Also, these reasons are emphasized by what Abraham tells the rich man- that in his earthly life, the rich man had good things, while Lazarus suffered.

Now that the rich man understands how serious it is that rich people need to help poor people, otherwise they will go to hell and be in agony forever, he asks Abraham to send Lazarus to go and warn his brothers about this. But Abraham says, no, they should already know, because they have access to the teachings of Moses and the prophets. The rich man knows that his brothers won't take Moses and the prophets seriously, because he didn't either during his life, but surely if someone comes back from the dead, that will convince them.

And Abraham says, no, "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."

The main point of this story is our obligation to help others. And also, that someday there will be justice- God will help people who suffered on earth, and send rich people to hell for not doing anything to help.

The secondary point is, rich people should know this. They have the teachings of Moses and the prophets, or other religions, or moral philosophies. Of course they are able to realize that they have a moral obligation to help others. But they don't want to. They will make excuses. The rich man in the story says his brothers will definitely believe if they see someone come back from the dead, but Abraham tells him, no, they'll still make excuses.

You shouldn't need a miracle, or a religion, or anything like that. It's obvious that people who have enough money for their own life should give to help others. And if you don't accept that basic obvious fact of morality, then even if you did see a miracle, you would still come up with reasons to ignore the people in need around you.

Just reading the parable by itself, without bringing in any of one's own beliefs about heaven and hell, it seems pretty clear that this is what it's saying. If you are rich, you need to use your money to help others, otherwise you will go to hell.

But of course, for evangelicals, Jesus can't possibly be saying that.

Evangelicals "know" the criteria for getting into heaven or hell: It's not about what you do, it's only about your faith in Jesus. If you believe in Jesus, and you "prayed the prayer" to commit your life to him, you will go to heaven. If you didn't do that, then by default you go to hell, because everyone is a sinner and deserves to go to hell. 

Evangelicals strongly disagree with the idea that people go to heaven just because they had a bad life and God feels bad for them. No! God has actual standards! You have to have the correct faith; God's not going to let you in just because They feel bad for you. And as for the rich man going to hell because he didn't help Lazarus- evangelicals would say, there totally are rich people that go to heaven, don't worry if you're a rich person- but maybe it's a little more difficult for rich people because they tend to rely on their money rather than realizing they need Jesus. And of course God *wants* you to use your money to help others, so if you *truly* believe in Jesus (at the level required to go to heaven) then you would do that, but let's be clear, going to heaven does not hinge on whether you helped others, it hinges on your faith in Jesus.

So we have this situation where evangelicals are totally sure this parable cannot mean what it obviously means. (Similar thing for the parable of the sheep and the goats.) Lazarus must have gone to heaven because he believed in Jesus- yeah that's not mentioned at all in the story, but that was definitely the actual reason, despite Abraham's words, "in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony." And the rich man went to hell because he didn't believe in Jesus- and if he had believed in Jesus, then his faith would have inspired him to help Lazarus. And when he talks about sending Lazarus to warn his brothers, he means sending Lazarus to tell them about the necessity of believing in Jesus. And the rich man says that his brothers won't believe just based on Moses and the prophets- I mean, yeah, when you're trying to convince someone of a particular religious doctrine, and your argument is "here are some ancient religious writings" this usually fails to convince them to convert to your religion. The rich man says it would convince them to give up their atheism if they saw an actual resurrection, but that's actually not true either. Atheists are really stubborn and unreasonable like that.

Wait, what? Why are we suddenly criticizing atheists...?

Yes, seriously, this is the interpretation of the parable I had when I was evangelical: There *is* enough evidence, from the bible, from "Moses and the Prophets," that people should *know* they are supposed to believe in Jesus and commit their lives to him. But when you talk to actual atheists, they tell you that's not enough evidence. They may give you examples of what kind of miracles they would have to see, that *would* count as evidence of the supernatural- but they're actually lying about that. Like Jesus says here, even if they saw someone come back from the dead, they would still not believe. So don't feel bad about how your apologetics arguments fail to convince those atheists. It's a *them* problem!

Yes, really. Evangelicals take this parable about how rich people need to help poor people, or else the rich people will go to hell, and turn it into this bizarre cheap shot at atheists. It's such a weird feeling for me, reading this now when I'm so far removed from evangelical ideology, realizing how obviously Jesus' point is that rich people need to help others (or else they will go to hell!) and somehow evangelicals managed to make it not about that at all- because evangelicals already know that the way to get into heaven is believing in Jesus- and then take this line at the end and turn it into a claim that "you know how your atheist friends say they would believe in God if you had better evidence? Well actually they're lying about that."

The rich man in hell wants to send Lazarus to tell his brothers how to avoid going to hell- and so evangelicals know that obviously means he wants Lazarus to tell them to believe in Jesus. That's how you avoid going to hell. Like we're so committed to this idea that faith in Jesus is the be-all-end-all, *the* answer for how to go to heaven, that we don't even read Jesus' actual words in front of us. (Even if we saw someone rise from the dead, we still wouldn't read Jesus' actual words in front of us.)

Try this on for size: This is a parable about rich Christians who don't use their money to help others. They should know that they're supposed to do that. They have Moses and the prophets. They have the bible. They even believe that Someone rose from the dead, and this still fails to convince them that they need to give money to help others.

How many Christians do we see right now, who are sure that Christianity is about political power and making rules to control other people, rather than helping the poor? Jesus was right. His followers believe He rose from the dead, but we still won't do what he said.

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Related

The Parable of the Living Wage

Sheep and Goats

Jesus Weighs in on "Being Right vs Doing Good"

What kind of God will judge how we treat immigrants?

White Privilege and the Rich Young Ruler

The Kingdom of Children: Eschatology

Image text: "Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low. Isaiah 40:4A" Image source.

I've been reading "The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology" by R. L. Stollar. Here's a section about "eschatology."

From pages 113-114:

In this chapter, we will look at what theologians call eschatology. This is the study of the future, the study of how the kingdom of God breaks into our right-here and right-now and creates profound changes to our lives. In liberation theology, eschatology is the focus on how powers around us-- our churches, our government, our economic order-- need to be redeemed. They need to be redeemed because they are set up in a way that makes it harder for us to love our neighbors as ourselves. They need to be redeemed because they do not place the first last and the last first. Liberation theologians want us to think about how the kingdom of God should disrupt these powers around us. "Hope in the future seeks roots in the present."

Child liberation theology raises the same issues, but with regard to children. Child liberation theology also engages eschatology by asking how we can better realize the kingdom of God in the right-here and right-now for children. The path to doing this involves taking Jesus seriously when he said in Mark 9:37, "Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me." What I am going to argue might seem too audacious or maybe even sacrilegious. Part of realizing the kingdom of God in the right-here and right-now is seeing children as God-to-us. Children are not simply representatives or servants or mouthpieces of God. They are, in a profound and real sense, God's chosen and royal substitutes. They serve as God-to-us in our right-here and right-now.

Now before you discard this book, let me tell you what I am not saying: I am not saying that children are gods. I am not saying that we should worship children. And I am not saying that children are substitutes for God in the sense that we no longer need God. What I am saying is that Jesus called us to see children as God-to-us in our right-here and right-now. They are the neighbors who we are supposed to love as ourselves. And just as the commandment to love our neighbors is rooted in the greatest commandment to love God (Matt. 22:36-40), loving children is similarly rooted in loving God. This makes loving children an act of worship.

Eschatology? As far as I know, eschatology is about heaven and hell and the end of the world- the complete opposite of the "right-here and right-now" Stollar is talking about. He says, "This is the study of the future, the study of how the kingdom of God breaks into our right-here and right-now and creates profound changes to our lives." The grammar of the sentence suggests that those are 2 different ways of saying the same thing, but, what on earth, "the future" is totally different from "how the kingdom of God breaks into our right-here and right-now." Right?

Even so, I'm like, really into this. I'm very excited about the idea that our beliefs about heaven and hell and the end of the world should have a profound effect on the way we live now- in particular, that it means the kingdom of God breaks into our world now, and we fight for liberation for everyone.

When I was evangelical, I believed that people go to heaven or hell based on whether they are "saved"- ie, whether they believed in Jesus and "prayed the prayer" to commit their lives to him, with the appropriate amount of emotional sincerity. Heaven and hell last for eternity; everything we do here on earth is meaningless in comparison. Our actions in this life only matter to the extent that they nudge people closer to "getting saved," to falling on the correct side of that binary.

In evangelical land, it's easy to have the attitude "well, I'm saved, so there's nothing else I need to be doing now. Just waiting till I go to heaven." Or, "why should we give food to hungry people? If we're not also telling them about Jesus, it's pointless."

In evangelical land, it always felt like there was this big divide between the eternity of heaven and hell, and the normal lives we're living right now. Like getting people saved to get to heaven is the most important thing, and the time we spend just living our normal lives outside of that is just busywork. 

But now my beliefs are completely different. Now I believe that we are supposed to bring the kingdom of heaven to the earth, as Jesus taught us to pray. Heaven is not some faraway unreachable thing; heaven is going to come to this earth, and we should do the work to make it happen. As Martin Luther King Jr said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." That's heaven- and it ain't gonna bend itself. We have to do it.

So we look forward to heaven by doing the work to fight for justice on this earth. It's so profoundly and viscerally connected- not like the "pie in the sky when you die" and "fire insurance" of evangelicalism. I love it.

And that's what Stollar is talking about here. Eschatology is not this faraway future thing- it's about how the kingdom of God comes into our world right now. It's about the systems and powers in this world, and how they need to be redeemed and transformed, every valley raised up and mountain made low.

(Suggested background music for this post is Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven is a Place on Earth.")

So... it strikes me as strange that Stollar uses the word "eschatology" for this, but also, I love it. I think this a good way to think about heaven and hell. (And maybe this *is* how "eschatology" is used in liberation theology?) Let's do the work right now on this earth. That's heaven and hell.

And it makes me think, maybe religious beliefs should be understood as projections that inform our thinking about what we should do right now. Just like a complex 3-dimensional object projects a 2D shadow- religious beliefs are that shadow, and we live our lives in the shape of a 3D object that could make that shadow. Maybe heaven and hell are not real, but whatever you believe about them makes a real difference in how you live. Maybe religion is not actually true, but it's about the power of a story. Sure, you could make a list of behaviors that people should do or not do, but people respond better to stories. A big grand story about what the world is, and how God wants us to live, and the way that filters down into our very concrete actions in the here-and-now.

(And, to clarify, I'm not saying being religious is better than being non-religious. There's a wide range of different ways that people map their religious beliefs [or lack thereof] onto questions of morality/purpose/how we should live our lives, and I would not say that religious people's mappings are better than non-religious people's.)

I wouldn't regret it, if I lived my life in an effort to bring heaven to this earth, and then it turned out heaven didn't exist. Even if heaven is not real, there's something about this that *is* real. Something about... helping people is the right thing to do, even if there's no God rewarding you for it. That's real. It's a religious belief- because how can you prove it? what would it even mean to prove it? It's a religious belief that feels even deeper than my religion, somehow. 

My religion is "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people."

The kingdom of heaven is not far away. As Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

---

Follow-up post: Faith, Fruit, and "Do you actually believe your religion?"

Posts about "The Kingdom of Children":

"The Kingdom of Children" (a book about child liberation theology)
The Kingdom of Children: Comparing Religions
The Kingdom of Children: Eschatology
The Kingdom of Children: Theology and Play
The Kingdom of Children: Communion and Baptism

Related 

The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us To Pray

I don't believe in a literal "Jesus coming back." But, be ready.

"Muppet Christmas Carol" Is My Religion

On Christianity and Waiting

On Christianity and Waiting

Book cover for "Washed and Waiting"

Today in "books that Perfect Number heard about 10 years ago and finally got around to reading"...

I recently read Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality, by Wesley Hill, published in 2010. Hill is a gay Christian and believes in the traditional Christian teaching that says same-sex romantic/sexual relationships are sinful. The book is about how he struggles with the pain of loneliness and desire that can't be fulfilled, but he holds on to his faith that God sees what he is doing, that it's the right thing to do, and God will reward him some day. The purpose is to encourage other gay Christians who hold these beliefs and struggle with them.

I wasn't going to blog about this because I'm not really the right person for this... I feel like, a very obvious solution suggests itself... like why don't you just date a man? See, but I shouldn't actually say that to someone who is in this situation because it would come across as really insensitive. People in this situation are working so hard to keep the rules that they believe God is requiring them to keep, and they feel like it's so difficult and painful and lonely and they need encouragement, and if I come along and say "hey good news, your beliefs are wrong and you don't have to do any of this at all" well that is not helpful.

Actually, though, I think a lot of what Hill writes about in this book can be applied to singleness in general. People may be single for all sorts of reasons- all sorts of reasons which don't have an "obvious solution"- and they often do feel like it's overwhelmingly lonely. The book emphasizes that we all need human connection, and that the desire for friendship/connection should be embraced, and the church is supposed to meet that need. The church doesn't do a good job of this- churches often don't seem to know what to do with single people- but, in an ideal world, it would be a place where people can form deep, meaningful friendships. It's good that this book exists.

Anyway, the main thing about this book that inspired me to write this blog post is this: This is a very different version of Christianity than what I believe. Superficially, one might thing that it's just a matter of "some Christians think same-sex relationships are sinful, some Christians think same-sex relationships are okay", perhaps just a few Greek words in a bible verse being interpreted differently by the 2 different sides. But it turns out it goes way deeper than that. 

The book is called "Washed and Waiting"- because celibate gay Christians are "washed" clean from their sins and are "waiting" to get to heaven and finally be rewarded by God and healed of their homosexuality. (Yes, the book says that homosexuality is an abnormality that will eventually be removed when we are all made perfect in heaven.) The "waiting" part is really difficult- living one's whole lifetime with this pain and longing and loneliness, struggling, failing, trying to be faithful to God's law, clinging to the hope that someday God will reward you.

Is the Christian life about waiting, and trying not to sin? Wow, no, I very much do not see it that way. The Christian life should be about doing, not waiting. We are supposed to take action to help people and do good and make the world better. That is what actually matters. Not the extent to which you can control and discipline and repress yourself as it relates to your own personal habits and thoughts.

I was also struck by how much this ideology relies on heaven to finally make everything better. This life is full of pain and struggle and that's just how it is; we won't be healed until after we die and meet God. I don't agree with this. I don't think we should wait for heaven; I think we should bring the kingdom of heaven to the earth. As Jesus taught us to pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." We can't wait for God to save us; we need to take action and do it ourselves. And what if there is no heaven? I don't want to bank on that. We need to do what we can now to make this world better. 

If our religion doesn't help people right here and now, I think it's worthless. 

I will say, I can think of some circumstances where you can't really do anything to solve your problem except look forward to heaven. For example, what if someone you love died? Nothing you can do about it, except hope that you will see them again in heaven. Or what if you have a chronic illness or disability that you wish you could be healed from- nothing you can do except look forward to being healed in heaven. So yes, this idea of "waiting" and relying on heaven's existence can apply to some situations, but I very much do not think this "waiting" is the main point of Christianity. The book talks about it like it's the main point of Christianity. Waiting and *not* doing things. Maybe Hill would disagree with me saying that; maybe he doesn't think it's the main point of the Christian life. But if you read *only* this book, that's the impression you would get.

Still, though, it shouldn't just be "waiting"- we should take action to change the world and help people and advocate for disabled people's rights, etc, do what we can to make things better here on earth, even though we can't *completely* solve these problems. It feels so bizarre and jarring to me, to encounter this ideology that says gay Christians can't date a same-sex partner, because reasons, and that causes them to suffer loneliness and it sure seems like we could easily solve this by allowing them to date, but no no, let's not do that, let's wait for heaven.

(Okay, yes, I'm kind of oversimplifying it- Hill *does* give reasons in the book for why he believes he can't just date a man. It's not like this "obvious solution" has never occurred to him. All his reasons rely on a view of Christianity that's very different from mine though, so they don't really do anything for me.)

I don't think we should wait for heaven, and accept that we suffer in this world because that's just how it is. Christianity should be about bringing the kingdom of heaven to this world. Christianity shouldn't be about waiting, it should be about doing.

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Related:

If heaven is so great, why did God even make this world?

"On earth as it is in heaven" 

"Slaves, Women & Homosexuals" (What is this book actually about?)

"Waiting On God" - But Like, Why Though?

If heaven is so great, why did God even make this world?

Typical pop-culture depiction of heaven, with sunlight streaming through clouds. Image source.

[content note: stats about child death, discussion of hypothetical suicide and murder]

Let's suppose we believe that the world we live in now is flawed, and heaven is a perfect world where there is no suffering and all the wrongs are made right. (And yes I do believe this.)

Here is my big question: Why do we even have this world, then? Why didn't God just put us in heaven to start with? 

The idea of heaven seems like the kind of thing that people would come up with when they're having problems in this world. Longing for another world, which doesn't have any problems at all. 

But how about taking a step back and asking, if there really is a God who created a heaven, would this world we live in even exist? If we just start with the idea that there really is a God who wants people to live fulfilling lives- what kind of world would that God create? Would They create a world where the strong can take advantage of the weak, where some people are just born with fewer resources and fewer opportunities and that's just the way it is, and then make a second world which is perfect, which people go to after they die? Why even bother with the flawed world?

Christians have a few different ways of answering this, and I find them all weak:

1. Evangelicals (and many other groups of Christians) believe that only people who are "saved" go to heaven. Everyone deserves to go to hell because we're all sinners, but people who believe the correct things about Jesus are "saved" and can escape their deserved fate and go to heaven. So, people need to live on this earth because this is where they will choose if they're going to believe in Jesus or not, which is what determines if they go to heaven or hell. God can't just "skip" this life and put us all in heaven, because God only wants people who would freely choose that.

This argument doesn't mean anything to me because I don't believe in that kind of hell. Yeah, I used to be evangelical, and constantly worried about my non-Christian friends who were in danger of going to hell- I'm so glad I don't believe that any more. I sometimes say "I don't believe in hell" but I just mean it as a shorthand for "I don't believe that everyone deserves to go to hell, and I don't believe that one's religious beliefs are the determining factor in whether one goes to heaven or hell"- because I do believe there will be a judgment, and "the wages you failed to pay your workers are crying out against you." And "whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me."

(This argument also gets more complicated when someone asks "what about people who never heard about Jesus, and never had a chance to believe in him- it's not fair for God to automatically send them to hell" and then someone answers "God will judge them based on whether they *would have* believed in Jesus, if they had had the opportunity." So... so suddenly God is letting people into heaven based on what they would have done in a hypothetical alternate universe? Okay, then why not just judge all of us that way? No need to actually live out our whole lives on earth- God can just send us straight to heaven or hell based on what we "would have" chosen if we had in fact lived on earth. ... Honestly I've always felt this "God will judge based on what they knew" idea is just shoddily tacked on because we feel bad about people going to hell if they happened to live in a time or place where they never heard the name Jesus. "God will judge them based on what they knew" is not at all consistent with the rest of conservative Christians' beliefs about heaven/ hell/ God/ salvation/ sin/ evangelism/ missions/ etc.)

So the evangelical idea that the reason we have to live in this world is to see who chooses Jesus and who defaults to going to hell just doesn't mean anything to me.

2. In this life, because we have the choice to sin, because the world is not perfect, that's what gives us the opportunity for personal growth. To learn how to become better people, we need to be free to choose good or evil. And suffering helps us become stronger.

I don't think this argument is any good, and here's why: child mortality. Nowadays we have very good medical care and vaccines, so this is not something that most people in developed countries have experience with now, but for the vast majority of human history, it was normal for little children to die. For babies to die. For very rough ballpark numbers, I found this page from the CDC which compares current infant mortality rates to the rates from the year 1900. In the year 1900, ballpark numbers are around 10%-30% of infants dying before reaching age 1. (And if you're considering older children and not just infants, Our World in Data estimates something like 50% of children died before age 15 in the time period before 1700-ish.)

So how does it make any sense to say that it's important for us to live in this world first, before going to heaven, so that we can learn morality and make choices that shape who we are, when a significant percentage of people didn't live long enough for that to happen? And if we say heaven rights all the wrongs of this world, including infant mortality... then that means it's okay that those babies didn't live long enough to grow into people who could make good or bad decisions... if that's okay for them- and they're a significant fraction of the human population, like 10-30%- why isn't it okay for everyone? Why is it so necessary for the rest of us to live in this world, then?

If heaven is so great, why doesn't God just put us all there to start with? People have various answers to that, but the fact is, for a significant fraction of the human population, God basically *did* just "put them there to start with", ie, they died as babies. So if you say "oh but we have to live our lives on earth, to learn morality" well why didn't those babies then have to live their lives on earth, to learn morality? This is not some kind of rare statistical outlier- this is something like 30% of all people. Not *now*, thank goodness, because we have good medicine and vaccines, but if you look at all of human history.

3. There are good things we can do in this world that we can't do in heaven, like fight against injustice. And help people.

Uh... yeah it's good to fight against injustice, but wouldn't it be better if we didn't have to...? 

And hey maybe we can still help people when we're in heaven. Help each other with mundane low-stakes problems. That sounds nice.

---

There's a weird paradox about heaven: we claim it's so good, and if you feel sad about someone dying, you can encourage yourself by saying "they're in a better place"- that in some sense it's good that they're no longer in this world, but they are in heaven instead.

But this needs to be just a nice thing to say to help people feel better, not something we actually literally believe. If we really did believe it's better to be in heaven than on earth, we should kill ourselves. "Ah," someone will answer, "God closed that loophole by automatically sending you to hell if you commit suicide." Okay, well then don't kill yourself- kill other people. You're helping them get to heaven, right? Maybe you feel like, if God sends you to hell to punish you for murder, that's an acceptable cost, you're okay with going to hell yourself because you know you've done so much good for other people.

This logic is especially monstrous when people believe in some kind of "age of accountability"- ie, children are innocent, and if they die they will automatically go to heaven, but adults will be judged for their sins and possibly sent to hell. So, it follows that it's better for children to die rather than grow up and be at risk of going to hell. (And there really have been people who murdered children because of this belief.)

And there have been politicians/leaders who didn't care about the large-scale effects of what they were doing, didn't care whether their policies would lead to more children dying or not, because eh it's all okay, it's God's plan.

If we truly believe we're going to heaven... well, then why do we see it as a good thing that infant mortality is no longer common? This weird paradox where we try to believe "they're in a better place"- but that has to be nothing more than a way to try to make yourself feel better about something you can't change. Not a belief that would then inform actual choices you make, which could have real effects in terms of people living and dying. It can't be that. It's just horrible to even begin to reason through the conclusions that follow from that belief.

My approach for dealing with this problem is to believe in heaven, but not with much confidence. I hope it's real, but I don't know. Don't bank on it. Don't go around murdering people (and/or deprioritizing investment in public health) if you don't even know if heaven is real or not, my god.

It's better to have less faith, it seems.

---

So back to the main question I want to ask: Why didn't God just put us all in heaven to begin with? Why do we even have this world? And any answer you give has to take into account that God *did* put a nonnegligible percentage of people "in heaven to begin with" (ie, infant mortality rates have been very high throughout history). Apparently it's fine that, whatever lessons we were supposed to learn by living full lives on earth, a significant proportion of people just totally missed out on. And your answer should also take into account that we view it as an extremely good thing that in modern times, infant/child mortality is very rare. 

Advances in medical technology have very much changed the distribution of ages at which people enter heaven. Changed the demographics of heaven. Is that a good thing? Did God intend for it to be that way?

I don't have a good answer for this. I hope heaven is real, I believe in it, but this is an aspect of it that doesn't make sense.

---

Related:

Sure Of What We Hope For

A Bit Suspicious That "Heavenly Tourism" Confirms Everything We Already Believe

xkcd comic where a biologist says "The heroes of my field have slain one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse." Image source.

Jesus Weighs in on "Being Right vs Doing Good"

Artwork showing Jesus healing a blind man. Image source.

This is a follow-up to my post Being Right vs Doing Good~

So, what did Jesus have to say to the question, "Which is more important: being right or doing good?"

Okay I'll just tell you the answer now: it's doing good. Jesus was not interested in telling everyone the "right answers" and making sure everyone had the "right beliefs." Jesus was interested in how people treat each other.

Here are the receipts.

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Who is my neighbor 

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

So this "expert" asks Jesus a question- "Who is my neighbor?" In response, Jesus tells the parable of the good Samaritan. In this parable, a man is beaten by robbers, who leave him laying on the side of the road. A priest walks by and doesn't help. A Levite walks by and doesn't help. Then a Samaritan walks by, and stops to help this guy, bandaging his wounds, bringing him to an inn to take care of him.

That's Jesus' response. This story. This guy asked "who is my neighbor" and Jesus told a story. And then Jesus asked, "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" and tells him to "Go and do likewise."

Readers who are paying attention may notice that we still are not given a proper definition of "neighbor" here. We know the command is "love your neighbor as yourself," and surely we need to know what "neighbor" means, in order to understand this command, right? But Jesus doesn't give us that.

Jesus' purpose was not to make sure everyone knew all the exact nuances of "the rules", so we could rules-lawyer about them. It's not about that. The point of the story is not to teach you an exact definition of the command "love your neighbor as yourself." The point is that you should help people. That's what matters. What you do.

(As a person who over-analyzes things, I have to say, this annoys me.)

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The sheep and the goats

In Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats. He says that people will be separated into 2 groups- sheep and goats- and the King will tell the sheep that they will be rewarded because "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat" (and other scenarios where they helped him). The sheep then ask what he's talking about. He says, "Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me." For the goats, it's the opposite- they will receive eternal punishment, because "I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat" and so on.

So I want to ask you this question: Is the purpose of this story to teach us the process by which people get judged and sent to heaven or hell? Or is the purpose of this story to teach us that we should help people?

I think the point is we should help people. 

I don't think the point is to tell us the mechanisms of how people go to heaven or hell. Like Jesus really wanted us to know that someday he's gonna divide people into 2 groups, and if you helped hungry/thirsty/sick/etc people then you go to heaven... wait, how much do you have to help such people? What is the threshold exactly? How do you know if you've done enough to get into heaven?

It's not about that. It's not about those questions. Jesus is not telling us facts about how heaven and hell work. He is telling us that we should help people. That's the point.

Maybe it's *not* true that there's really a judgment and a heaven and hell. I don't know. Maybe it's just a story that serves as a guide to getting us into the right frame of mind, to have an attitude of being open and generous and compassionate towards people as we live our lives.

And I'll admit, as a person who overanalyzes things, I *do* worry about "how do I know if I've helped enough people to get into heaven?" But I think if we're worrying about that, we're missing the point of the parable. Worrying about if I've done enough- that puts the focus on myself. But the point of the parable is we should help others. The point is not "we should make sure we've helped others enough to meet whatever Jesus' standard is, and we should constantly worry about that."

Maybe it needs to not be literally true, or else you do end up with those implications. 

(And I love how the sheep clearly do *not* have the correct beliefs about Jesus/heaven/hell. Jesus says "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat" and they initially disagree with him. Jesus doesn't care- what matters is what you do, not your beliefs behind it.)

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My point

When you read what the bible says about Jesus' life, well, it doesn't look like the sort of thing that one would do if one's goal was to teach everyone the correct facts about morality/God/etc. If that was his goal, he could have spent all his time giving clear explanations (and then Christians wouldn't have had anything to argue about amongst ourselves for the past 2000 years). He could have said, "okay, here's how it works. Here's how heaven and hell work. Here's the correct teaching about the nature of God." He could have told us the exact correct details about the Trinity, free will, how atonement works, souls, church hierarchy structures, baptism, etc etc etc.

Instead, he cared about people, helped people, healed people. His teaching was about what you should do- not how to have the correct beliefs about everything. And he often used parables, which introduces the risk that someone is going to understand the parables incorrectly. He was okay with that. (Contrast this with modern evangelical Christian media, which has to hit you over the head with the message, because wouldn't it be terrible if we used a bit of subtlety and then somebody didn't get the "correct" message from it?)

Yeah, Jesus didn't act like a person who thinks the highest priority is that everyone needs to have the correct beliefs about everything. Doing good is what actually matters. 

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Related:

Sheep and Goats

When You Believe God is Out to Get You

A rock with the words "God answers prayer" on it. Image source.

I recently posted this link, Asylum-seekers thought they were following the rules. Now some are told to start over, and I have some more things I want to say about it.

The article is about how the MAGA government is using this strategy to screw over immigrants who are applying for asylum: Find some minor part of the process that wasn't done exactly according to the rules, and then say that it invalidates the whole process. (And in some cases, it was not the applicant's fault- they didn't have an interview because the government did not have any available times to do interviews.)

On one level, I understand that people can make the argument that this is what the rules say, so this is how it should work- if you don't follow all the steps correctly, then you don't get approved. But take a step back and ask what the overall goal is. For these MAGAs, it appears to me that the goal is to deport as many immigrants as possible. So they're looking for anything they can use as a reason to reject someone's application. 

But the original intention of the asylum system is this: Some people are forced to leave their home countries because they are genuinely in danger. In that kind of situation, they *should* have the right to live in the US. And if you're thinking about it from this perspective, you don't reject people just because they didn't do every single step perfectly. You give them support to help them through all the steps, and/or just don't make it an issue if some of the less-important steps aren't quite done perfectly.

These 2 contrasting perspectives- which I'll call "the government is out to get you" vs "people *should* get approved if they genuinely meet the criteria"- well, they made me think about how evangelicals talk about God. Is God out to get us, or do They genuinely want to help people?

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The most obvious example of "God is out to get you" is the evangelical teaching about salvation. Who goes to heaven, and who goes to hell? Well, evangelicals believe this: Everyone deserves to go to hell. You have to be totally perfect and sinless to go to heaven. Yeah, sure, God loves us, God wants us to go to heaven, he's sad that we're all going to hell- but his hands are tied. That's the rules. If you have committed any sin at all, at any point in your life, you deserve to go to hell, and so God has to send you to hell. 

Oh, but, good news, God figured out a workaround. Jesus came and died on the cross, to take all our sins onto himself, so that we would appear to be perfect and sinless and therefore can go to heaven. But, in order to get your sins forgiven, you have to "pray the prayer" to "ask Jesus into your heart." You have to believe the correct things about Jesus. You have to really really sincerely believe. If you jump through those hoops correctly, then God is allowed to let you into heaven. If not, well, his hands are tied. 

Yes, apparently God loves all of us, but rules are rules, and if people didn't believe the correct things in the correct way and have the correct attitude in their hearts, sadly God just can't let them into heaven. They will be tortured in hell forever. I was taught that this was the gospel, this was the central message of Christianity, this is what we need to tell the world.

But, sometimes people would ask, what about someone who has never heard of Jesus? It doesn't seem fair for them to go to hell if they never had a chance to do all those correct steps to get to heaven. 

When I was evangelical, and non-Christians brought up this point to argue that God is being unfair, I answered by saying "well, one idea I've heard is 'people will be judged based on what they knew.' God will determine if you *would have* believed in Jesus, if given the chance, and let you into heaven on that basis." 

I said it like this- "one idea I've heard"- because I didn't know if that was for real. Sure, it seems better and more fair to say "people will be judged based on what they knew"- but is that in the bible anywhere? Are we just making this up to feel better about our religion? Carving out this exception for people who have never heard of Jesus- is that really valid?

Plus, it leads to all kinds of contradictions with other evangelical beliefs. If it's true that people go to heaven even if they've never heard of Jesus but "would have" believed, then it's not really so important for Christians to go into all the world as missionaries and tell people about Jesus. In fact, perhaps people have a better chance of getting into heaven if they've never heard, because then God judges them based on this "what if you had heard about Jesus in an ideal way" standard- maybe that gives them a better chance than "they kinda sorta heard about Jesus but not in that much detail, and so they never really gave it any thought, and didn't convert to Christianity." 

But you very much do NOT see Christians saying "hey, maybe we *shouldn't* be missionaries, because 'God judges people based on what they knew.'" Instead, you see Christians saying "We NEED to send missionaries to tell everyone about Jesus, to save them from hell! !!! This is so important! People are in danger of going to hell! This is something worth giving your life for!" 

No, this "God judges based on what they knew" idea isn't something that evangelicals truly believe and have thought through the implications of. It's just something we say when someone raises the objection that the criteria to get into heaven seem unfair. To be consistent with the rest of evangelical Christian ideology, you'd have to believe that God's hands are tied- he loves people and wants them to go to heaven, but rules are rules and there's nothing he can do about it.

The question of "what if someone didn't believe in Jesus because they've never heard" is sort of the easiest one. For all the other reasons that someone might not believe in Jesus because they had a bad experience with Christianity, evangelicals don't discuss whether there might be some kind of carve-out exception to help them. No. Rules are rules. God's hands are tied.

For example, what if someone is gay, and Christians are so mean to them about it, that they leave the church and don't believe in Jesus? What if someone is sexually abused by their pastor, and Christians are so heartless and victim-blamy about it, that they leave Christianity behind? What if someone really really wants to believe in God, and they pray and pray for God to show them They are real, they try everything they can, and they never get any response from God, so they give up on it? No, evangelicals think all these people are going to hell. Rules are rules.

As I said in my 2015 post When Christians Say "We're Sorry":

If Christians really are sorry, they know that people need to heal on their own terms.

But of course, like I said earlier, believing in hell screws this all up. Because how sorry can you really be, and how much freedom can you really allow a victim to have, when you believe in a God who won't care about that on judgment day? When you believe in a God who doesn't care that church people hurt this person, and for their own mental and emotional health, they never went to church again... when you believe in a God who says you're out if you don't believe these specific doctrines about Jesus- no excuses.

How sorry can you really be when you worship a God who puts "the gospel" above caring for victims?

If all this is true, I want to ask this question: Does God actually want people to go to heaven?

Yeah, I know the evangelical answer to that is of course God wants everyone to go to heaven! God wants it so much that he came and died for us!

But then, why are so many people failing to get "saved" because of reasons that don't really feel like good enough reasons to send someone to hell? Doesn't it seem like, if God really wanted people to go to heaven, They could set up a different system, to genuinely help people get on the path to get there? Rather than rejecting a huge proportion of humanity because they didn't believe the "right" things in the "right" way.

And yeah, I know the evangelical answer to this is, well those people must have not *really* wanted to follow God. On some level, they wanted to rebel against God, and these other factors are just excuses. God gives us free will, and some people choose to reject him. He respects their decision. (And sends them to hell for it.)

I know that's the "answer," but I don't buy it.

Also, many evangelicals have experienced salvation anxiety- ie, the worry that perhaps, when we prayed to commit our lives to Jesus, we didn't quite do it in *exactly* the right way, and therefore we're not really "saved" and we're going to hell. Maybe we didn't say the right words, or maybe we didn't "really mean it." So much worry and psychoanalyzing yourself. It's common for evangelicals to "pray the prayer" many many times, just in case all the previous times you somehow did it wrong. Children praying to Jesus every night to save them from hell, and still constantly worried that they didn't quite have the right feelings or right motivations, so what if it didn't "count"?

I submit to you that this is not a God that wants people to go to heaven. This is a God who is out to get us.

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There are plenty of other circumstances where Christians believe that God set up some kind of thing for people's benefit, but people didn't quite follow all the technicalities of all the rules, and so missed out on the entire thing. We should be asking, did God actually want people to have those benefits, or not? Setting up a system of confusing rules, where one mistake means you fail the entire thing. Doesn't seem like something one would do if one wanted people to actually succeed.

For example, you're praying for something, and it doesn't happen. You keep praying for it, for a long time, and it still doesn't happen. What gives? Doesn't the bible say "whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours"? Didn't Jesus say, "You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it"? And yet many people have the experience of praying for something for a long time, and God doesn't make it happen.

Well, the evangelical answer for this is that these biblical promises about prayer come with all kinds of caveats. Maybe the problem is that you prayed for something that was outside of God's will. Maybe the problem is that you prayed with the wrong motives. Maybe the problem is that you have some sin in your life that you haven't repented of, and so God is refusing to answer your prayers.

A lot of Christians have had the experience of wanting something so bad- something very serious, like for a family member to be healed of a serious medical problem- and trying everything they possibly can to get their prayers to "work." Trying so hard to make sure you have the right feelings and the right motives while praying. Trying so hard to make sure you're not doing anything that God might interpret as sinful. Troubleshooting. Why isn't this working?

Yeah, the model we're working with here is that God has set up a system where They answer prayers. God's power to give us whatever we ask is right there, available to us. But you have to do all of the steps perfectly. If you don't quite meet all of the criteria completely perfectly, well, that must be the reason God isn't answering your prayer.

Kind of makes you wonder if God actually wants to answer prayers at all. Rules are rules, God's hands are tied... But maybe if They actually wanted to answer prayers, if They actually wanted these promises to mean anything, They could have gone about this differently. 

Another example: Years ago, I had some health problems, and that caused me to no longer believe in the concept of "trusting God." Because, apparently I can't "trust God" to not let health problems derail my whole life. What does "trusting God" even mean, if apparently this is within the range of things which God is okay with allowing to happen to me? Trust him to do what, exactly? Not letting my internal organs try to ruin my life for no reason is apparently NOT something I can trust God for.

Anyway, I once told a Christian friend my whole sad story about my health problems and why I don't trust God. (This was way after it had happened, and I wasn't having those problems any more.) And she said, "Maybe God was trying to teach you something."

Ugh. Geez. Maybe God was trying to teach me something. Yeah, this is something that Christians believe, that God allows bad things to happen to us because They have "a plan" and maybe They're trying to teach us to love Them more or be a better person or something like that.

And I said, "Well then God did a bad job, because I didn't learn anything from this, and that's not my fault." See normally, in this ideology, it would be *my fault*, that God made these bad things happen to me, with some high-minded purpose about teaching me something important, and I totally missed that message- that would be my fault. Must have been because I didn't have the right attitude, I didn't pray the right way, whatever, that's how I missed out on this very important lesson that God wanted to teach me by [checks notes] making me feel sick all the time. My fault. Not God's.

If God wanted to teach me something, maybe They could have gone about it in a different way. Also, isn't God all-knowing? They knew this wasn't gonna work, but They did it to me anyway? This God seems really bad at planning.

You have to ask, did this God actually want to teach me something, or not?

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Here's what it all adds up to: In this ideology, there are amazing wonderful things that God wants to give us because God loves us so much. But, any little mistake on our part might ruin the whole thing. These big grand promises about how God loves everyone and wants everyone to go to heaven, how God is so eager and ready to answer prayer and to give us good things- contrast that with the reality that oh, apparently only a small percentage of people are able to get those good things, because everyone else makes some minor mistake and therefore loses out on the whole thing.

Kinda looks like God doesn't actually want to do those things for us.

I wish Christians would stop asking "what did I do wrong, that is stopping God from answering my prayers" and instead ask "why did God set up a system where you only get your prayers answered if you pray in the exact perfect way, and then not do anything to help us know what that exact perfect way is?"

Because, isn't the point that we are not perfect, and that's okay, God loves us and meets us where we are? We were not able to reach God, so God came down to us. We aren't able to be good enough on our own, but God's love makes up for it. Isn't that what Christianity is about? "We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans." "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." "We love because he first loved us.""

As for me, I'm a Christian, but I don't pray and I don't believe God intervenes in the world, because of questions like this. When you believe God intervened in some specific way to help you with some specific thing you experienced, then that raises all sorts of questions about all of the times that God did not intervene to help people, and however you answer those questions, it can't lead to anywhere good. It leads to victim-blaming, or perhaps a belief that God has biases about who is worth helping and who isn't. No, I don't believe in that.

When Christians give all sorts of reasons why it's right for God to send someone to hell for not believing the right things, or why God's not helping you or answering your prayers because of some little thing you didn't do perfectly, this isn't a God who genuinely loves people and wants to help them. This is a God who is out to get you.

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Related: 

ICE and Hell 

I'm SO HAPPY I Won't Be Praying During Childbirth

I Didn't Like the Ocean in "Moana" Because it was Too Much Like God

Sheep and Goats

Nativity scene showing Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in separate cages. This was displayed by a church in 2019 to protest the US policy of jailing immigrants and separating families. Image source.

Hi readers, anyone remember when I was doing a blog series on the gospel of Matthew? Which I started in 2012? And I haven't updated since 2022? Yeah believe it or not, I still want to keep doing this blog series, so here we are. Matthew 25:31-46, the parable of the sheep and the goats. This is one of my FAVORITE bible passages.

Seriously, love the parable of the sheep and the goats. Go read the whole thing. 

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The big point: We should help people

The point of this parable- and the point of Christianity, in my opinion- is that we should help people. You see people in need- you should help them. That's it. 

When you help people, you are helping Jesus. When you ignore people in need, you are ignoring Jesus. I believe that very literally. 

This is the whole point. This is what we should learn from this passage. I mean, it doesn't matter if you know anything else about the bible or religion or whatever- you just need to help people.

The "sheep" were confused when Jesus told them they had helped him- they said "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?" See, they had no idea about the connection between Jesus and helping people. They didn't have all the correct religious beliefs locked down. But that doesn't matter. Jesus doesn't care. 

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Heaven and hell

In this story, Jesus tells us that the criteria for who goes to heaven and who goes to hell is simply this: Did you help people who were in need?

That's it. That's the criteria, according to this bible passage.

Of course, evangelicals don't believe that. Evangelicals believe that whether you go to heaven or hell is about being "saved"- ie, did you believe the correct set of religious doctrines, and have an attitude of genuine repentance for your sins, and ask Jesus to come and rule your life? Only Christians go to heaven- but actually, a lot of Christians don't even make the cut.

In evangelical ideology, getting into heaven is very much NOT about what you do. No, that would be works-based salvation, and we are the proud descendants of Martin Luther, who told those Catholics what was what. Works-based salvation, oh the horror. People think they earn their way to heaven by doing good things- as if you, a person, have the ability to earn your way to heaven, come on, stop being so full of yourself, you can do nothing, it's the grace of God that does everything, and we just have to believe, that's it. Watch out for those so-called Christians who want to tell you that getting into heaven is in any way related to what you do rather than what you believe. That's works-based!!!!!

Yeah, that's one of the very key tenets of evangelicalism. Saved through faith alone. If anyone dares to suggest that there's any connection between salvation and doing good things, we eye them extremely suspiciously.

Okay but here in Matthew 25, Jesus is literally saying you get into heaven based on whether you help people.

What did I think about this passage back when I was evangelical? Well, this was one of the "unclear passages." You know, in the bible there are "clear" passages and "unclear" passages- the bible is [supposedly] totally consistent, no contradictions, no errors, but some parts are kinda confusing, right? We have to "use the clear passages to interpret the unclear passages." So, for example, we know that we are saved through faith alone and not works- we got that from the "clear" passages of the bible- and then we come to the parable of the sheep and the goats, which seems to maybe suggest that people are saved based on whether they help others? What? That can't be right. Thus this is an "unclear" passage, and needs to be interpreted in light of what we know from the "clear" passages.

So when I was an evangelical, I understood the parable of the sheep and the goats like this: We are saved through faith alone, obviously. The criteria for getting into heaven is whether you're the correct type of Christian. When Jesus is talking about separating the sheep from the goats, he must be taking the pool of people who claim to be Christians, and separating them into the ones that are real Christians and the ones that aren't. If you're a real Christian, you'll have the right attitude in your heart, and so when you meet people in need, you'll help them- but that's a downstream consequence of being the correct type of Christian.

Back when I was evangelical, if you had suggested to me that this parable is saying that people of all religions can get to heaven if they feed the hungry, no way I would have believed you. No way it says that. People who were the wrong religions must have been already screened out, before Jesus comes and separates the sheep from the goats, right?

(Yeah so my point is, if evangelicals tell you they just simply believe the bible- they don't. Particularly the ones who take strong political stands against feeding the hungry, making sure everyone has health care, welcoming immigrants, etc.)

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Prison?

Interesting that one of the good deeds Jesus lists is "I was in prison and you came to visit me." We don't typically think of prisoners as people in need, whom we should help. I wonder what was going on in their society when Jesus said this- did a lot of people get imprisoned unjustly? In the US, mass incarceration is a big problem- we should help people whose lives are affected by this. (Ah, I thought I was gonna write about the sheep and the goats without getting political, but it turns out I can't.)

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Am I doing enough?

Sometimes I worry that Jesus is gonna think I'm not doing enough. I give money to charities which are helping people, but I could give more. Is Jesus going to judge me for that?

But I don't think we should get caught up in those kinds of worries. Feels kinda self-centered. The point is that I should help people, not that I should calculate what level of helping people is required so I meet the criteria of being a good enough person. Kinda like when white people are more worried about being called a racist, than about the actual effect of racism on black people's lives.

Maybe Jesus' point wasn't "here's what you need to do so that you can go to heaven." Maybe the "heaven vs hell" part of the story isn't literally true, but just a storytelling device. And the actual point is, we should help people.

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Conclusion

I love the parable of the sheep and the goats. It's great. It says the most important thing is to help people- and by doing so, we are helping Jesus. It says that Jesus doesn't care what religion you are, only about whether you help people. It portrays heaven and hell's entrance criteria completely opposite to what evangelicals say it is. And it's political.

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This post is part of a series on the gospel of Matthew.

Previous post: The Parable of the Talents: Risk and Return in Building the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 25:14-30)

Next post: One Of You Will Betray Me (a bible fanfic) (Matthew 26)

Click here to go to the beginning of the series.

A Bit Suspicious That "Heavenly Tourism" Confirms Everything We Already Believe

A comic showing a man in a devil outfit at the gates of heaven. He says, "Sorry about this - I died at a costume party." Image source.

Anyone remember the whole "heavenly tourism" fad?

A few years ago, some "heavenly tourism" stories started popping up. Books like "Heaven Is For Real" and "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven," which were (supposedly true) accounts of people who had near-death experiences, and supposedly went to heaven and then came back. It was a whole thing in Christian culture, back then. (Later, Alex Malarkey, the boy from "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven" said that whole book was not true.)

These stories were, basically, about proving how right our religious beliefs are. Scoring points against people from other religions and/or atheists. Doesn't that seem... extremely weird? If you really got to go see what heaven was like, shouldn't it be about learning incredible new otherworldly information, rather than confirming that you already were right about everything?

The "heavenly tourism" stories included elements like this: A child goes to heaven and sees Jesus, who looks basically like what Christians expect Jesus to look like. The child sees angels, who are basically what Christians expect angels to look like. The child meets some of his relatives who died a long time ago- and is able to later describe what these relatives looked like, which shouldn't be possible because the child had never met them on earth- and this matches Christians' beliefs about who is in heaven and what kind of existence they would have. And so on.

And there's usually an aspect of the story that's just there to score points for "pro-life" ideology: The child meets another child in heaven, who explains that she's the sister who died in their mom's belly, or something along those lines. And when the child comes back from heaven and tells his mom, the mom is so surprised, because she never told him that she had a miscarriage/abortion. (I say this "scores points" for the "pro-life" side because "pro-life" people wrongly believe that pro-choice people view a fetus as having no value/soul/life/etc at any point of development up until birth. So, if a dead fetus goes to heaven, that means abortion should always be illegal, or something. Uh, okay.)

And there may be a few elements of the story which at first don't seem to match what Christians believe- the child says he saw something in heaven, and the good Christian adults who are listening to this story can't figure out what he's talking about. But, they dig a little deeper and they find that it TOTALLY DOES match something the bible said, or whatever, just in a way they didn't expect. So, see, we were right about everything.

Really? Someone goes to heaven and comes back, and all we get is more confidence that we were already right about everything? We don't, like, learn anything new? Really?

I gotta say, I believe in heaven, but I definitely think I'm wrong about a lot of aspects of it. If heaven is real, probably the first thing that happens to everyone who goes there is they find out it's completely different from what they expected. It must be; we have no mechanism to actually get reliable information on what heaven is like- most of our beliefs are basically folklore that has gradually built up over hundreds or thousands of years, with no way to actually fact-check any of it. A lot of it has got to be just plain wrong. And wouldn't it be awesome, to get a glimpse of what heaven really is, and find out how wrong you are?

Personally, my beliefs about heaven and resurrection come from two main sources:

1. The world is not just. I want to believe that somehow, someday, all the wrongs will be made right. I want to believe that justice is real. And so I hope that there is resurrection, that heaven is real, and I imagine what heaven would have to be like, to truly create justice.
   But maybe that's just wishful thinking. Just because I want it, doesn't mean it's actually real. Which brings me to point number 2...
2. There is a long tradition of people believing in various religions because we want there to be more than just this world. (And, in particular, I'm a Christian, so I'm influenced by Christian beliefs about resurrection and heaven.) Thousands of years of people saying the world is not just and we hope for a better world. Okay, maybe that's just wishful thinking too, and there's nothing real to it. But since it's so common, I kind of believe there's something there. I hope there is.

That's, uh, that's pretty much it. That's all the "evidence" we have that heaven exists. (I put "evidence" in scare quotes because honestly neither of those things really adds up to any evidence at all.) That's all we have to go on, as we speculate about what heaven is like. Point 1 is just our opinions on what perfect justice should look like, and point 2 is claims from religions about how maybe a few hundred years ago, God spoke to someone and gave some clues about what heaven is like. That's it. So, okay, that's the broad outlines of what heaven is, but we seriously know nothing about the details. Like, you could say "I believe God will make everything right, but I don't have any idea how that will work" and that's basically it. Beyond that, any details you believe about heaven are just fan theories.

So, wow, how cool would it be to actually go to heaven and see what it's like, and then come back? And likely the main thing that would happen is you would find out how totally wrong you are about pretty much all of it. Very cool to learn new information and find out which things we were wrong about.

Right?

But, apparently not. Because that's not the angle that those "heavenly tourism" stories take at all. They're not about learning something new; they're used as evidence that Christians are already right about everything. They're evidence for the beliefs we already have, something you can bring up in an argument with non-Christians (though honestly I don't think these kinds of stories are at all convincing to non-Christians, so good luck with that!), rather than an incredibly useful tool for examining our own beliefs and getting rid of the ones which are just wrong.

Isn't that a little... strange?

And really it's about the whole concept of certainty, about how when I was an evangelical I thought I was right about everything, because the bible gives us all the answers and that's that. But now I'm like, I don't know, I hope resurrection is real, I believe in it, but I don't know, I could be wrong. I see the ways that my beliefs are based on ... like... what I *want* to be true, rather than things I actually have evidence for. And... I do believe people have a conscience that comes from God, and so it does mean something that we understand this world is not the way it should be, and we want there to be a better world- so, perhaps that means there *is* a better world- so, there's that, but that's not really evidence either. (It's a fan theory.)

Winning arguments. Scoring points. Telling other people why you're right and they're wrong. Imagine you get to go to heaven- YOU GET TO GO TO HEAVEN- and that's all you get out of it.

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Related:

Sure Of What We Hope For 

Someday Dave Ramsey will have to stand before God and explain why he fired a pregnant woman

And this song, "Heaven is a place on earth." Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. We'll make heaven a place on earth. That's my religion.

On "Unjust Marriage"

I searched google for "levirate marriage" and this is the diagram I got. It's a family tree, with circles (women) and triangles (men), and one triangle is crossed out and an arrow is drawn from the wife to the brother. Image source.

A while ago I saw this blog series "When Marriage is Unjust" by Herb Montgomery- here's part 1, part 2, and part 3. It's about Luke 20:27-38, where the Sadducees come and ask Jesus this weird hypothetical question about a woman who married 7 brothers in sequence because they keep dying on her- whose wife will she be at the resurrection (ie, in heaven)? Jesus tells them that at the resurrection, there will be no marriage.

Montgomery's take on this passage is:

Jesus explains that in the age to come, an age of justice, there will be no marriage. How unjustly must the institution of marriage have been that Jesus couldn’t imagine it in the coming age of justice? Jesus states that all who are children of the resurrection will be “like the angels.” We can debate whatever that means, but the implication of the phrase is that marriage will be no more because all injustice will be no more.

Marriage in the time of Jesus was so unjust and oppressive to women, that Jesus says it cannot possibly exist at the resurrection, when there is perfect justice.

(Montgomery's blog posts also raise some good points about the practice of levirate marriage- which is what the Sadducees are describing, a widow has to marry her dead husband's brother- and how it was so centered on men. Like the dead man's "need" to have an heir is more important than his widow's right to make her own choices about things like marriage. I've heard the argument that this practice was intended to help the woman, because if she was single and didn't have a son, she basically had no way to provide for herself- even so, the problems are all caused by patriarchy.)

I find this fascinating because it's so different from what I was taught "the bible says" about marriage, growing up in evangelicalism and purity culture. Purity culture teaches that "God has a plan for your life" about what person you will marry. That God picked 1 specific opposite-gender person for you, and that's "God's plan" (and you have to pray really hard and be really stressed about trying to figure out who it is, or else you're ruining God's plan). And that when you follow all of God's rules, don't have sex before marriage, and marry the one magical person that God picked, the result will be so perfect and magical and amazing. You'll have such a loving, intimate, romantic connection. You'll have the best sex ever. You'll fit right into your gender role, and it will feel so natural and fulfilling.

That was how I viewed marriage. You find someone you can truly trust, that you can love with everything you have, and you build a life together, as equal partners. I thought that's what marriage *is*. (And yes, lucky for me, that *is* what my marriage is about.)

Turns out that's a pretty modern idea- having a marriage based on romantic love. And historically, the way it often worked was, women have a bunch of less-than-ideal options, and one of those options is to get married- so that's why they get married.

It really amazes me how obvious it is that there are no women in the bible who followed the "purity rules" and then had a perfect marriage, and I totally never noticed this, until I had already started to question purity ideology. I'm a bible nerd, I knew all the stories, I knew all the messed-up ways that men of the bible treated their wives, and yet somehow I still bought this idea that "God has picked 1 guy who is perfect for you, and if you follow these biblical rules, it guarantees a perfect marriage." HOW??? (I ended up writing about this here: "God has one perfect guy for you!" Yeah, that's not biblical.)

As I was thinking about the idea of "unjust marriage" and getting married because it's the least-bad option, I thought about this article I had read, from Sixth Tone: A Vietnamese Bride’s Chinese Dream. It's about a Vietnamese woman who didn't have many options for getting a well-paying job in Vietnam, and then she heard about a cousin who had married a Chinese man and moved to China. She decided to look into this option for herself too, which meant taking a very shady bus ride hundreds of miles into China, with some other Vietnamese women. They came to some small village in China and met the available men. She says this about the man whom she decided to marry:

The next family offered 100,000 yuan and had a two-story brick house. The suitor was in good physical shape, had a junior high school diploma, was five years older than me, and looked to be freshly shaven.

The first time I saw him, I felt nothing; my only concern was the bride price. After weighing it up, I decided to marry him.

It really surprised me, the way marriage is talked about in this article. It's not about "you know this person and you love this person and you want to spend your life with them." Instead, it's talked about like... do you think you could tolerate this person? If you had to live with him and have his children, could you accept that? Is it a better situation overall than the life you have in Vietnam?

The article also talks about the difficulties that this woman has because she entered China illegally. Not having id, worrying about being deported, not even having the right documents to be able to go back to Vietnam- and also, she couldn't speak Chinese at all when she first arrived. Immigrant women in this kind of situation are extremely vulnerable. What if her husband turns out to be abusive? She can't easily leave him because then she may get deported.

This is the reality of what marriage is, for a lot of people in the world today. It's a way to get out of a bad situation, into a different-and-hopefully-less-bad situation. And I think reading about women's experiences today, choosing marriage for these reasons, can help us when we read what the bible says about marriage. 

We read words like "marriage" or "divorce" in the bible, and we think of those terms in the way we see them defined in our culture today- which is very much because of the work of feminist activists, pushing for changes in society so that women would have better options. And as a result of that feminist work, it feels normal to us to marry someone because you want to be with them, rather than because it's the least-bad option available to you. And also, the work of LGBT activists- because the concept of same-sex marriage is very much dependent on the idea of marrying someone because you want to be with them, not because of societal expectations, or economic reasons, or being expected to have children. (But also there are legal things like health insurance, hospital visitation, etc, which are very important reasons same-sex couples need to have the right to marry.) So this is how we see marriage, and then we read the bible and we assume that's what the bible means when it uses the word "marriage", but wow it is NOT.

So, in summary: In purity culture, I was taught that God has a plan for all of us to have a wonderful marriage with an opposite-sex partner, whom we work together with so incredibly well, and that we love and trust fully. And yes, I'm married now, and I'm glad my relationship with my husband is like that- we work together well, it's romantic, we love each other, etc. (But I don't believe in the gender-roles stuff, and also it's important to me that I chose to marry him, instead of just coasting along on "God's plan.") But, this view of marriage is a very modern thing- and actually, there are many cultures in the world today where that's not what marriage is at all. Instead, marriage is about financial needs, or immigration opportunities, or fitting a role that your family wants you to fit... And the concept of marriage that we see in the bible is much closer to that than to romantic ideals about "we want to spend our lives together." 

When we read what the bible says about marriage, we should remember that's the kind of marriage it's talking about. And we should be grateful that because of feminist and LGBT activists, marriage in our culture has become something so much better than what it was in biblical times.

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And 1 more thing I want to say: We can help by donating to charities that help women around the world have better economic opportunities, and charities that help immigrants. For example, there's Women For Women International, which focuses on women who are survivors of war.

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Related:

"God has one perfect guy for you!" Yeah, that's not biblical. 

This "Do Not Intermarry With Them" Stuff Hits Different Now 

It Doesn’t Actually Matter What Jesus Said About Divorce

US Immigration and the Definition of Marriage