My Twitter feed is full of the usual festive wishes from theists, either asserting outright or dropping heavy hints that I'd better get saved in order to spend eternity with their beloved despot rather than his mate downstairs.
Aside from the embarrassingly obvious fact that neither of them exists, are the alternatives as disparate as their popularisers would have us think? Hell as depicted in theist literature doesn't sound terribly attractive, I grant, but like all lies made up to terrify children into submission, its advertised nastiness is inversely proportional to its likelihood of being true.
As for heaven, what's all that about? Singing the praises of the Dear Leader from dawn till dusk, for ever without end? As the late Christopher Hitchens put it so eloquently, it's one thing to be tapped on the shoulder and told that the party is going on but you have to leave. It's quite another to be told that the party is going on eternally, and you can't leave. What's more, the boss insists that you will have a good time. It's rather like a celestial North Korea, the difference being that at least you can die and leave North Korea.
Joking aside, surely eternity means that there will come a time when you have thought every possible thought, done every deed available within heaven's rather tame limitations, read every sonnet, played every tune, danced every dance and tasted every fruit. What then? All over again, with feeling?
Theists don't like the idea of being dead, so they cling to a story in which they can stay alive. The rest of us are quite cool with the idea that nothing's forever, and besides, every one of us knows what being dead is like. We have all been dead for fifteen billion years. As Samuel Langhorne Clemens put it, when we are dead we will be once again as we were at the time of the dinosaurs and of Mary Tudor, and that caused us not the slightest inconvenience.
Aside from the embarrassingly obvious fact that neither of them exists, are the alternatives as disparate as their popularisers would have us think? Hell as depicted in theist literature doesn't sound terribly attractive, I grant, but like all lies made up to terrify children into submission, its advertised nastiness is inversely proportional to its likelihood of being true.
As for heaven, what's all that about? Singing the praises of the Dear Leader from dawn till dusk, for ever without end? As the late Christopher Hitchens put it so eloquently, it's one thing to be tapped on the shoulder and told that the party is going on but you have to leave. It's quite another to be told that the party is going on eternally, and you can't leave. What's more, the boss insists that you will have a good time. It's rather like a celestial North Korea, the difference being that at least you can die and leave North Korea.
Joking aside, surely eternity means that there will come a time when you have thought every possible thought, done every deed available within heaven's rather tame limitations, read every sonnet, played every tune, danced every dance and tasted every fruit. What then? All over again, with feeling?
Theists don't like the idea of being dead, so they cling to a story in which they can stay alive. The rest of us are quite cool with the idea that nothing's forever, and besides, every one of us knows what being dead is like. We have all been dead for fifteen billion years. As Samuel Langhorne Clemens put it, when we are dead we will be once again as we were at the time of the dinosaurs and of Mary Tudor, and that caused us not the slightest inconvenience.
It is time to acknowledge publicly that this life is the only one we get, and mankind can ill afford the luxury enjoyed by those who would force change on others because of their belief in unsubstantiable nonsense.
