As an atheist I give as much credence to Heaven and Hell as I do Santa’s workshop at the North Pole or the sincerest pumpkin patch where the Great Pumpkin resides. However, I see comments on bulletin boards of new atheists saying they are having trouble dispensing with their inbred fear of Hell. Let’s think this through. Say for the sake of argument that the Christians have it right and there is a real place Heaven and a real place Hell. In Heaven the Bible doesn’t talk about harps and sitting on clouds. Look at the book of Revelations. Look at the epistles. Heaven is mostly an eternity of kneeling on a hard marble floor, prostrate before a fractious deity with an inferiority complex. As Richard Dawkins said “the God of (the Bible) is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Dan Barker’s book “God, the most unpleasant character in all fiction” backs up these claims with evidence direct from the “Good Book”. All the denizens of Heaven are constantly on their knees, faces pressed to the floor praising God to prop up his frail ego. And Jesus prances around all day saying “I am the greatest”, “I am the alpha and omega” like some cut rate Mohammed Ali. And who knows what the hell the Spook does. And as the old gospel hymn Amazing Grace says “when we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we first begun.” Kinda scary.
On the other hand, most Christianity has dropped the fire and pitchfork Hell as a medieval construct to incite fear among the less faithful. Hell is seen simply as being separated from God. And looking at the Bible, Satan (or Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Morning Star or any other of the thousand names for this wayward angel) seems like a stand up kind of guy. He has seen the real God and is unimpressed. He is thought to be the one who animated the snake in the Garden. He told Eve the truth when he said God had lied when he said eating the fruit would make them die. He only rained misery down on Job at the instruction of God. He even told Jesus “join with me and we can rock this planet”, but he was afraid. All of what we see as the evil of Satan comes from the lying mouth of the bully upstairs and his minions here.
So spend eternity on your knees with the bully or spend it separated from him, but in discussion with other denizens of Hell: Gandhi, Buddha, Dawkins, Darwin, Galileo, Hitchens, Sam Harris, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Marco Polo, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, the majority of the posters on this website and thousands of other free thinkers, including me.
Kind of makes me sad that Heaven and Hell aren’t real. I bet there’d be a rocking party down below.