God Shuffled His Feet

"Do you have to eat or get your hair cut in heaven? And if your eye got poked out in this life, would it be waiting up in heaven with your wife?"

- Crash Test Dummies

Good questions. What is heaven? Popular culture would have us believe it's a city of clouds populated by haloed harp players, the Pentecostals would have us believe it's a place where you live in eternal happiness, and Atheists would have us ask "Exactly what the hell is that?". I'm an Atheist.

Happiness. Happiness is subjective. So if you're idea of happiness conflicts with the Christian idea of happiness, where does that leave you in relation to heaven? If your idea of fun is drunken and drug-fuelled hedonistic polygamistic unsafe sex, do you get to do that for eternity in heaven? No, you don't, so why would you want to go there? Christianity seems to use the idea of heaven as some incentive to submit to their belief system, but it's a paradox. If your idea of fun isn't my idea of fun, why would I want to spend eternity doing it?

Speaking of paradoxes, I picked this one up in Joe Hill's book "Horns". I don't have a direct quote so I'm again going to rely on my powers of paraphrase. It basically goes like this: If "God" wants you to go to heaven, and "The Devil" is meant to act as a deterrent to doing the "wrong" thing and in doing so make you behave yourself (so you can go to heaven). Doesn't that mean that God and The Devil are on the same side? And if that is the case, does that make them interchangeable?