Non-religious people can live just as positive and hopeful lives as religious believers. Believers doubt this atheist attitude, and love to bring up the topic of heaven in response.

Is religion really so great just because you get to believe in an afterlife? Without religion, believers claim, there’s no reason to be hopeful about life at all. And heaven is a huge part of that consolation for most believers. Believers often say, “How can you have a hopeful attitude about life when you think that death is final?”

Actually, nonbelievers don’t have any bigger difficulty staying positive than anyone else. You can find depressed atheists, and pretty depressed believers too. Death is just another tough reality to be accepted along with so many unchangeable things about life. Its natural to want to not die. Hoping for a second endless life is the unnatural condition. Why should people get their hopes so high? But no hopes are too high for religious folks. The sky’s the limit for them – actually, not even the sky limits their hopes as they gaze up to heaven.

But I don’t think that heaven is really about hope or consolation.

Religion at the personal level is ultimately about wish-fulfillment (and that is why religion includes delusion as well). So it appears easy to explain belief in heaven – people really to believe, because that belief feels so great. For believers, it feels so good to be able to console yourself when life is tough, and it feels so good to be able to tell loved ones about heaven when their lives get tough. All the same, I’m skeptical that heaven is really about loving and hopeful consolation.

One reason why I’m skeptical is the curious fact that almost all people who believe in a pleasant afterlife also believe in a nasty afterlife. Christian and Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist hells (just to mention a few) are fascinatingly disturbing. Even folks with fuzzy notions of “hell” as just a separation from God make sure to remind you that such separation is not supposed to be pleasant. If heaven is about one’s own wish-fulfillment, why do people also want to believe in hell? Conveniently, hell is not for you, it’s for other people.

Consolation is lovely for you and people you care about. But religious believers don’t really want everybody to be consoled. Believers want to be reassured that other people won’t ever be consoled. Believers imagine hell because they like to imagine certain people in hell. Believers adoringly talk as if heaven is supposed to be such a fabulous place for everyone. They go on and on about how we should all become believers so that we can all believe that we are going to heaven. But believers don’t really want everyone in heaven. What believers really believe is that everyone should accept that some are getting heaven, and some are getting hell. And the people going to hell the fastest are those who don’t believe in this lovingly fashioned plan.

Heaven and hell are more about enforcing moral retribution upon everyone, and not about loving consolation for everyone. I said earlier that religion personally is largely about private wish-fulfillment. But at the social level, religion is mostly about imposing a public moral system. And not just any moral system – religions with heavens and hells have moral systems about obedience, vengeance, and retribution. With heaven and hell, private wish-fulfillment nicely pairs up with public moral-expectation. God delivers love to us because we feel deserving of that love. God delivers vengeful retribution upon others because we wish we could do it to them ourselves.

When believers say, “My God is all about Love!” what they are actually saying is that God really loves them and doesn’t love others. These are the kind of people who can’t feel truly loved unless someone else doesn’t get that love. Such a childishly selfish attitude, barely tolerable from the three year-old pushing the older sibling away from the parental lap, is entirely despicable from adults. Yet religious societies take this to the public level, effectively frightening members into obedience, and warning outsiders not in that good company that they will suffer for it. Join our religion, the message rings out, or else you’ll get hell for it!

Preachers and theologians from all kinds of religions are eager for everyone to know all about hell. Their warnings help fill libraries all around the world. Just one sample may be enough, from Puritan Jonathan Edwards (d.1758). Notice how his sermon has to describe, in literally agonizing detail, not just what hell is like for those in it, but how hell looks to those in heaven:



That God will execute the fierceness of his anger, implies that he will inflict wrath without any pity: when God beholds the ineffable extremity of your case, and sees your torment to be so vastly disproportioned to your strength, and sees how your poor soul is crushed and sinks down, as it were into an infinite gloom, he will have no compassion upon you, he will not forbear the executions of his wrath, or in the least lighten his hand; there shall be no moderation or mercy, nor will God then at all stay his rough wind; he will have no regard to your welfare, nor be at all careful lest you should suffer too much, in any other sense than only that you shall not suffer beyond what strict justice requires: nothing shall be withheld, because it’s so hard for you to bear.… [Y]ou shall be tormented in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb; and when you shall be in this state of suffering, the glorious inhabitants of heaven shall go forth and look on the awful spectacle, that they may see what the wrath and fierceness of the Almighty is, and when they have seen it, they will fall down and adore that great power and majesty. ( Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 1739 )

Wow, what a thing to hear from a sermon. Heaven would be incomplete unless you can watch people suffering in hell. Heaven truly is the happiest place, praise God! As sickening as all this is, it only expresses what religion tacitly thinks, how heaven for you requires hell for someone else. And that’s no coincidence, since the larger point of such a “loving” religion is to not love everyone. Such a religion is trying to enforce a crude morality in which you can’t be rewarded for being really good unless others are punished for being really bad. God the Father doesn’t really love everyone equally. Jesus saves, but terms and conditions apply.

For believers who don’t take heaven and hell so seriously, my general point about religion and hope still stands. Religions enforce their crude moral codes using crude psychological techniques. Religions force people into contradictory and schizophrenic mental states. Believers have to simultaneously believe that life really is so awful and hopeless that only a religious fantasy lets you believe that life really is so hopeful. Notice that holding these two contradictory beliefs together is essential to religion. You have to really truly believe that life was so awfully hopeless before you’d be driven to take religion seriously and believe that life is actually quite hopeful. On the other hand, if you didn’t think this life was all that hopeless (like the way that atheists don’t), then you wouldn’t have to take religion seriously in the first place. Religion is premised on sensing and fearing hopelessness in this life.

That is why religion tirelessly pounds the awfulness of this life into your head from the

day you are born. Before you are even ready to maturely think about what life is about, religions instruct you that you are horribly imperfect, or shrouded in sin, or trapped in karma, and so forth. Each religion has to convince you that your life is so bad so that they, and they alone, can provide the one cure to make you well.

Addiction to such poisonous cures can cloud the minds and twist the hearts of believers, but not atheists. Atheists have their own struggles to stay focused on beautiful and worthy things in life, but at least they don’t suffer from unearthly distractions. When believers demand that you find hope in life, reply that you already can. Then there’s no need to listen to an unnecessary sermon.