I appreciate and I agree that Americans are a little low on hope right now. I disagree with a couple points.
First, while the universe may not have a purpose as simple and neat as one found in Christianity, that does not mean that existence outside an organized religion is completely unmoored, random, unfeeling, and meaningless. I'm reminded of the beginning of Steven Pinker's novel Enlightenment Now, in which he answers the question "Why should I live?":
"In the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your convictions, and so you are committed to reason as the means to discover and justify what is important to you. And there are so many reasons to live!
As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy–the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness–and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues.
And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress."
Secondly, I would argue that some of the ideas within Christianity tend to inflate the importance of the individual. People think that God died individually for them and that they are in direct communication with the Creator of the universe. That's all fine and dandy if God is telling you to feed and shelter the less fortunate, but it gets dicey when God is telling you to kill the infidels, reclaim the Holy Land, or that polygamy is the way to go. Absent religious belief, one gets a sense of perspective on their place in the cosmos--relative insignificance. So, there's less concern about one's place in eternity and more concern about the positive change that can be made now or for future generations and society as a whole.
Finally, I really cannot stomach the idea of all these individual heavens. I remember someone saying at my grandmother's funeral that they had a vision of her happily riding around on a horse in heaven. I just thought that was ridiculous. I understand why it's appealing to think of heaven as whatever makes one feel better about all the suffering that happens during life and all the uncertainty of death. I do not find the idea of heaven as everything we enjoyed in life minus everything we found unpleasant appealing. The playground is fun because sitting still in class is sometimes boring. Karaoke is fun because we don't all have the voices of angels (also, we're usually drunk). Rollercoasters are fun because waiting is hard and feeling the thrill of adrenaline when the ride first plunges is exhilarating. Clean water is fun because it's a valuable limited resource. If everything is frosting, frosting loses its sweetness. And let's not forget that the Christian heaven is going to have a population far smaller than the Christian hell--where everyone will have all the things they hated about life minus all the things they found pleasant.
Nothing about heaven or hell gives me hope. I find hope in working to make a better future for my family and the next generation inheriting the Earth. That fills me with a deep sense of empathy and purpose.
Agree that the idea of "boutique heavens" is a bit nauseating. But worth noting, that's not the only conception of heaven, but it's one we espouse in this hyperindividualized age, in which the heights of our imagination are limited by, say, resorts.
There are other, older ideas. The Beatific Vision, for instance--the communion (emphasis on that previous word) of saints. It's this very idea--communion--that is hard for us to grasp these days.
Agree with Jon: People are going to worship, whether it is the Absolute, one or more of the panoply of spirits that make up the "host" part of "Lord of Hosts," some abstract ideal (truth, justice, love, et al.), themselves as individuals, or (as seems to be the case in many corners of the modern West) the Void. We're free to choose, but choose wisely. As Merton intimates, we become like that which we worship.
I agree that the idea of communion of/with the saints and the Lord of Hosts should be more appealing than "boutique heavens" (love that term! haha) for Christians. The idea of enjoying the eternal blissful company of a band of like-minded saints should fill one with hope. What about all the other 'souls' who don't qualify as saints -- all the millions of people who occupied the Americas isolated from any concept of Judeo-Christian belief for millennia? Where will the Sentinelese people be communing for eternity? What about all the people who were born into Islamic families or Hindu families instead of into Western culture? They didn't choose wisely enough, I guess. It would have been far wiser to have been born in the United States in the last century.
I also agree with Jon/Bob Dylan that you gotta serve somebody (something). I don't know that I would use the word "worship," and I don't know anyone who worships the Void--unless that's the handle of some YouTube influencer I'm not familiar with. I agree with Pinker that as a sentient being I can "foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace." So, that's what I serve. I don't worry about the afterlife because I didn't worry about the before-life.
My take: some may inadvertently think they worship "nothing," when in reality that translates to the Void, in a sense (although hate to say it, I have known at least one IG "influencer" who literally worships the Void...not kidding).
I'm heterodox on this point, which would get me thrown out of a number of joints, but Matthew 25:31-46, as clear an eschatological presentation as one could want, doesn't say anything about right belief...only right action (which implies a certain indwelling in one's heart). Big tent, catholic in the sense of universal: we can never be certain how the Holy Spirit may be manifested to those of different faiths and in different ages, yet if I had to bet it would involve agape, such that whoever gives a cup of cold water to one of the saints will not lose his or her reward.
Thanks for reading and discussing! Great points from you both. I didn't mean to imply the idea of 'boutique heavens,' more just the idea of joy without suffering. I think I find life without the hope of ultimate redemption or "making things right" to be kind of unbearably tragic, to the point where I might consider 'anti-natalism' if I was not a 'believer'. I may do a post on this in the future so thank you for provoking that thinking. Stay tuned!
Hey, Jon,
I appreciate and I agree that Americans are a little low on hope right now. I disagree with a couple points.
First, while the universe may not have a purpose as simple and neat as one found in Christianity, that does not mean that existence outside an organized religion is completely unmoored, random, unfeeling, and meaningless. I'm reminded of the beginning of Steven Pinker's novel Enlightenment Now, in which he answers the question "Why should I live?":
"In the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your convictions, and so you are committed to reason as the means to discover and justify what is important to you. And there are so many reasons to live!
As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy–the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness–and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues.
And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress."
Secondly, I would argue that some of the ideas within Christianity tend to inflate the importance of the individual. People think that God died individually for them and that they are in direct communication with the Creator of the universe. That's all fine and dandy if God is telling you to feed and shelter the less fortunate, but it gets dicey when God is telling you to kill the infidels, reclaim the Holy Land, or that polygamy is the way to go. Absent religious belief, one gets a sense of perspective on their place in the cosmos--relative insignificance. So, there's less concern about one's place in eternity and more concern about the positive change that can be made now or for future generations and society as a whole.
Finally, I really cannot stomach the idea of all these individual heavens. I remember someone saying at my grandmother's funeral that they had a vision of her happily riding around on a horse in heaven. I just thought that was ridiculous. I understand why it's appealing to think of heaven as whatever makes one feel better about all the suffering that happens during life and all the uncertainty of death. I do not find the idea of heaven as everything we enjoyed in life minus everything we found unpleasant appealing. The playground is fun because sitting still in class is sometimes boring. Karaoke is fun because we don't all have the voices of angels (also, we're usually drunk). Rollercoasters are fun because waiting is hard and feeling the thrill of adrenaline when the ride first plunges is exhilarating. Clean water is fun because it's a valuable limited resource. If everything is frosting, frosting loses its sweetness. And let's not forget that the Christian heaven is going to have a population far smaller than the Christian hell--where everyone will have all the things they hated about life minus all the things they found pleasant.
Nothing about heaven or hell gives me hope. I find hope in working to make a better future for my family and the next generation inheriting the Earth. That fills me with a deep sense of empathy and purpose.
Agree that the idea of "boutique heavens" is a bit nauseating. But worth noting, that's not the only conception of heaven, but it's one we espouse in this hyperindividualized age, in which the heights of our imagination are limited by, say, resorts.
There are other, older ideas. The Beatific Vision, for instance--the communion (emphasis on that previous word) of saints. It's this very idea--communion--that is hard for us to grasp these days.
Agree with Jon: People are going to worship, whether it is the Absolute, one or more of the panoply of spirits that make up the "host" part of "Lord of Hosts," some abstract ideal (truth, justice, love, et al.), themselves as individuals, or (as seems to be the case in many corners of the modern West) the Void. We're free to choose, but choose wisely. As Merton intimates, we become like that which we worship.
I agree that the idea of communion of/with the saints and the Lord of Hosts should be more appealing than "boutique heavens" (love that term! haha) for Christians. The idea of enjoying the eternal blissful company of a band of like-minded saints should fill one with hope. What about all the other 'souls' who don't qualify as saints -- all the millions of people who occupied the Americas isolated from any concept of Judeo-Christian belief for millennia? Where will the Sentinelese people be communing for eternity? What about all the people who were born into Islamic families or Hindu families instead of into Western culture? They didn't choose wisely enough, I guess. It would have been far wiser to have been born in the United States in the last century.
I also agree with Jon/Bob Dylan that you gotta serve somebody (something). I don't know that I would use the word "worship," and I don't know anyone who worships the Void--unless that's the handle of some YouTube influencer I'm not familiar with. I agree with Pinker that as a sentient being I can "foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace." So, that's what I serve. I don't worry about the afterlife because I didn't worry about the before-life.
My take: some may inadvertently think they worship "nothing," when in reality that translates to the Void, in a sense (although hate to say it, I have known at least one IG "influencer" who literally worships the Void...not kidding).
I'm heterodox on this point, which would get me thrown out of a number of joints, but Matthew 25:31-46, as clear an eschatological presentation as one could want, doesn't say anything about right belief...only right action (which implies a certain indwelling in one's heart). Big tent, catholic in the sense of universal: we can never be certain how the Holy Spirit may be manifested to those of different faiths and in different ages, yet if I had to bet it would involve agape, such that whoever gives a cup of cold water to one of the saints will not lose his or her reward.
Thanks for reading and discussing! Great points from you both. I didn't mean to imply the idea of 'boutique heavens,' more just the idea of joy without suffering. I think I find life without the hope of ultimate redemption or "making things right" to be kind of unbearably tragic, to the point where I might consider 'anti-natalism' if I was not a 'believer'. I may do a post on this in the future so thank you for provoking that thinking. Stay tuned!