Mormonism’s Heaven > Other Heavens
Posted on Aug 10, 2015 by Trevor in Religion
Heaven. It’s a lovely concept. Many different religions have conceived up some variant of a paradisiacal afterlife. What about the standard Christian version of heaven, though? Is it really that appealing?
Many comedians have pointed out the lackluster experience that living in such a heaven might entail. In The Daily Show’s Book Earth: A Visitor’s Guide, the writers attempt to describe our concept of heaven to extraterrestrial tourists:
Given how easy and fun earthly sinning could be, you’d think that our vision of heaven would have to dazzle us. However, the furthest our collective imaginations got was that heaven was white, well maintained, and looked a little bit like the clean room in a hospital burn ward. Best we could tell, heaven was a place where you and everyone you’d ever known did happy things to harp music—something you never would’ve been caught dead listening to when you were alive.
Sounds about right.
Gary Larson’s The Far Side makes his point as follows:
Like he did with many theological tropes, Joseph Smith took the standard Christian narrative of heaven and ran with it. In fact, Mormonism’s expansive (and often specific) details of the afterlife have sometimes been the subject of ridicule by others. (See Kolob, becoming a god, eternal sexual reproduction, tiered kingdoms, and other “space doctrines”.)
Now, I’m not one to worry too much about the afterlife nor fret over the details thereof. But I have to say, Joseph Smith’s version of heaven sounds literally worlds better than the standard portrayal. Playing harps? Singing in a choir? Kissing Jesus’s feet eternally? While some of these are obviously meant to be metaphors, and while some things in Mormon portrayals are just as silly, at least Mormons believe that people will be doing something that matters. Something even grander than what we were doing in mortality.
Building galaxies? Designing species? Manipulating time and space? Sign me up for that, please.
In Steven Peck’s novella A Short Stay in Hell, he describes a version of Hell whose primary form of punishment is time. Just passing time. Eons of time, spent doing largely menial things with no real significance. Most people will recognize that scarcity is a big part of what makes something valuable, therefore it follows that an infinite supply of time is dauntingly worthless. I tell you, it’s staggering the way Peck’s rendition of Hell makes eternity seem like the worse thing imaginable. If you don’t reevaluate your concept of “forever” after reading that book, you aren’t thinking it through.
So if it turns out that literal eternity awaits me one day, and I have a choice, I’ll opt for the expansive, boundless, infinite Mormon concept over the staid traditional version in a heartbeat. Supposing that heartbeats are still a thing at that time.
