Does Heaven Exist?

Did religion get Heaven wrong?

Would you want to go to Heaven when you die?

I’m not asking: Do you believe in the existence of Heaven?

What I’m wondering is, if it were true that there is a Heaven - a paradise you enter into after death - would you want to go?

This may sound like a trick question. Right? I think a lot of people might be up for Heaven - eternal perfect happiness - if it were true. Life is difficult for everyone, and is tragic and traumatic for many. The idea of a big pay-off at the end such as infinite bliss and absence of all suffering, is a hopeful happier ever after.

Turns out, most people do in fact believe in Heaven. A study by the Pew Research Center shows that three-quarters of U.S. adults believe in the pearly gates.

After Heaven, the top belief in the afterlife is where one’s spirit, consciousness or energy lives on after our physical body has passed away, or in a continued existence in an alternate dimension or reality. Reincarnation is also prominent as an afterlife narrative - the belief that people will be reborn again and again in this world. Still others believe that people’s energy rejoins the universe in some form.

Common beliefs about what Heaven is like includes:

• eternal happiness

• absence of suffering

• reunited with deceased loved ones

• can meet God

• have perfectly healthy and imperishable bodies

• reunited with pets or animals

• can become angels

The notion of Heaven is complicated. Oddly, Jesus never taught or promoted the modern Christian conception of Heaven. A central message of Jesus was, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”

Most people would be shocked to discover that the modern Christian conception of eternal life in Heaven is conspicuously missing in the New Testament. Words attributed to Jesus in John 17:3 read, “Now this is eternal life: that they know God.” In other words, “eternal life” is not an afterlife location, but the experience of union with ultimate reality.

Perhaps not surprisingly, competing images about Heaven abound. Until around the end of the 17th century, Heaven was primarily about the Beatific Vision, a theological concept that describes the future reality in which believers will get to see God face to face. The perfect happiness of eternity in Heaven consisted in the worship, praise and adoration of God.

Traditional Judaism was somewhat reticent about the life to come. But when it was spoken of, it was primarily in terms of the spiritual vision of God. As one third-century rabbi explained it:

“In the world-to-come there is no eating, no drinking, no mating, no trading, no jealousy, no hatred, and no enmity; instead, the righteous sit with crowns on their heads and enjoy the splendor of the divine Presence.”

*The fresco of Christ the Redeemer in Glory with the Heavenly Host by Niccolo Circignani Il Pomarancio (1588) in main apse of church Basilica di Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Rome, Italy.

Having been raised Catholic, I often heard this idea of Heaven, which was disturbing to a teenage boy. Who wants to sit around all eternity in a never-ending Catholic Mass, worshipping God. I could barely make it through the Sunday Mass at St. Mary’s, and that was only because I was imagining life with Cindy Cavalletti as my girlfriend, who sat with her family two pews up to the right.

Within Christianity, the image of a God-centered Heaven was to last well into the 19th century. As Bishop Reginald Heber (1783-1826) put it in his hymn Holy, Holy, Holy:

Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore Thee,
casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;
cherubim and seraphim, falling down before Thee,
which wert and art and evermore shalt be.

But from the middle of the 18th century until the end of the 19th, there was a gradual transition to a Heaven centered on human activities. It became a continuation of material existence, only without the sufferings of this present life. The saved were increasingly active in a joy filled environment. Human love replaced the primacy of the divine love. Relationships between people became fundamental to the afterlife, and families were re-united.

By the 20th century, Heaven had received an epic makeover and became part of the modern mind. Heaven is widely regarded as a state after death in which we continue to have a consciousness of ourselves. There remains the conviction that we will be reunited with those whom we loved on this earth. Life there, as on this earth, will be one in which we laugh, love and grow ethically, intellectually and spiritually, but without human suffering. Heaven often has an additional majestic appeal with images of mansions, streets of gold, and abundance.

Revelation 21:4 describes Heaven this way:

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

It would be impossible to cover the diverse views, history, meaning and evolution of the notion of Heaven in this short essay. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a useful analysis of Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought. I previously published an extensive article on the doctrine of Hell, Is Hell Real? Debunking the False Doctrine of Eternal Conscious Torment.

If you’re interested, a few books to explore this subject further would be:

📖 Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife by Bart D. Ehrman

📖 The Early History of Heaven by J. Edward Wright

📖 A Brief History of Heaven by Alister E. McGrath

📖 Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife by Lisa Miller

Why is heaven such a cherished idea?

It’s important to note that I’m not advocating any particular position or belief about Heaven. It’s true that I’m not particularly fond of the traditional Christian understanding of Heaven, namely because I deconstructed and left behind the theological edifice upon which this conception of Heaven was built. There are many different views of the afterlife, ranging from food for worms to streets of gold. I’m not here to talk you into or out of any belief. My lens on subjects such as these is the philosophy of religion, which in this case involves investigating the significance and meaning of Heaven as a religious idea.

That Heaven is an enduring afterlife narrative, isn’t surprising. The two things humans fear most - death and suffering - are resolved by the notion of Heaven, which is a ready-made paradise of perpetual and eternal bliss, and the absence of all suffering. We are fond of the idea of immortality and eternal paradise.

The traditional Christian concept of Heaven spares people of death anxiety to the extent that it offers the comforting notion that a person continues on into the afterlife, without the downside of our human imperfections and worldly hardships. Next to our own death, the loss of loved ones is perhaps the most traumatic reality of the lived human experience. The concept of Heaven mitigates our emotional anguish with the idea that they are “in a better place” and we will one day be “re-united” with them.

For people who leave religion, they often cease believing in large swarths of their former Christian beliefs. I previously wrote an article on why religion-leavers question the Christian conception of God (Christian Theism). Before long, other beliefs such as belief in Heaven, start to fall.

In my work as a non-religious Spiritual Director, I work with people who left religion and are experiencing existential dread. At the core of this is often death anxiety or the fear of non-being. I previously wrote an extensive article on the subject of the fear of death, and cultivating a healthy death acceptance. I also published an entire series on navigating the leaving-religion process.

One of the central reasons why I founded the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality, was to support people in their deconstruction and reconstruction process. One of the gratitude perks for becoming a paid subscriber is receiving a free full membership to the Center, which includes copies of two books I wrote about religious deconstruction (Life After Religion 30-Day Detox Guide) and post-religion reconstruction (How to Have a Great Day Without Religion), as well as monthly support groups and workshops.

I previously published an article on the evolution of religion, and how the religious imagination formed in order to cope with the givens of human existence, in the absence of modern science and psychology. One could argue that the conception of Heaven endures as an existential coping mechanism.

It's hard to say if the idea of heaven would be a natural longing within a human being or if it is inculcated within us through the influence of religion. For example, would a 6-year-old who never went to church suddenly have a moment after launching a projectile with their Stomp Rocket and say, “Please, please, please - let there be a place of eternal perpetual bliss and the absence of all pain and suffering that I will go to when I die!”

Heaven According to Religion

The typical idea of Heaven is that it’s a ready-made place one arrives to. There are several things you’d have to believe in order to embrace the traditional Christian concept of Heaven:

✔️ Eternal Heaven is the reward for the true believer, and Eternal Hell is the punishment for the unbeliever.

✔️ Heaven is a place or dimension located somewhere in the universe.

✔️ God is a supernatural being who resides in Heaven.

✔️ After human death, a true believer receives a new imperishable body to continue a human-like experience in Heaven.

✔️ Heaven assumes the continuance of human agency, but the possibility of thinking or acting in destructive ways is no longer present.

✔️ Heaven is the culmination of the narrative of God being the object of universal worship, adoration and glorification.

The challenge, and perhaps the value, of religion is that it attempts to make the non-material, spiritual, metaphysical, transcendent dimension accessible, practical and relatable in human terms. God is anthropomorphized into a supreme being, evil is personified in Satan, eternal truth is encapsulated in a book (the Bible), and the two ultimate destinations are the consequence of our choices, which are represented by two locations - Heaven and Hell.

Depending on how one interprets the Bible, one might take ideas like Heaven literally or figuratively. I can’t emphasize enough how one’s interpretation of the Bible is central to these matters. I devoted an entire article to addressing this.

This is where it is useful to use rational and critical thinking to evaluate these literal interpretations.

• Is it rational to conclude that God is a human-like supreme being?

• Is it rational that evil is the result of a fallen angel, Satan?

• Is it rational that all transcendent truth is contained in one book?

• Is it rational that heaven is a location in the sky?

In my book, Inner Anarchy, I wrote:

“Heaven is the ace in the hole of the Christian religion. It’s the trump card. The promise of heaven is the hope that keeps Christians believing. No matter the hardships that befall their lives or the suffering they see in the world, believers derive a sense of comfort and justice from the idea that there will be a huge payoff in the end. Heaven is regarded as where things finally happen—where Christians’ hopes, rewards, and bliss will materialize. Heaven is the place where salvation is fulfilled and the good life begins—where all the believers are having a ball in their white nightgowns, walking up and down streets of gold and worshipping their God in glory. They have arrived!

Some things about this heaven just don’t add up. How can the “good news” be that we must endure a lifetime of difficulty, misery, and suffering only to get sick and die a miserable death so we can finally be happy and fulfilled? If you went to a restaurant that advertised exquisite cuisine, but said you had to first eat all the rotten food out of the back dumpster to get the good stuff, would you? I’m guessing not! Surely many people reach the end of their life and look back and wonder what the purpose of it was—especially as they leave all their grieving loved ones behind. That is cruel.

And there is something else that doesn’t add up about the Christian religion’s ideas of heaven. Up until now, no one has been there and come back and been able to authentically verify those ideas. While it is true that people have had near-death experiences and spoken of very real spiritual and mystical experiences, there is no scientific hard evidence that proves that heaven exists somewhere out there. It is still very much a theory that Christians cling to. If we were so certain that this belief of heaven as a perfect paradise is so infallible, then why not put end it all and go there now?! Woo hoo! We are out of here! Christians should be racing each other to see who can get there first!

But, despite all the misery of the world, most of us don’t want to die. Instead, we do everything we can to slow down, hold off, and prevent death. We fight tooth and nail to cling to life for as long as we can here on earth—Christians as much as anyone. We spend billions and billions on medical research, doctors, and hospitals. Dying is the last activity we want to take part in.”

What Ludwig, Nietzsche and Marx said

Throughout history, just as religion was advancing the idea of heaven, many philosophers questioned it. 19th-century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach wrote:

“Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires.”

In my recent article, What if Jesus went undercover boss at Joel Osteen's Church?, I included several ways that I believe that the Christian religion has muddled the legacy of Jesus. One of them is that the vision of Jesus for a transformed society, got twisted into an afterlife fantasy about Heaven. This is the point that Feuerbach is making - that the afterlife Heaven narrative dulls a person’s vision for a meaningful and vibrant herelife in exchange for the futuristic fantasy of eternal bliss.

This was also John Lennon’s sentiment in Imagine:

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky

Imagine all the people
Livin' for today

It seems that Lennon’s point is that once we let go of the idea of a future paradise, we more vigorously embrace the potentialities and possibilities of what life offer us now.

Ludwig Feuerbach, in a series of lectures on religion, said the following:

“Man has many wishes that he does not really wish to fulfil, and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose the contrary. He wants them to remain wishes, they have value only in his imagination; their fulfilment would be a bitter disappointment to him. Such a desire is the desire for eternal life. If it were fulfilled, man would become thoroughly sick of living eternally, and yearn for death. In reality man wishes merely to avoid a premature, violent or gruesome death. Everything has its measure, says a pagan philosopher; in the end we weary of everything, even of life; a time comes when man desires death. Consequently, there is nothing frightening about a normal, natural death, the death of a man who has fulfilled himself and lived out his life. Old men often long for death. The German philosopher Kant could hardly wait to die, and not in order to resuscitate, but because he longed for the end. Only an unnatural, unfortunate death, the death of a child, a youth, a man in the prime of life, makes us revolt against death and wish for a new life. Such misfortunes are bitterly painful for the survivors; and yet they do not justify belief in a hereafter, if only because such abnormal cases – and they are abnormal even if they should be more frequent than natural death – could only have an abnormal hereafter as their consequence, a hereafter for those who have died too soon or by violence; but a special hereafter of this kind is an absurdity which no one could believe.”

Feuerbach’s main points are:

• The idea of Heaven sounds good on paper but be careful for what you ask for.

• Heaven is often seen as justice for those who die prematurely or encounter great misfortune and suffering in their death, and provides comfort for those traumatized by the loss of loved ones… but the idea of Heaven may not be the only or even the best way to address these struggles with the reality of death.

• Heaven remedies an underlying belief that death is a curse, tragedy, wrong and unnatural, but our inability to understand death more positively isn’t necessarily a justification for the doctrine of Heaven.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote,

“The kingdom of heaven is not something lying above the earth or coming after death. It does not have a yesterday or a day after tomorrow, and it will not arrive in a ‘thousand years’. It is an experience of the heart. It is everywhere and it is nowhere.”

In other words, Nietzsche was saying that the ideal and potential that heaven represents is not something that is located in some particular afterlife place, but is an ideal and potential that runs through the human heart and is meant to be manifested in the here and now on earth.

Nietzsche also wrote,

“I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes.”

What does “faithful to the earth” mean? It could include:

Faithful to...

🌿 Becoming fully what we are

🌿 Actualizing our highest potentialities and possibilities

🌿 Preventing and alleviating human and planetary suffering

🌿 Aiding human and planetary flourishing

🌿 Honoring the gift of life by embracing it fully

What are these “otherworldly hopes”? Quite possibly they are:

⚡ Heaven as a place

⚡ Favoring the afterlife over the herelife

⚡ Anticipating God to right every wrong and end all suffering

⚡ Promise of a future eternal paradise and perpetual happiness

Heaven as a political weapon

1st Century Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus, in his monumental universal history Bibliotheca historica, wrote, “It is to the interest of states to be deceived in religion.”

Roman historian, Livy, wrote in admiration of Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, who “introduced the fear of the gods as the most efficacious means of controlling an ignorant and barbarous populace.” Roman philosopher, Seneca, added, “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” English philosopher, William Hazlitt, wrote, “The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.”

There are always two equally participating parties in a lie – the person who tells the lie and the person who believes it. Even as religion has been a means of control over people, it has also offered something people want. We have all heard the well-known line of Karl Marx, “Religion is the opium of the people.”

Marx believed that religion had certain practical purposes in society that were similar to the function of opium in a sick or injured person: it reduced one's immediate suffering or distracted them from it by providing pleasant feelings and illusions. Marx saw religion as harmful and viewed the promise of Heaven as a mechanism to distract people from seeing the class structure and oppression around them, and thus preventing the necessary revolution to change it.

To Marx, religion offered an escape from a grim and grinding world, typically caused by an oppressive ruling class. Religion tells people that God loves them as his own children, how he is in control of all things, will provide for and protect them, and how the faithful have a future eternal life of perfect happiness in heaven. Russian revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin, wrote:

“People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.”

But for those few hours of escape, religion commits the greatest injustice against humankind by corroding the part of us that is capable of accessing what human beings most deeply want and need. American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, developed the notion of the “Hierarchy of Needs,” which uses a triangle to convey the layers of fundamental needs all human beings have.

On the bottom of the triangle/hierarchy are safety and security needs such as basic human survival. Maslow next identified needs of love, belonging and a stable self-respect and self-esteem. Nearing the top of the hierarchy, Maslow said human beings ultimately desire self-actualization and self-transcendence – reaching one’s full potential as an individual person, and meaningful engagement with a reality greater than oneself.

For a human being to consciously direct their lives in order to meet these essential needs they would have to have a strong sense of self-worth, self-trust and self-reliance. But these are the exact qualities that religion too often strips away from a person.

Throughout history, religion has repeatedly discouraged people from thinking for themselves, dissuaded them from questioning what they’ve been told, and discredited their ability to direct their own lives. Religion weakens people’s relationship with themselves, and replaces it with a dependency on a particular belief-system, and the leaders and organization that represents it. Religion has often used this arrangement to control people and further its own self-serving ends.

There’s an insidious way that religion prevents a person from accepting reality. That’s why Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” We would rather be swept up in good-feeling illusions, than look reality square in the face and address it.

Too often religion’s idea of heaven lulls people into a mindset of...

• not fully embracing the life we have now

• not taking responsibility for our own happiness

• accepting the unacceptable about the condition of our world

Political activist and philosopher, Angela Davis, wrote, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” Contrary to this sentiment, religion too often sees an inevitability to the devolution of the world, and Heaven as the happy ending, at least for true believers.

The fundamental message of Christianity is: this life is hardship and suffering but it’s only temporary, and enduring it gracefully will be rewarded to true believers with eternal paradise in Heaven. To question this premise is to question God. To refuse the premise of current suffering and seek to eradicate it is a losing game and stands in opposition to the will and plan of God. God is the rescuer, fixer, saver, redeemer; not you.

This is why many non-religious people often have happier lives than religious people; they are not holding out for some better eternal future and instead, making the most of the life they have now. Jim Morrison was right, “No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.” In other words, it's unforgivable to squander the present because of some religious notion of the future.

Too often, there is the religious idea that God is going to swoop down and solve our problems for us, and that divine intervention is the secret to a life of happiness. The gift you have already been given is the capability of consciously guiding your life in ways that are meaningful and fulfilling to you. You are responsible for your life.

Rethinking Heaven

This still leaves the question: Is Heaven real?

This could be broken down into two questions:

• Is Heaven real?

• In what way is Heaven real?

What follows is an alternative understanding to the traditional Christian concept of Heaven. Think of this as a thought-experiment. Admittedly, it is not without it’s own problems, and would require some measure of faith. I’m not pushing this view of Heaven.

People often speak of having transcendent, peak or heaven-like experiences. Consider the possibility that these are pointers to the way things could be. In other words, moments of deep love, peace, harmony, belonging, freedom and joy point to how things could be. Yes, hate, discord, alienation, oppression and suffering are rampant in our world. Does it have to be this way? Could it be a different way? And more importantly, could we create and produce that way?

How would things be if humankind got its act together and focused 100% of our time and energies working towards the good? We don't know. Maybe the sky's the limit, and then once we reach the limit of the sky, there's a sky beyond that and then another and another. Who knows where this goes! What are the limitations of the human being? Do we know?

The universe has been in a process of expansion, stretching back some 14 billion years. The evolution of living things on earth began 4.5 billion years ago. Human evolution has been a process of a meager 85 million years. Maybe the universe, living things, and human beings are only in the toddler stage of development, at best. Who's to say that there aren't other entire dimensions or realms of expansion and evolution that we haven't even gotten to yet? Maybe the current study of consciousness is a doorway into one of those new dimensions or realms.

Is it possible that heaven is meant to represent this realm or dimension of becoming?

Consider the possibility that the notion of “on earth as it is in heaven” is meant to convey that the next leap in the expansion and evolution of the cosmos exists right now in potential, waiting to be actualized.

Maslow spoke of “self-actualization” as a step in individual human development, but what if it's also a decisive step in the process of an ever-advancing universe and the evolution of our collective reality as human beings and all living things.

Could the Bible mean this?

Is it possible that the Bible is a story that holds a secret that religion has missed? What if the secret is that Heaven is here. The story could be understood as unfolding as follows:

🌱 The Garden of Eden in Genesis represents the idea of a fully evolved and actualized universe in which all living things coexist in peace, harmony and flourishing.

🌱 Adam and Eve's eating of the forbidden fruit represents a monumental stage in the saga of the unfolding universe because human beings discover that we have the capacity to use our powers to create heaven or hell.

🌱 God is initially the primary agent calling the shots and overseeing human affairs while human beings fail miserably at executing their human agency and makes the world more like hell than heaven.

🌱 Around the time of Abraham, human beings are starting to get the hang of it, which marks a transition where God withdraws into the background, and more highly developed human beings take the reigns of guiding and directing human affairs.

🌱 Jesus, referred to as the “Second Adam”, represents the fully actualized human being who is a synthesis of divine/heaven and human/earth, and capable of restoring what was represented in the paradise of Eden, which Jesus refers to as the “kingdom of heaven.”

🌱 Jesus teaches that the “kingdom of heaven” is real and present in potential within every human being, waiting to be realized. Jesus defined “eternal life” as “knowing God”; in other words, “eternal life” is accessing the transcendent dimension, which we experience through love, peace, harmony, equanimity, joy and well-being.

Therefore, you could answer the two heaven questions as follows:

• Is Heaven real? Yes.

• In what way is Heaven real? Heaven is real in potential.

What is “potential”? Potential is having the capacity to become something. You can’t get any more real than that.

A person may have the potential to become an NBA player. Not everyone has this potential. Of those who do, some number of them actualize that potential and in fact become NBA players. The point is to consider that Heaven is real and exists as potential, and that the nucleus of this potential is within each of us. Heaven exists as potential. This potential is represented in the Eden Paradise of peace, harmony, belonging, well-being and flourishing, and the absence of enmity and suffering. It’s a potential we are capable of actualizing.

Heaven is not a ready-made place you go when you die, it’s a reality that we create now. We don’t go to heaven, we make it.

German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote:

“The Kingdom of Heaven is a condition of the heart — not something that comes upon the earth or after death.”

It’s interesting that an atheist philosopher and Jesus both essentially agree on what Heaven is.

But there’s also a stark warning in this. Hell is also real and exists as potential. The capacity to create the anguish, suffering, and torment of hell is also within us. We have seen this Hell made real throughout history and is real today. This is what Adam and Eve discovered - the human condition and predicament is tricky; Heaven and Hell are both within us as a potential. We can create and produce either one.

Consider the possibility that Heaven is not a ready-made place you go to, but a real potential that we actualize in the world, and quite possibly represents the next stage in the expansion of the universe, evolution of our species, and the self-actualization of a new collective reality.

If Heaven is real in potential, then you could say that Heaven is a choice. If Hell is real in potential, Hell is a choice. Every choice we make in life is either creating Heaven or creating Hell. The choices we make in our personal life, in our relationships, in our work, in our interactions with others, what we care about, what matters to us, the beliefs, views and mindsets that govern our lives, our response to human suffering... every choice... is being made out of a Heaven and Hell that are real and exist as a potential within each of us.

Heaven on earth is a choice you must make, not a place you must find.

Is Heaven… Us?

Consider the possibility that everything Heaven represents exists right now as innate qualities of our innate nature and true self. If the word and concept of “God” points to ultimate reality, then “Imago Dei” - the idea that each of us bears the “image of God” - means that each of us is a manifestation or embodiment of that ultimate reality: ultimate wholeness, peace, happiness, and wellbeing.

Virtually every great spiritual master such as Jesus and Buddha taught that the reality of Heaven was not a place but a quality of being. The “kingdom of God” and “nirvana” are not future locations, but a present reality that is the ground of our very being.

The Buddha's moment of enlightenment under the Bodhi tree was the realization that nothing fundamentally needed to change in order to know peace, serenity and freedom. In other words, there is nothing wrong with the way things truly are at its most real and fundamental level, and therefore there is nothing truly, factually or objectively preventing peace, serenity and freedom. Buddha's profound insight was that all is well and whole at the most essential level and that his underlying nature and essence was one with that wholeness.

Christianity may have missed the true message of Jesus

One of the worst explained verses in the Bible is Matthew 3:2: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

The conventional understanding of these words of Jesus could be paraphrased as follows, “The final reckoning is near, it's time to get right with God.” This false interpretation is largely based upon the unfortunate translation of the word “repent” from the Greek into English.

“Repent” usually means to be contrite over one’s sinful condition or to turn away from one’s sinful ways. In the religious context, “repent” usually means acknowledging and grieving our sinful condition, turning from our wicked ways, throwing ourselves on the mercy of God, and pledging to do better… or else! “Repent” is one of those religious words that conjure up images of judgment, condemnation, and fear.

Being sorry for your past wrongs, turning from your wicked ways, acknowledging that you are an abomination to God, or grieving your sinful condition is NOT repentance. You are not an abomination, there is no God that stands in judgement of you, and your fundamental nature is not bad. You do not need to be “born again” because you were born just fine the first time.

The actual word “metanoia” (which was wrongly translated to the English word, “repent”) literally means “beyond the mind.” In other words, it means understanding something in a completely different light, or seeing something in a way you have never seen before.

The word “repent” (metanoia) means a deep and profound shift in perception. It’s a turning about in the deepest seat of our consciousness or awareness. It’s like the blinders fall off, and we see things as they really are. Metanoia means seeing and perceiving from within our innermost self. Metanoia is switching to a different source for understanding. It’s more than just “changing your thinking,” it’s a profound shift in how and from where we process what is real.

The healing work most attributed to Jesus was restoring sight. There is a symbolic significance to this - Jesus knew that necessity of seeing clearly. He once said, “If the eyes are good, the whole body is good.” In other words, true liberation is for one's eyes to be opened to see things as they truly are - to see the true nature of reality, the underlying essence of what we are, and to operate within that reality. This is “metanoia”.

Further, “Kingdom of God” should not be thought of God’s impending judgment associated with some eschatological event. The “Kingdom of God” is meant to convey the reality of peace, freedom, joy, harmony, liberation, wholeness and well-being. Jesus’ primary message was NOT, “Try harder; the kingdom of God is here.” Nor was it, “You have a lot of growing to do before you can ever expect to experience God’s kingdom.”

People were stumped because they could not find this Kingdom that Jesus claimed had already arrived. Jesus said this is because it’s a kingdom you can’t access through religious reasoning or political revolt. Jesus said the Kingdom of God is within you - it’s a spiritual reality and dimension that cannot be found without “repentance” (metanoia)... without this turning about at the deepest level of who we are and seeing through those eyes.

A re-frame of Matthew 3:2 could go as follows:

“You think the peace, freedom, joy, liberation, wholeness and harmony you desire is beyond your reach and you are separated from it. I tell you it is right at your fingertips! What you seek is not somewhere else and later; it is here right now in this very moment. What you have been searching for your entire life has always been within you and is you. Quit looking for it out there. Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which this reality flows; at its source you will find your answer and your search will be over.”

It is a paradox that Heaven could be present in its fullness right now within us and as us, but it is not realized as a human reality until we express and embody it through our mindset, choices and actions. We could not express or embody ultimate reality if it were not already present within us as potential, but this potential is not made real or actualized until we live it. Heaven is amply present in every person, but unless we act upon it, it is not manifested; until it is realized, it is not attained.

In A Study of Dogen, Masao Abe writes,

“Unless one becomes a buddha, the Buddha-nature is not realized as the Buddha-nature, and yet at the same time one can become a buddha only because one is originally endowed with the Buddha-nature.”

Where to find Heaven

There’s a story of a group of very wise men who had each discovered the kingdom of Heaven. Wanting it all for themselves, they met and discussed where they could hide this Heaven so ordinary people couldn’t find it.

One said, “Let’s hide it in the depths of the ocean.”

Another said, “No, let’s hide it in the farthest galaxies.”

The third replied, “No, people will surely look there. Let’s hide it in the most obvious place, a place where it will never occur to them to look because they’ll think it’s too simple. Let’s hide the kingdom of Heaven inside of people. They’ll never look there!”

Paracelsus wrote, “In every human being there is a special heaven, whole and unbroken.”

What if...

🍂 Religion says it’s about the afterlife. But what if we lived like this is the only life we'll ever have?

🍂 Religion says hold on till heaven. But what if we cultivated deep well-being within and among ourselves.

🍂 Religion says confess your wrongs to God. But what if we made amends with the people we have hurt?

🍂 Religion says judge people who don’t measure up. But what if we offered love, acceptance, understanding, validation and affirmation... just because every human being needs and deserves this?

🍂 Religion says to appeal to God to bring change in the world. But what if we decided to be the change we want to see?

🍂 Religion says God will bless you if you believe and do the right things. But what if we took responsibility and practiced the necessary skills for nurturing our own happiness and well-being, and creating the life we want to live?

🍂 Religion says look to God for help and healing. But what if we were instruments of help and healing to one another?

🍂 Religion says rescue people from eternal hell and punch their ticket to heaven. But what if we confronted injustice and took up the cause of the oppressed, and stood in solidarity with those who unnecessarily suffer around us?

🍂 Religion says you must have the right belief system to have true peace, certainty, security and purpose in the world. But what if we went deep inside ourselves and found that we already are what we've been looking for?

🍂 Religion says to blame Satan. But what if we took responsibility for the condition of our world and confronted the ways we are complicit in its brokenness?

🍂 Religion says go to church. But what if we cultivated real, authentic and deeply meaningful relationships with others along the everyday paths of life?

🍂 Religion says read the Bible in a year. But what if we applied ourselves to reading, honoring and following the book inside each of us?

🍂 Religion says there are “us” and “them.” But what if we accepted we are all one human family who need, desire and fear the same things, and we nurtured a more rigorous human solidarity?

🍂 Religion says be careful who you love. But what if love and compassion was our fundamental orientation toward all living things?

Religious Deconstruction and Heaven

Religious teachings about Heaven can cause harm when they promote fear, shame, passivity, or exclusion—especially in high-control or fear-based environments. These harms often manifest psychologically, socially, and ethically.

The harm can include:

🧠 Psychological Harm

• Fear of damnation: Teachings that emphasize heaven as a reward often pair it with hell as punishment, creating chronic anxiety, nightmares, and PTSD-like symptoms.

• Guilt and shame: Believers may internalize messages of unworthiness or sinfulness, especially around sexuality, purity, or moral failure. This can lead to depression, low self-esteem, and emotional repression.

• Loss of autonomy: When heaven is framed as conditional on obedience, people may suppress intuition, boundaries, or critical thinking—especially in fundamentalist settings.

🧍 Social and Relational Harm

• Alienation and rejection: Departing from a religious group or questioning heaven’s existence can result in loss of community, disownment, or social isolation.

• Inaction in the face of suffering: Belief in a future paradise can justify ignoring injustice now. For example, some may dismiss war, poverty, or climate collapse as “birth pains” before the Second Coming.

• Moral hierarchy: Heaven-based doctrines often create binary categories—saved vs. damned, chosen vs. lost—which can fuel judgment, exclusion, and spiritual elitism.

🕊 Ethical and Existential Harm

• Deferred justice: Promising heaven later can undermine efforts to create justice now. It may discourage activism, compassion, or systemic change.

• Spiritual bypassing: Heaven can be used to avoid grief, trauma, or existential questions—offering comfort without transformation.

• Colonial and patriarchal control: Heaven has historically been weaponized to justify conquest, obedience, and gendered submission, especially through purity culture and eschatological fear

What follows is a brief guide that offers one way of approaching the process of religious deconstruction and reconstructing a post-religion spirituality.

🌀 Heaven as Symbol: Beyond Reward

In many traditions, heaven functions as:

• Cosmic reward for moral or doctrinal fidelity

• Ultimate reunion with God, loved ones, or one’s true self

• Escape from suffering, injustice, or earthly limitation

But in post-religious or deconstructed contexts, heaven can be:

• A metaphor for wholeness, integration, or mutual liberation

• A symbol of ecological harmony, where the more-than-human world is not backdrop but kin

• A horizon of justice, not deferred but enacted here and now

🔍 Deconstructing Heaven: What Gets Unraveled?

Religious deconstruction often dismantles:

⚡ Transactional cosmologies: “If I believe/do X, I get heaven”

⚡ Binary eschatologies: Heaven vs. hell, saved vs. damned

⚡ Colonial theologies: Heaven as a tool of control, erasure, or supremacy

This opens space for:

🌿 Immanence over transcendence: Sacredness in the here and now

🌿 Pluralistic imaginaries: Many heavens, many paths, many truths

🌿 Grief and rupture: Mourning the loss of promised paradise, while ritualizing new meaning

You might map out the deconstruction and reconstruction of Heaven this way:

A person could follow this two-phase plan for deconstructing and reconstructing Heaven.

🔥 Phase I: Deconstruction — What Heaven Meant

Heaven often functioned as:

• Ultimate reward: A postmortem prize for belief, obedience, or suffering

• Moral sorting mechanism: Who’s in, who’s out; saved vs. damned

• Cosmic control: A tool for behavioral regulation, often tied to patriarchy, purity, or power

• Deferred justice: “You’ll get peace later”—which often justified present oppression

In deconstruction, this heaven is:

• Interrogated: Who built it? Who benefits? Who’s excluded?

• Grieved: Not just the loss of paradise, but the loss of certainty, belonging, and cosmic coherence

• Unraveled: From literal place to metaphor, from destination to myth

🌿 Phase II: Rewilding — What Heaven Could Become

Once heaven is deconstructed, it can be:

• Symbolic terrain: A metaphor for wholeness, mutual liberation, or ecological harmony

• Immanent horizon: Not “up there” or “after death,” but here, now, between us

• Ritualized longing: A way to name our ache for justice, beauty, and belonging

You might remix heaven as:

• A forest clearing where grief and joy meet

• A relational field where all beings are kin

• A vow-space where we commit to making earth more just, more alive

In Summary

• The existence of Heaven in the afterlife cannot be proven conclusively, but neither can my or your existence five minutes from now.

• The promise of Heaven as a futuristic paradise may be preventing us from fully embracing the possibilities and potentialities of life now.

• There is widespread consensus among many notable spiritual and philosophical leaders throughout history that the highest truths and transcendent realities can be known, experienced and accessed in the here-and-now lived human experience.

• Whether your afterlife belief is food for worms or streets of gold, we all benefit from working together to prevent human suffering and aid human flourishing.

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  “People dream of escaping their ordinary life, but their life was never ordinary. They simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.”

  - Jim Palmer, Notes from (Over) the Edge