Why I don’t want to go to heaven

Panel from “Somebody Goofed” by Jack Chick

I gave up Christianity in stages. Though I couldn’t say exactly which doctrines I first lost faith in, or in what sequence, hell was surely among the first.

Several times in conversations with theists, I’ve had occasion to explain why, if heaven and hell were real, I would not want to go to heaven. (Next time, perhaps I will point them to this post.)

If there were a hell, I wouldn’t enjoy heaven knowing that all my absent loved ones, or even perfect strangers, were being tortured forever and ever.

As Jesus recounted Lazarus doing, I imagine I’d go to the edge of heaven and look at all those sinners broiling in the lake of fire. Lazarus looked across the chasm, where a roasting rich man who denied him charity pleaded to him in vain for a single drop of water. Unlike cold Lazarus, I would weep for them.

Even if I didn’t hear their screams, I’d know that every second of every minute, of every hour, of every day, of every week, of every year, of every century, of every millennium, for ever and ever, every dead person who isn’t with me in heaven is suffering endless agony. I could not be happy with that knowledge, could you?

Now imagine cheerful mothers caring nothing of their daughters’ tortures, giddy grandsons unperturbed by their grandfathers’ torments, a complacent community devoid of compassion for all but their chosen selves. I’d find their stonehearted smiles sickening, like obscenely grinning Germans gleefully living next door to Auschwitz, worshipfully praising their Führer as he stuffs all the world’s Jews in a furnace. (But when God sends you into the furnace he built, your suffering never ends.)

Perhaps, like the ones who walk away from Omelas, I would leave heaven. Maybe I’d be altruistic enough to ask that one of the damned take my place.

To me, or to anyone with love in their hearts for the damned, or to anyone with basic human decency, if there is a hell, heaven can be no paradise at all.

That is why I would not want to go to heaven, if hell were real.