“She’s in hell”, he replied

“Oh no, that cannot be!”

“She was thoughtful and loving, giving and kind”,

“Indeed not a bad thought ever went through her mind.”

“Oh tell me, do tell me, what could she have done?”

“Time of death: 8:45pm”.

A sentence similar to this one spells the end of your existence. Your thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams and desires all cease to be. Everything that you once were has gone – leaving but a bag of bones and flesh that shall soon decay and rot while all manner of insects nourish themselves on the bits that still remain. It is the tragic, but at least consistent, end of the line for every living thing on the planet.

Until…

You wake up. You feel fresh, healthy, at peace. You look around and find yourself in a new realm, a land of beauty and calm, vibrant and lively. It takes a while to notice that the woman next to you is your grandmother. Oh it has been so long since you have seen her, and she is no longer the saggy breasted, senile old bag you remember her being. Instead she is in the prime of her youth, mid twenties, her hair long, flowing and coloured like a field of buttercups in the height of summer. Her body is pert and tight and she flitters around like a butterfly looking for nectar. You see your mother with her, no longer ravaged by age, the cancer that worked its way through her like a plague absent, her health restored.

It doesn’t take long before you are surrounded by loved ones. Your father and brothers, your cousins and aunts – all with you now, happy and smiling. They welcome you with open arms, as ecstatic to see you as you are to see them. For an instant you are the happiest dead-alive man in ‘after-existence’.

“Where’s my daughter?” You ask, looking through the crowd of loved ones in front of you, searching frantically for the person you love more than anyone else, the one person you could never live without. It takes a while before you find out that your daughter isn’t actually in the same place as you, instead she resides in a pit of never ending fire, never ending torture.

You grab those around you asking if there’s anything you can do, if there’s a way of making an official complaint, if there is a way you can rescue the person you love the most from a place created for the sole purpose of burning humans for eternity. You find out that there’s nothing you can do, that your daughter “deserves” her fate. Naturally you argue against this and ask to know what evil action she committed that resulted in her ultimate never ending punishment in a pit of fire and brimstone where there is wailing and the gnashing of teeth.

“She believed in the wrong God”, you are told. “She never accepted Jesus as her saviour and thus deserves to burn”.

It is at this moment you realise that ultimately, whether in heaven or hell, you are destined to an eternity of suffering. For ever and ever and ever you will know that the person you love the very most out of everyone you’ve ever known is burning. That fact will sit in your mind festering with each and every passing day of a never ending existence – and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. By day you worship and bow to this God, the image of your daughter in indescribable agony fresh on your mind. By night you worship and bow to this God, the image of your daughter in indescribable agony fresh on your mind – and that is all you do.

Forever.

As luck would have it however, God eventually comes to visit you with a unique offer.

“I give you a choice: Would you like to swap places with your daughter?”

1)      “Yes!” You say without hesitation, knowing that such a sacrifice is worth it if it saves your daughter.

This is invariably where the whole story falls apart. By saying “yes”, you are putting a human before God – which goes against the very reason you were made by him. If you would choose to be away from this God, you would never get to be near him in the first place. So while a “yes” answer is certainly more humane, more moral and more loving – it is not in keeping with the reason for your existence.

2)      “No!” You exclaim, knowing that this God demands worship and servitude, that love belongs to him and him alone. Your daughter burns but you get over it, it’s her own fault anyway. The old words of Jesus resound in your ear; “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters - yes, even his own life - he cannot be my disciple.” You realise that you were made not to love other humans, not to even love yourself, but to simply love and worship God. That is the entire point and purpose of your existence and ‘after existence’, nothing else matters.

I find it interesting that people would say that God is ‘all-loving’, the perfect parent. It would seem in fact that I am the better parent. I would go to hell for my children, who would God go to hell for?

While not everyone has this particular view of heaven, they will generally assert that the afterlife involves some people being there and some people not being there, (good/bad – although exactly what that entails is debateable). As a result the same problem remains – unless of course they simply do not care about their loved ones once they’re in this realm – which I shall cover shortly.

There are certain arguments of course that – if I were to be honest with you – simply make matters worse as far as I see it. For instance:

1. William Lane Craig amongst others asserts that we’ll be too happy to even notice. We’re in heaven – it’s pure party time from the second you get there and hence you won’t spare a moment to think about anyone else.

My first question of course would be to ask if anyone would actually want that? Sure, I love to party but I would rather know that my daughter is suffering than be partying in complete ignorance. Who would actually want to be in that position?

From there I would actually ask whether people in heaven have any intelligence. I would assume that your loved ones, (that have made it), are there with you – all partying together. That you would recognise these people but not at any stage enquire as to where the one you love the most is would – to me at least – signify that you’ve turned into a moron.

Imagine the best party you’ve ever had. Your mother turns up, your father turns up, your friends, cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters yet you never actually bother asking where your daughter is? It’s ludicrous.

2. Another claim is that I “won’t remember them”. Apparently it would seem that upon entering the heavenly realm my memory is wiped clean. Wait, that can’t be correct. If my memory was completely wiped I wouldn’t even know why I was in heaven in the first place. “God? What’s that then?”

Obviously we’re talking about a ‘selective’ memory wipe. Who selected it? I certainly didn’t. Sure, I would select to forget all about those rare embarrassing experiences that have happened throughout my life but not my daughter. So who’s wiped my memory and why? Would you want that?

Just to make it clear, the reason I have stated “want” a couple of times is because – although want has no relevance as far as truth is concerned, if you wouldn’t want it, how would you end up in heaven even if it were true? I would submit that you must surely want to be in heaven as it really is to even stand a chance of getting there. The thing is, I can’t see that this is anything that anyone would want.

In ‘Letters From the Earth’, Twain goes in to an in-depth look at heaven and how everything that mankind actually likes is totally absent. It’s as if heaven was concocted of everything man actually doesn’t like at all. Personally I don’t think we need to go that far – the absence of a loved one is, in my mind, sufficient enough to negate any value in the notion of ‘heaven’.

Would I want to go to heaven if my daughter isn’t there? Not a chance. Would you?

Araneus Diadematus

Being the nice kind of guy that I am, I adopted them all as my own and went about giving them their names. My favourite is without doubt the imaginatively named Spider Thirteen. He’s the one on the left.I sat and watched them as they took their first steps, started to slowly and cautiously explore their surroundings and began to marvel at the world they had been born in to. There was so much to teach them and so little time to learn.

Of course, we live in a universe that works on survival and predation. Everything strives to survive and everything needs to kill something else just to do it. It is most often the case that the young make the easiest victims and so I sat and watched as other spiders popped in, picked off one of the youngsters and popped right out again. Poor Spider Thirty-two. He was literally born to be lunch.

It's a spider-eat-spider world