Heavens Have Outworn Their Usefulness

Leave everything behind that you do not need to take with you. This will be the journey of a lifetime. It will be a lifetime’s journey. There is nothing after as there was nothing before. This is all there is. There is no secret path that will take you to a better world; there is only the best that you can make in this one.

Heavens are concepts that have outworn their usefulness, they belong to ages when people were born, lived and died into almost fixed roles. In most cases if you were born a peasant you would die as a peasant, born a nobleman you would die a nobleman and if you had the misfortune to be born a woman then there was a lot to bear before you died.

So, something was needed to keep you within your place and contented (more or less) that it was so. Therefore, the idea of heavens was created. A better life after this one – if you were good and behaved yourself, of course. Otherwise, it was the worst thing you can think of – forever.

It is interesting how all heavens tend to be more or less alike – a place free from the worries of earlier ages: easy food, endless leisure, eternal youthfulness and so on. A concept later appropriated by those early 20^th century attempts to create new religions – communism and fascism – to represent the paradises that those ideologies would – one day – create, but here on earth rather than in some putative heaven.

It is just as interesting too, though, to see the religion’s visions of hell: endless toil, pain, suffering and so on. It is therefore ironic that it was something closer to these visions of hell that fascism and communism actually ended up creating, rather than anything resembling a heaven.

Maybe though, communism and fascism - as failed religions - did perform one useful service for us in showing that dreams of heavens are very dangerous things and we should always beware of people who seem to believe in the possibility of them too much.