Chapter 6A – Heaven and Hell
I meant to address the notion of heaven and hell in Chapter 6 but published before I remembered. I just finished a Wired article in the February Issue – You Can’t Beat the Devil – discussing how hell is always better portrayed in movies and books than heaven. The author, Chris Suellentrop, brings up Dante’s Inferno as a classic example. I couldn’t agree more. Historically hell seems more interesting than heaven. With the discussion of good and evil in Chapter 6, we saw that evil evolves from interactions based on lies (either partial or full). I claimed that if everyone told the full truth all of the time, there would be no evil. Now a world with no evil should be heaven, right? Given that description, we see that heaven is nothing close to the worlds portrayed in books and movies. In a world without evil, we’d still play football and get injured. We’d still be able to swear and drink; we’d be happy and we’d be sad. None of our daily lives would be changed by the lack of evil, except we’d be able to trust everyone all of the time. We’d not need to spend any energy sorting through people’s words to see if there is some nuance, or fear that we’d be taken in by a Ponzi pyramid scheme. We’d still have murder, and people would still get mad.
Now you could say that I’ve redefined heaven and you are correct. I think the onus on others to tell me why a world without evil is not heaven. The heaven conjured up in movies and books are not just a world without evil. It is devoid of the very thing that allows the world to exist – hope. They claim heaven is a place where everything is perfect which, by definition, means nothing changes. I understand that people grow tired of the constant “rat race” that is the evolutionary process that is part and parcel of the universe. By its very design, the universe devises new, emergent properties and then evolution take over and spreads the new property throughout the environment. That is the only way things work in our universe so what people are calling heaven is not a world without evil, it is a completely different place that has very little in common with our current world. Just as the opposite of hate is not love (it is indifference); the opposite of hell is not heaven. Heaven is a make believe place that could never exist in our universe.
We all grow tired of having to expend energy to keep ourselves evolving. Every now and then we need to take a break and gather together all of the changes we’ve experienced into a new, stable base. Every one of us has a different tolerance for that stable base (remember the drop and pool model) but all of us are programmed to eventually move to a new set of challenges and face a new “drop” of evolution.
Perhaps the biggest harm religions have done is persuade us that the drop and pool of the universe – rapid change followed by consolidation – is not natural and a prolonged period of consolidation is a desirable place to be. It isn’t – it is the very definition of death. As long as you interact with others (and yourself) you will change and you cannot change that and remain alive. Not interacting is just another definition of death.
So I’m not surprised that the portrayal of heaven is so boring and un-natural. It is a make believe place that cannot exist in the universe and one it we would not be at peace, we’d be dead.
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