| Why We Need Heaven | ||
| In troubled times, the afterlife beckons with visions of dark-eyed virgins, gardens and palaces, the bliss of Gods eternal presence and the joy of uniting with loved ones. How can the promise of paradise inspire so many to goodness, and few to murder? | ||
| By Lisa Miller NEWSWEEK | ||
| Aug. 12 issue Hagar Zar is sure her husband, Gilad, is in heaven. Perhaps thats why she looks so serene and clear-eyed when she talks about the gruesome way he diedgunned down by Palestinians early one morning while he was at work. |
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There is nothing at all unusual about Hagar Zars religious beliefs, except for the theological puzzle they present: can her enemy be in heaven, too? Just months before Gilad Zar was killed, Akram Nabiti blew himself up near a bus stop in a tony residential Jerusalem neighborhood, injuring at least 20 people. And though his grieving Muslim father, Ishaq, says he would have locked up his son in a cage had he known about Akrams plans, I have no doubt whatsoever that he is in paradise. WHOSE HEAVEN? |
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For believers, heaven can be inspiration, incentive, comfort or ballast. It can be metaphoric, or concretebuilt to last, as Billy Grahams daughter Anne Graham Lotz puts it in her popular little book Heaven: My Fathers House. According to a NEWSWEEK Poll, 76 percent of Americans believe in heaven, and, of those, 71 percent think its an actual place, but after that, agreement breaks down. Nineteen percent think heaven looks like a garden, 13 percent say it looks like a cityand 17 percent dont know. In the peaceful, prosperous West, visions of heaven are increasingly individualistic; a best-selling new novel, The Lovely Bones, is narrated by a 14-year-old girl who has gone to heaven, and her paradise contains puppies, big fields and Victorian cupolas.
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Even when clerics insist that heaven is symbolic, most people continue to think about heaven in terms of what they want. Thats why dog-lovers think theyll be reunited with their pets in heaven, and the poor think of heaven as a place where theyll never have to work. Smart political and religious leaders know this. In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformers, tapping the vein of popular outrage over the materialism and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, offered their recruits a version of heaven that focused on the individuals meeting God. Before he sent his soldiers on the First Crusade, Pope Urban II implied that if they died in the name of Christ, they would ascend to heaven and dwell in the company of the Lord. At its worst, heaven can be an effective tool for manipulation, says Paul Knitter, emeritus professor of theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati. If you can get people to believe in a certain heaven, you can get them to do anything. David Koresh told his followers in Waco that if they died with him, they would go directly to heaven. // do nothing for browsers that don't support SRC tag
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THIS HEAVEN IS MINE
And so visions of heaven divide peopleeven those who worship the same God. When a religious community feels endangered or at odds with the mainstream culture, a vision of heaven can be like a badge of belonging. This heaven is mine, believers say. If you dont join me, you cant come. And when that feeling of oppression turns to war, heaven can be a flag waved in battle. Ismail Abu Shanab, a Hamas leader who lives in Gaza, says Palestinian youth believe much more strongly in heaven than they did 20 years ago. They believe that if killed fighting in the name of Islam, they will go straight to the seventh level of heaven and delight in the company of beautiful virgins. Abu Shanab says that this idea of heaven gives the martyrs comfortand power. It gives Palestinians the advantage over Israelis, he says.
Heaven was designed inpart to bolster constituencies under stress. Until the Greeks desecrated the Jewish temple in 167 B.C., for example, the Jews had a largely inchoate idea of the hereafter. They called it Sheol, and it was a kind of numb darknessnot an end, exactly, but not existence either. But when the Greeks, with their many gods and their decadent habits, began to threaten the Hebrew way of existence, Jewish leaders came up with a powerful incentive to stay faithful and fight back. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt, says a passage in the Book of Daniel, written around 165 B.C. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever. This is the first full-blown reference to resurrection in the Bible, an enormously dramatic historical event and an act of incredible theological chutzpah, says Neil Gillman, professor of philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Over the centuries, the mainstream Jewish concept of an afterlife has evolved into something like a spiritual journey; Jews also believe that at the end of time, paradise will exist on earth and souls will be reunited with their bodies. Theologians stress, though, that the here and now is what matters for Jews, not the hereafter.
The New Testaments fullest descriptions of heaven were also battle cries. After the Romans crushed Jerusalem in A.D. 70, Middle Eastern cities were teeming with festivals honoring the Roman emperors, and the earliest Christians were in a very modern assimilationist dilemma. To what extent do we join the mainstream culture? they wondered. Do we attend without participating, participate without believing, believe without embracing? The Book of Revelation drew the battle lines, says L. Michael White, professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin. Revelations mythic descriptions of thunder and lightning and burning torches, as well as its familiar promises of pearl gates and jeweled walls, were exhortations to the earliest Christians: Do not worship the Roman emperors. Stay faithful to your God and Jerusalem will be restored and you will live in a magnificent city forever. Based on the images in Revelation, thinkers from Augustine on began to conceptualize heaven as a celestial city, a wonderful Oz.
Why We Need Hell, Too
Through the years, Christian visions of heaven changed as society evolved. Dante saw heaven as the universe, and Thomas Aquinas thought of it as a brilliant place, full of light and knowledge. In the 18th century, Emanuel Swedenborg imagined heaven as a tangible world, with public gardens and parks. Jennifer Vavrek, 14, a counselor at Vacation Bible School, in Monroe, Conn., takes the contemporary, mainstream view. Heaven, she says, is whatever you dream it is. For Vavrek, heaven has angels and white clouds; her grandparents are there.
TWO KINDS OF EVERY FRUIT
On the West Bank and in Gaza, talk about heaven is as common as dust. In the Dahaishe refugee camp near Bethlehem, youngsters who have spent most of the past month indoors confined by the Israeli curfew are roaming the streets, waiting for tanks to rumble by so they can vent their anger with stones. They talk about being martyrs the way other children talk about being doctors or firemen. Everyone here wants to be a shahid [martyr], everyone has a friend who died and went to heaven, says Salem, a genial 10-year-old. Everything I could wish for is in paradise, says Abdullah, who is 13. I would have green gardens and fresh fruit trees and we would have freedom. Not like here.
PARADISE AND PROPAGANDA
This isnt the first time Muslim extremists have immolated themselves in the name of heaven. As recently as the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, tens of thousands of Iranian soldiers died walking headlong into Iraqi artillery and land mines, certain of their rewards in the hereafter. Many were heeding a book, written by an Iranian religious leader, called Maad (literally, Resurrection), which made paradise sound something like a deluxe Vegas hotel: There is a castle in Paradise made of marble. In that castle there are 70 houses made of rubies and in each house there are 70 rooms made of emeralds ... In each room there are 70 female servants. An Iranian field commander who served in battle for five years calls this heavenly vision propaganda, written expressly for young, unmarried men living in material poverty and sexual repression. Detail from a painting in a book of poems by Nizami that shows the heavenly ascension of the prophet Muhammad, as described in the Qur'an
Moderate Muslim scholars vehemently dispute the fundamentalist view. For one thing, descriptions of heaven are metaphorical, human attempts to describe the indescribable, these scholars say. For another, Muslim teachings contain strict injunctions against suicide. And while Islamic texts do promise heaven to soldiers who give their lives for Allah, they require those soldiers be engaged in what contemporary Westerners would call a just war. Theres a verse in the Quran that says, If youve killed one innocent person its as if youve killed all of humanity, says Basit Koshul, a lecturer in comparative religion at Concordia College, in Moorhead, Minn. To kill someone unjustly and then say to yourself that youre going to go to heaven and wont have to submit to judgment, its very problematic.
On The West Bank, Jews and Arabs are engaged in a life-and-death political struggle. In America, our anxieties are more personal. Lotz looks around her and sees a world devastated by sadness and fear. Her beloved parents are ailing. Her brother-in-law died last year of a brain tumor. Disease, the economy, drive-by shootings, school shootings, kidnappings and other perils of contemporary society have left us in need, she says, of assurance and hope. Her book Heaven: My Fathers House was in the works before the September 11 attacks, but afterward, her publisher rushed it into print. The book, which describes in detail what heaven will be like based on her interpretation of Revelation, has spent the past six months on the Christian Bookseller Association best-seller list.
THE PRECISE SIZE OF HEAVEN
The book appeals because its like the theological version of comfort food. Lotz compares heaven to a dream home, one that is safe, thats all paid for, that shelters your loved ones. In Lotzs heaven, God is the head of the house, the kind father who leaves the porch light on for the arrival of his beloved children. Lotz even gives the dimensions of heaven. Its a cube, 1,500 miles on a side, as large as the area from Canada to Mexico, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rockies. It could easily accommodate 20 billion residents, each having his or her own private 75-acre cube or room or mansion. This would still leave plenty of room for streets, parks, and public buildings.
More-progressive Christian theologians go crazy when they hear someone give the coordinates for heaven. Theres no specific teaching on where heaven is or what it is, says Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College and author of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven ... But Never Dreamed of Asking. The Bible doesnt give directions from downtown Cleveland. But Cynthia Machamer likes Lotzs specificity. She has had some financial problems, and shes still grieving over the loss of her brother, who died accidentally two years ago. Although Machamer, 39, didnt necessarily agree with the books every word, she found it reasonable and comforting. It reminded her, she says, that theres more to life than suffering.
So does heaven, as a concept, actually motivate people to action? Well, yes, but not by itself. There is no doubt that the heaven being promoted on the West Bank provides disaffected youth with powerful visions of a better place. Georgetowns Voll doesnt think that the virgins carry much weight with the Palestinian martyrs; unlike the Iranians in the 1980s, teenagers on the West Bank do have access to sex. More seductive is that you would have a house, regular food, prosperity, he says. You would have flowing water; someone wouldnt be bombing your well. If you had lived without all that stuff for the first 15 or 20 years of your life, heaven would sound pretty good with or without 72 virgins.
But while heaven talk is motivating and justifying, and an integral part of the rhetoric of jihad, its not the sole impulse behind any terrorist act. The suicide bombers as well as the Qaeda terrorists are also motivated by baser passions, whether they be political beliefs, personal hatreds, financial concerns or yearnings for notoriety. We have to see some sort of personal motivation on the part of these terrorists, says Jonathan Brockopp, assistant professor of religion at Bard College. Theyre in this in some ways for themselves. Indeed, on the West Bank, a new breed of secular martyr is emerging, young men and women who use the rhetoric of politics, not religion, to justify their acts.
CAN ANYONE GET IN?
It wasnt that long ago that the majority of Americans still went regularly to church or synagogue and could probably recite the catechism or the Ten Commandments. And to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the nature of their faith, believers saw these acts of devotiongoing to confession, giving to the shul, helping other people, saying your prayersas assurance of rewards in the hereafter. Now, among mainline Christians, hardly anyone in the pulpit preaches about heaven anymore, and among the faithful theres a demise of the conviction that actions have real consequences, says Randall Balmer, professor of American religion at Barnard College. Even evangelical Christians, who do preach on heaven, eschew the idea that a lifetime of good works guarantees entree to paradise. The only thing you need to do to get to heaven is accept Jesus Christ as your savior, says Lotz. With that simple act, murderers can get in, she says, and terrorists can, too.
Part of our peculiarity as humans is that we believe what we want to believe, and if thats illogical, we dont care. (In a letter, Ernest Hemingway wrote that he thought of heaven as two lovely houses in town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.) While most of us have ceased to correlate specific behaviors with rewards in heaven, we still think that if were good, well go there. Seventy-five percent of Americans believe that their actions on earth determine whether theyll go to heaven, according to a NEWSWEEK Poll. The optimistic view is that, as a culture, weve grown up and are able to tell right from wrong without needing a cosmic carrot or stick. The pessimistic view is that weve lost our points-and-rewards system and our moral compass as well.
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As many of the victims families lean on the promise of heaven to help them through the rest of their lives, political and terrorist leaders continue to use visions of heaven to justify their opposing views. But as innumerable and compelling as they are, visions of heaven are just that: visions. Good, compassionate behavior is not a matter of historical necessity, political perspective or cultural bias. If one can make the mental leap to imagine God in heaven, meting out judgment at the final hour, its not so much more of a stretch to believe that, in his or her wisdom, God must be able to sort out the bad guys from the good, and twisted rationalizations from what is true.
With Dan Ephron and Joanna Chen in the West Bank, Anne Underwood, Julie Scelfo and Margaret Williams in New York and Christopher Dickey in Paris
2002 Newsweek, Inc.