I was thinking about heaven just last night in bed.

What would heaven be like?

Or maybe to put that another way; What could heaven be like?

Well I could write a book about that just based on my own imagination. The real irony there is that the heavens that I can imagine in my mind necessarily transcend any heaven that could possible be related to the God described in the Bible. This is because the book places restrictions on what heaven could be like, if only by describing what the God is like.

After all, in the biblical heaven only God's will shall be done. Therefore there can be no such thing as free will in heaven. It's entirely a dictatorship and there are no arguments. You do as you are told without asking any questions. And hesitation to do the will of God will result in being reprimanded by the wrath of God.

Of course, the idea is that only complete and total sheep will ever make it into heaven in the first place. So unless you are completely prepared to give up any inkling of free will you won't get into heaven in the first place. According to the biblical account God is only interested in those who will serve him without question, and if he tells you to stone your unruly child to death you do it without hesitation. If you are a woman and he tells you to shut up and obey your male master, you do it, you don't argue with God. You don't even politely raise an objection. God is all-wise, and there is no possible way that you could realize or understand something that God doesn't already know. So you can't possible have a legitimate objection to voice that God hasn't already considered.

That's what the biblical heaven must be like according to that doctrine. Therefore any heaven you imagine where you might have free will is outside of the scope of the biblical heaven.

The real question is whether a non-biblical heaven could exist. In other words, can there be a spiritual world beyond the physical? I believe there is.

Unlike the biblical picture, I believe that our true essence is spiritual and always has been. I don't believe that we came into being when our physical bodies were born. I also have no clue why people would think that, especially people who believe that they continue on in spiritual form after their body dies. If you can believe it works in that direction then why not in the other direction, meaning that you were already a spirit before you physical body was born.

Why would our creator need to use physical bodies to create new spirits?

Especially if it is said that he can do all things.

Why not just raise spirits from scratch as spirits? Why even bother with a physical world at all? What purpose would that serve God?

Also what purpose would a hell serve God?

Why could any deity even bother creating things it doesn't want or like?

These are contradictions in the biblical story.

A supposedly all-powerful God who is forced to create and maintain things it doesn't even like. It supposedly weeps when souls are cast into hell. Oh poor God. Weeping like a parent who lost a child and can't do anything about it.

Yet, God supposedly created the whole stupid scenario!

An all-powerful God none the less.

A God who could have chose to do things differently if it wanted to.

How about this?

If God wants to raise spirits to serve him and do his will in heaven then why even bother will all of mankind petty disagreements and disobedience. Instead of asking people to stone their unruly children why not just give those children a heart attack. Do away with all the weeds, just like a gardener pulls weeds in a garden.

God supposedly also knows everyone's thoughts. Why not just have people who think bad thoughts fall over dead on the spot. Why pee around with them at all? Why should God care? He's just going to toss them into an eternal fire pit in the end anyway.

Speaking of the eternal hell fire, why even bother with that at all? Why not just make spirits die. If God doesn't like someone all he needs to do is un-create them. What good would it be for God to torture them (or have them tortured)?

What would be the point to that? How would God benefit from that?

Clearly a God who just flicks a magic wand and makes undesirable people disappear like as if they had never been created would be a compassionately superior God. Therefore the biblical version of God cannot be perfect. The biblical God is flawed in that it is not perfectly compassionate. It has arranged to make people suffer when suffering is totally unnecessary and would serve no one any good.

The biblical picture of God is flawed in so many ways.

It can't possible be true.

But that doesn't mean that a spiritual world can't exist. The bible never held any copyright on spirituality in the first place. It was only one of a myriad of different ideas that mankind has had about spirituality. Ironically, it's not even the best possible picture by far!

Why would anyone choose to believe a flawed picture when better pictures of spirituality exist?

Do they truly believe that God is flawed?

Maybe they do.

Maybe they are so used to the world being screwed up that they can't even imagine what a genuinely perfect God would truly be like.

Thankfully I can.

Think about this: Souls reaching and fueling the sun to make it everlasting..... but then again, the sun is compromised of eternal flames(!).... Is heaven really hell? (Just a thought)

Isn't "Hell" or "Hole" a derivation of an ancient hebrew word, referring to the open pit with an eternal burning fire that corpses were thrown into (prior to cemetaries)?

Does anybody know the origin of the word "Heaven"?

Yes Hell is actually a reference to sulfur pits that burn naturally. The dead bodies of undesirables were cast into the sulfur pits to be cremated instead of buried.

The word "Heaven" mean "Sky" or firmament. The places where the sun, stars, a planets reside. The word "planet" actually means wandering star.

The original biblical folklore held that there are seven levels of heaven (thus the highest level being the Seventh Heaven). This is because there are only 7 planets easily visible with the naked eye. Each planet was considered to be a level of heaven. They were the moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

The earth wasn't considered to be a planet as it was considered to be fix with all these other "heavenly bodies" revolving around it.

The stars were considered to be pinholes in the firmament of heaven allowing the light to shine in from the highest and greatest "Seventh Heaven".

They also believed in different levels of hell. They actually had many more levels of hell for some strange reason. I guess they really got off on dwelling on hell.

All these different levels of heaven and hell were bothersome to King James and others and were thus weeded out of the scriptures when the biblical stories were canonized into what we now refer to as "The Book" or "The Bible". The word Bible just means Book. All books were "bibles" back in those days. That's just what the word "bible" means.

There are still a few references in the Bible to multiple levels of heaven though. They missed a few references when they tried to eradicate that idea.

By the way, this is also the origin of the idea that God's favorite number is 7. It came from the fact that there were 7 celestial bodies that were clearly different from the other stars in that they moved in the sky.

I always thought it was strange that there are so many references to 7 being God's favorite numbers, Seven trumpets, seven angels, seven levels of heaven, etc. Yet there are 10 commandments.

I think men got caught with their fingers in the mix on that one!

Had their God actually written the commandments there would have only been seven of them to match his favorite number. Especially considering that the first four are basically just; Worship me! Worship me! Worship me! Worship me!

Had those four been condensed into just one, then there would only need to be 7 commandments. It would have been more consistent with the rest of the stories then. Too bad they screwed up and gave themselves away making up 10 commandments to match their fingers instead of 7 to match the wandering stars.

Interesting little tidbits...you are always full of them! Thank you soo much for posting, I always love and learn a lot from what you post!

tHANKS aBRA!