This question was posed recently:

“The bible (sic) describes heaven as a place where people sing god’s (sic) praises forever. Being a praisebot doesn’t even sound enticing.

“If there were a heaven, and you got to design your own utopia, what would you include in it?”

One thing many Christians and non-Christians alike don’t realize is that the Bible does not go on at length about how Heaven’s residents will spend the eternal afterlife. The heavenly city (“New Jerusalem”) is described quite specifically, but what you will actually do there is mostly left to the imagination.

The saved will “rest from their hard work” (Rev. 14:13), receive “a crown” (2 Tim. 4:7-8), and “walk” a lot (Rev. 21:24). But also they’ll worship God pretty much constantly (Rev. 22:3) and “reign forever and ever” (Rev. 22:4). It doesn’t say over what or whom they will reign. Surely it won’t be difficult reigning since nothing bad happens there (Rev. 21:4).

The question I quoted above was in an atheist forum where everyone agreed that walking, worshiping, and “reigning” (over what?) for eternity would be terribly boring and pointless. A sampling of the many responses:

— “super strong wifi”
— “basically every sin in the Bible”
— “limitless library and a heated pool”
— “dinosaurs with LASERS”
— “beer volcanoes”
— “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll”
— “dogs, horses, and forests”
— “cats, chocolate, coffee, beer”
— “I would have a ‘non existence’ button installed so I could blip out of there”
— “Nature. Vast, unblemished wilderness... Limited people.”
— “travel the universe unimpeded by time and space”

Several insisted that living forever isn’t something anyone should want. On that point, I take the “how could you know?” position — since no one knows what it would be like. I’m not even convinced we can understand infinity, much less determine whether we’d want to live that long. Most people I meet can’t visualize the massive difference between million and billion, so I don’t think we’re capable of deciding ahead of time whether we’d enjoy living into infinity.

Interestingly, most answers listed things we enjoy in this life. The concept — that Heaven will mainly consist of the things you already enjoy, minus the things you don’t enjoy — is fairly common even among believers I’ve talked to.

Someone I knew in Bible college saw the “reigning” part and tried to guess what it meant. He eventually decided it meant we’d be promoted to be “gods” of new universes. Just like YHWH reigns over this universe, he said, we’d each get (or be allowed to create) our own universes to be gods over. I found that fascinating, if unsupported by context.

A lot of Christians seem to think they’ll become “angels” after we die. There is nothing in the Bible to support this theory, but I’ve met many who profess to believe it. It’s widely propagated in movies — “grandma’s an angel in Heaven now!”

My Response

But what about me? (My opinion is what you came here for, right?) What is my answer to the original question? First, I will rephrase it: “If I could live forever, and could magically design all aspects of that life, what would it be like?”

Yes, my ideal afterlife would be shockingly different than the one proposed in the Bible. It would have almost none of the features described in Revelations — neither endless worshipping nor endless resting or unspecified reigning. Unless that’s what you want to do — if you get to be in my afterlife, I want your experience to be as enjoyable as mine.

In short, I tend to agree with the general consensus that the utopian afterlife should consist of (1) an abundance of what we enjoy, and (2) the absence of what we don’t enjoy.

But What Is Pleasure Without Pain?

Someone would likely challenge my response above with the hackneyed “you can’t truly enjoy pleasure without pain” or “abundance would mean nothing without a contrast against shortage” or some form of this untrue false dichotomy.

I am perfectly capable of enjoying an ice cream sandwich without first having experienced, say, cancer. Can a person truly appreciate not having cancer until they get cancer? Yes, by Jove, I think I can appreciate not having cancer.

But yes, in some sense, we take many things for granted because we haven’t experienced worse things. My children will never know life before the internet or Netflix, so they may never realize quite how fantastic the technology is. But they can still enjoy Netflix even if they don’t appreciate it in the same way I do.

If, on the other hand, you’re convinced you couldn’t fully enjoy unending pleasure and satisfaction without occasional lack or want or pain or sorrow, then I propose a really cool feature of my hypothetical afterlife:

The Real Life Simulator

Any time during the utopian afterlife that you begin to feel like you’re not really enjoying it due to everything being happy all the time, there will be a Real Life Simulator. It’s like those flying simulators, except it’s indistinguishable from the real thing. You can press a button or flip a switch and become immersed in a simulation of real life. Perhaps you will even have your consciousness inserted into a newborn baby so you can experience the WHOLE THING from beginning to end. After all, you’ll have plenty of time, right? You can live forever again after you’re done with the simulation.

You can once again feel what it’s like to burn your hand on the stove, get a two-week-long head cold or sinus infection, have a flat tire or dead battery when it’s 11°F outside, and have other children make fun of you because you’re too fat or too thin or don’t have trendy sneakers. Then you can grow up and experience rejection and lost love and minimum wage jobs under myopic assholes and paying the mortgage and... Maybe break your leg skiing if your simulation includes a wealthy family. Or be injured by farm equipment or livestock if your simulation is in a rural area. I mean, the possibilities are endless.

Whenever you get tired of it, you can say the Safe Word and exit the simulation back to paradise.

Alone Time

But back to my answer, which was, if you’ll remember: (1) an abundance of what I enjoy, and (2) the absence of what I don’t enjoy.

One thing I’d like is the ability to ignore/avoid specific people (or even all people) for any length of time without anyone getting hurt feelings over it. And then the ability to undo that barrier any time I’m ready. Kind of like a social media “block”, but with zero possible negative repercussions from it.

In my life, I’ve constantly struggled with the necessity of dealing with other people when I don’t want to, and at other times really needing someone but having no one. For example, I would enjoy grocery shopping a billion times more if I was the only person in the store. (Not that grocery shopping would be a thing in the ideal afterlife. Which brings me to my next point.)

Lack Of Physical Need

So much of what we do or avoid in real life is mandated by our physiology. Nearly a third of our lives are spent asleep. Significant parts of the waking two-thirds is taken up with eating, bathing, burping, farting, sneezing, pooping, having periods, getting sick, trimming nails and hair, growing babies in our wombs, etc. Most of us spend the first quarter of our lives without a fully developed brain, and the last quarter watching that brainpower slip away. Our bodies take 12 to 20 years to fully prepare, and the last few decades see the body increasingly fall apart. We also can’t fly, see in the dark, hear most wavelengths of sound, see most wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, live underwater, see clearly underwater, and a thousand other things that might be enjoyable or useful.

I could probably spend a few hundred years (at least) exploring all the options once physical limitations were removed.

I don’t mean we couldn’t eat or sleep (or fart) in my ideal afterlife — by all means, if you enjoy those things, go for it. But I do think that none of those should be hard limits in this imaginary utopia we’re considering.

Mental Giants

I think existence would be more fun with a better brain. A brain that didn’t forget something unless I wanted to forget it. How much have I heard or seen or read in my life that is now all-but-forgotten? Many gigabytes, I assume. For example, I don’t remember the lyrics to a song I googled two weeks ago. I also don’t remember the name of that boy who stood between me and a bully 40 years ago.

The “limitless library” that someone suggested in the forum wouldn’t be quite so useful if you kept forgetting stuff every 200 years or so.

No Villains

Most of us don’t battle actual villains, of course. Unless you’re one of those people who believe TAINTUS is a cartoon villain sent back from the future.

For most of us, our “villains” consist of acerbic coworkers, frustrating but unavoidable circumstances (traffic jams, for example), or own failures — like forgetting to check the spare tire’s air pressure before a long road trip. In my experience, these enemies of happiness and pleasure are all around in real life — they would be gone in my ideal afterlife. With my better brain, I wouldn’t have the lapses that cause occasional frustration and time-wasting. With no need for a job, and the ability to “block” people, the unpleasant coworker is a thing of the past. With no need for cars, things like traffic jams disappear.

But we do sometimes feel the effects of actual villains in our society, even if only indirectly. For example, someone at Wells Fargo decided to start creating millions of fraudulent accounts so they could charge extra fees to existing customers. Several someones at ExxonMobil knew about climate change’s reality 40 years ago and decided to spend millions of dollars to confuse and obfuscate the issue in order to rake in record profits (the most of any company, ever). And someone working in our government decided to screw over debt-laden college students who had already been screwed over by predatory lending practices. And so on.

None of this would occur in my ideal afterlife. Not because, as a religionist would say, “those people won’t be there”, but because the circumstances that lead to those issues not existing. For example, we’ll have limitless time to learn from limitless sources of information, so no one would ever get a college loan. Without the need for money (and therefore banks), the Wells Fargo fraud scandal could never happen.

But Who Gets To Go To This Afterlife?

One of the primary features of monotheistic claims about the afterlife is that only certain demographics get to go to the good place, and the other sectors are sent unwillingly to the bad place.

My place won’t be like that. Exclusionary policies are for situations with limited resources, and in this afterlife nothing is limited. Everyone gets to sit at the front of the bus, or swim in the city’s best pool, or go to the best schools.

“But what about truly evil people? Do you really want to reward them?”

First, it’s not a “reward” for anything. It’s just a thought experiment about what I think an ideal afterlife would be like. Second, I don’t think there are any truly evil people — but that’s a concept for a different day’s discussion. Thirdly, I’ve already described that I’ll have the ability to block any person (or all persons) I don’t want to deal with.

What’s The Point?

“Why bring it up at all”, you might wonder, “if you don’t believe in gods and afterlives?”

It’s true, I don’t believe for one second that an “afterlife” is possible. It looks to me like existence is entirely non-spiritual, and that once the electrical activity in my brain has ceased then I’ll be gone for good. But I can think of a few reasons to discuss this topic.

One: I enjoy hypothetical discussions that have no bearing on the real world. Like: “Who would win in a boxing match between The Incredible Hulk and The Thing?” Or: “What if there was an inside-out Earth in which people lived on the inside of a sphere?”

Two: I think it’s an idea worth exploring if it points out how silly are religion’s ideas of the afterlife. And it does point this out. Remember at the top, when I listed what the Bible says about Heaven? Constantly worshiping. Reigning. Walking. Wearing crowns. The first is only done out of necessity, when some narcissistic being holds the power of life or death over you and insists you worship it — not an ideal situation. The other three are the kinds of ideas that might sound nice to a pre-historic pastoral culture that hasn’t yet heard of movie theaters or water parks or space flight. And even the non-biblical ideas of Heaven in our culture — floating around through cloudscapes, wearing white robes, playing harps — are fairly silly and undesirable too.

Three: What if... Bear with me here; this is where I transition to my conclusion: What if some of those ideal aspects are (at least partially) possible here in this life? To choose one at random: getting rid of traffic jams. This, as we all know, is entirely possible. It’s a completely unnecessary feature of life that is wholly manufactured by us. It’s a solvable problem with the right thinking and enough social and political willpower. And some of those other ideals are either halfway here already or could someday be reality.

This concept — that we have, or could someday have, the ability to improve our lives and/or the lives of future humans — is at the core of progressivism. And in many ways it’s at the core of modern human history. Despite the villains, things are getting better. That “limitless library” is nearly a reality today, but was only a pipe dream a hundred years ago. And though I can’t jump up and fly like a bird, I can — because of science and technology — buy a ride in a hot air balloon or other aircraft — and spaceflight is just around the corner. And no, we still don’t have the technology to “block” annoying coworkers or neighbors. But thanks to advances in sciences like psychology and pharmacology, more of our coworkers are getting the help they need with mental and behavioral issues.

The idea of Heaven and Hell (or other types of afterlives) in most religions functions as an incentive program to promote behavioral changes in followers. In the same way, imagining an entirely hypothetical paradisiacal afterlife might spur behavioral changes in us — when we realize that at least some of those sought-after pleasures can exist here.

If so, shouldn’t we work toward that?