To the modern Western mind, there are fewer more boring places than Heaven.  Who would want to go there anyway?  Maybe it is a nice place for dead people, but anyone who really wants to live…I mean really live will avoid heaven at all costs.

Don’t believe me?  Ask Kenny, he sings it better than anyone I know:

Everybody want to go to Heaven…

John Eldredge speaks to the predominant mindset of the “Christian” group,

Nearly every Christian I have spoken with has some idea that eternity is an unending church service…We have settled on an image of the never ending sing-along in the sky, one great hymn after another, forever and ever, amen.  And our heart sinks.  Forever and ever? That’s it? That’s the good news? And then we sigh and feel guilty that we are not more ‘spiritual.’  We lose heart, and we turn once more to the present to find what life we can.”

Heaven is regulated to the corner of life-that-is-no-more.  “____is in Heaven now,” is a quasi pithy aphorism people attempt to share with those in mourning in some hope it may be of comfort.  If we Westerners were more honest, we would instead say, “I am sorry for your loss; bummer [your loved one] is in Heaven. Tedious existence, I hear.”

All that talk of a “better place” is really a bunch of nonsense.    In order for heaven to be “better” than here, a person must here be racked in pain, or horrifically disfigured, or completely disabled.  To suggest that someone dead goes to hell, well that wouldn’t be polite at all, so that option is removed.  We only tell the living, “Go to hell!”

Since Westerners are in-practice and philosophically sold out entirely to materialism, we know we simply stop existing when we die.  Heaven is the spoonful of sugar that makes the reality of nihilism a bit less tart.

My friends at Main Street are going to journey with me for the next six weeks on a quest to discover whether or not Heaven is worth our attentions at all.

Maybe it is just a good place for dead people.