Like all cope, excuses, avoidance, cognitive dissonance, sour-graping, et cetera, the ideas of heaven and hell are often used to prevent human beings from reaching our highest potential. They allow us to avoid seeing the truth of injustice, and more importantly, our role in that injustice and our responsibility to that truth.
Let’s start with hell.
If someone in public life does deplorable things and they are not held accountable for them, the easiest way to sleep at night is to say, “well, they’ll answer for their crimes in the hereafter.”
This allows the unjust social conditions that led to the lack of the accountability to continue. It is, in itself, a means of avoiding accountability, namely that which falls upon each individual citizen in a society that takes part in a system they know to be unjust, that allows that injustice to continue and sometimes even benefits from it.
Next, we’ll deal with heaven.
Heaven is a means of dealing with the injustice that occurs on a social level, rather than a societal level. Social injustices that are perpetrated against me can remain similarly unaddressed, based on the belief that, once again, justice will be served in the hereafter.
Simply by “being good” to various degrees (based on personal religious convictions), I can more easily deal with the social injustices of greed, selfishness, violence, or other manifestations of “evil” in others. This belief in heaven spares me from having to correct these social injustices or other errant human behavior.
Hence once again heaven functions to avoid accountability and allow “evil” to continue, by reassuring myself that a godly force will deal out all necessary justice—not now while the injustice is occurring, while my consciousness is in effect, but “later,” after death comes.
Perhaps these injustices contributed to the arrival of that death. Perhaps the societal injustice of avarice prevented much-needed social services from arriving in a timely manner, or made medical care prohibitively expensive. Or perhaps the social injustice of being bullied, taken advantage of, exploited, or otherwise ill-treated led to stress conditions that negatively impacted my health.
Is it at a cost of this life that we gain access to the next? That bargain is only fair if you believe the next life is of greater value than the one you are living.
Some might say that heaven and hell function as a way to deal with elements of life that we cannot control. That is undoubtedly true in practice. But these conditions are only “out of our control” because of copes such as these, which function on an individual level to avoid recognizing the degrees of control that we have to overcome them, whether societal injustices or social ones.
Both are addressed, by and large, through collective awareness and collective action. If the value of human life—all human life and by extension the individual life—were to be recognized on an individual level, by the individual, social interpersonal injustices could be overcome through personal resistance.
This recognition of the value of human life can be made on a collective level as well. In so making it, the idea of what is “possible” on a material—not a spiritual—level can evolve, thereby rendering heaven and hell obsolete, at least insofar as a reason why resistance is unnecessary.
It is at this point that the engagement of justice enters the human realm and not the heavenly, the present and not the eternal, and relies not on some mystically omniscient judge whose judgments have yet to prove superior or even binding, but on personal and collective examination and analysis of the conditions which create injustice.
This analysis, while indeed fallible and disprovable like all true science, is, by contrast, not mystical but earthly, not assumed but testable and verifiable, not deferred but immediate.
It is this analysis, which would truly address injustice, that might lead humankind to its next phase of evolution, which would occur here on earth, writ large in a more evolved, aware, ready, and able society, rather than in a heavenly or hellish realm where perfection is said to exist.
But what perfection is truly perfect which needs to be believed in? Or a perfection which relates to a similarly imagined realm? Is it more perfect than a perfection which exists on earth, before your very eyes? Or even a perfection which is also imagined but imagined OF this earth—not of some invisible realm—that it might be brought into existence at least in part through trial and error, and human ingenuity, bravery, and fellowship?
My answer is no.
Aulos Media 