Imagine

“Imagine there’s no heaven”, the song appeals to our higher level of consciousness. It asks us to discard the notion that there is an all-powerful benevolent father figure that has prepared a life everlasting in a land of milk and honey, free of want forever.

The Lennon dichotomy challenges the Christian belief that all we have to do is successfully negotiate the minefield God placed before us on Earth to attain our reward. Complete the course under par and you’re in. Unless you’re a Catholic. If you’re a Catholic, you can admit all of the bogeys recorded on your scorecard as par at the time you sink your last putt on the 18th. The act of contrition will gain you admission to the club house where seventy to eighty virgins will attend to your every need. Whoops, I combined religious philosophies.

I ramble into the religious because of a post I made a while back that brought brimstone down on my head and apparently a pox on my house. I refer to my “If Men Could Get Pregnant” post.

In the post I posit the theory that the Christians are acting very un-Christian in the rabid pursuit of overturning Roe v. Wade and the controlling of the process we will generically call “birth”. The Christians will have us to believe that conception (or birth as it is known to the Evangelicals) begins with the look across a darkened room. Anything that impedes that furtive glance from resulting into a potential acolyte is anathema. There is no scripture to support this philosophy, they just “imagined” it. I’d like to imagine further.

Imagine you saw your child blazing an ant hill with a magnifying glass. You might watch out of amusement for a few seconds before recommending the child pursue a better activity. Imagine you saw same child pulling the wings off of fly. The child argues they’re not killing the fly like they were the ants, but you would still discontinue their behavior. Next you catch your little darling tying tin cans to the dog’s tail. “It didn’t kill him or dismember him” your precious argues, but you still send him to time out because you know cruelty when you see it. Particularly when it involves animals.

Now imagine all of the stories you read in the Bible are true, gospel as they say. Start with Genesis when God’s perfect creations are found to be guilty of lust (you didn’t really believe the snake story did you?). God cast Adam and Eve out of Eden because he knew (all-knowing remember) that someday that lust was going to become an issue. Why he didn’t order the Adam and Eve models without lust mode is open to interpretation( free will, yadda, yadda, yadda).

Humankind bops along for a few millennia until the lust situation becomes such an overwhelming concern that God decides the answer is a complete reboot (see Genesis chapters 6, 7 & 8). Now with Earth 2.0 and an almost clean slate, God watches his experiment with eager anticipation. Humankind eventually reverts back to its sinful self and God decides to correct course using a different tack. He sends his “only begotten son” to die a cruel public death. We assume there were some serious “perks” involved in getting his son to endure the corporal plane. Imagine explaining to Jesus when he got back to heaven why gnats were necessary or hemorrhoids?

Anyway, Jesus died for our sins, and we are all square with God except for the occasional World War, small war, earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, typhoon, flood, tornado, and school shootings. We do have that big bang foretold in Revelations when “the earth shall be scorched by fire and the blood will run to the horses mane” to look forward to. Don’t wait, you need to get all of the lust in you out before then. Just be sure to keep track so that you can confess it all at the end, if you’re a Catholic.

“Confession is good for the soul” and it will help you to ascend into the kingdom of heaven. Just don’t try to sit in the chair on the right side of God. That seat’s reserved. One of the “perks”, remember?

Imagine that I have been astute in my analogy of the cruel child to the “just and loving God.” Imagine my incredulity that so many people need to force their personal beliefs on others? Beliefs that were imagined.

Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try.