Heaven

Lisa Miller, “Heaven” (Our Enduring Fascination With The Afterlife), HarperCollins, 2010, 296 Pages

Lisa Miller is the religion editor at Newsweek where she writes a regular column describing religion(s) and their intersections with politics and ethics. “Heaven” primarily deals with the three monotheistic religions and their evolving ideas of just what heaven is, other than God’s home, which is one of the only real points of agreement. I read this book to determine just how many people actually believe in heaven (80% in the U.S.) and how much thought has went in to this belief. The book stays to politically correct for my tastes. She never adequately determines how much thought people give to this subject and the Muslims come across like a Salvation army contingent.

My Notes:
Pg. xi: According to a 2007 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 28 percent of Americans practice a religion different from the one they grew up with (and if you include people who move from one Protestant denomination to another, that number is 44 percent).

Pg. xiv: When we talk about heaven, most of us mean more or less the same thing. Heaven is a perfect place. It is the home of God, and a reward for living the right kind of life. In heaven, we live forever. This concept of heaven was invented in Judea around 200 BCE. It changed with Christ and again with Muhammad—then with the scholars of the idle Ages, the painters of the Renaissance, the revolutionaries of the Reformation.

Pg. xviii: This book focuses on the three Western monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—because they share so much history and so many religious concepts—and because the topic is big enough with trying to be all-encompassing.

Pg. 14: Around the year 200 BCE, some Jews began to believe that the faithful among them would ascend to heaven where they would live as themselves with God after they died. This was a radical change. Until then, heaven was the home of God—not of people.

Pg. 54: Jesus said a lot about heaven, much of it hard to understand. In the Gospel of Matthew alone, he talks about the Kingdom of Heaven in terms of a farmer sowing a field, a mustard seed, the yeast in the dough, a fishing ne, a merchant looking for pearls, a king settling accounts, a king who has prepared a wedding banquet for his son, a landowner who hires men for his vineyard, and ten virgins.

Pg. 55: Eschatology is a theological word, which means ‘the study of the end of the world.’ All three of the Western monotheisms are eschatological. All believe that history is linear and progressive. It moves forward, never back. (Buddhists, by contrast, believe that history is cyclical: the universe comes into being, evolves, fades, and disappears again and again.)

Pg. 69: Revelation was written around 95 CE, and many scholars believe that John was probably a refugee from Jerusalem, a person who had seen the destruction of the Holy City by Rome twenty-odd years before and who, traumatized, considered the destruction of the city, and especially of the Temple, a sign of the last days.

Pg. 93: The Qur’an establishes Islam’s ‘five pillars’—the five things every Muslim must do to please God. The first pillar is similar to the Bible’s First Commandment. The Islamic version says, ‘There is no God but God’ and establishes Muhammad as God’s true messenger. The other pillars are: praying five times daily, giving alms to the poor, fasting during the month of Ramadan and, if possible, making the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca.

Pg. 111: Scholars fight bitterly over the thirty-seventh chapter of the book of Ezekiel, written during the Babylonian exile. In it, the prophet Ezekiel is looking over a great valley, which is filled with dry bones…etc. Just what is the point of this chapter?

Pg. 150: Purgatory then can be said to have brought about the Protestant Reformation. It was the abuse of indulgences, as well as the mechanical way in which Catholics imagined they could affect their own salvation, that infuriated Luther and Calvin and moved them to reinvent the idea of what it meant to be a Christian. They threw away the idea of the institutional church as a banker that calculated an individual’s credits and debits in heaven.

Pg. 188: So essential is the family reunion to modern conceptions of heaven that the reader may be surprised to learn that it is a recent development, widespread only in the last two centuries. In antiquity, people may have believed that they would inhabit the same heaven as their loved ones—but they emphatically did not believe that life in the next world would be anything like this one. Initiate, familiar relationships would cease to exist. ‘There will be no marriage in heaven,’ Jesus said (Mark 12:5).

Pg. 199: Universalists are Christians who ‘do not believe a loving God could condemn anyone to hell for eternity.’ In 1961, the Universalists formally joined forces with the Unitarians (who do not believe in a Trinitarian God), creating the Unitarian-Universalist denomination.

Pg. 243: My biggest beef with the atheism writers Christophe Hitchens and Sam Harris—whose works I generally admire—is this: the God hey set up to knock down is a straw man. They define God in the most simplistic, kindergarten terms: an omniscient, omnipotent meddler, whose inscrutable ways and insane approach to justice motivate people to great evil, or, at best, to compliant thoughtlessness.