The Afterlife As a Dream
I was raised with the mainstream christian belief that there is an afterlife and it consists of heaven and hell. You go to heaven if you are a good, faithful christian, to hell if you are bad. Hell is usually envisioned as a fiery place, where souls burn for all of eternity. Heaven is described as a place where the streets are paved with gold. That doesn't really sound all that appealing to me. It sounds like Trump's ridiculous gold-plated penthouse in New York: cold and ostentatious. My heaven would be a place of physical comfort but also beautiful scenery, endless miles of trail, waterfalls, placid beaches, but also changeable weather. Basically it would be like natural earth but without the illness and back pain. Over time my ideas about the possibility of an afterlife have changed. For the most part, a rational world view seems inconsistent with religion, and an afterlife requires a religious universe 1 . But as I have written elsewhere , this is superficial. Religion does