Put the question to any Catholic, Christian or any denomination of Muslim and the variety of answers will entertain you with boundless humour.
For Christians the common thread is standing in the presence of God singing and praising for eternity. By any measure, this is a boring thing specially for those who were used to be challenged with the variety that life offered when living. For Muslims the lure is much more sensual from an earthly prospective. Which Allah believer wouldn't want the company of young, pretty and nubile virgins roaming around fragrant gardens with colourful trees and flowers to do with them as one wills. However, practically speaking even a year of debauchery in such a paradise would make the most lecherous of us pretty bored. Thanks to science, the question of death and therefore heaven is answered most sensibly if not most comfortably. Forget the made up idea of a soul, every feeling every idea, every sense of pleasure and pain emanates from the electrical impulses and chemical reactions in your living brain. When it dies, you as a total entity cease to exist. No more meeting your friend, your enemy, or your family in better or worse surroundings in an imagined afterlife. Kaput, the party is over. Therefore, enjoy everything life has to offer in a way that is kindest to others, harming no one. Treat all others as if they live in a world in which you don't know how you yourself will be born: of what colour, whether possessing all or less than the normal human faculties, of what gender or orientation (or lack of it) or anything else. Don't go by ancient texts or modern religious instruction. They are all immoral written by clever yet ignorants who themselves transgress what they teach and interpret those texts to follow the laws and morals of modern society instead of the other way around Those ancient scriptures make differences among us, teach us to hate, guide us with fear, burdening us with some guilt called sin as if as human beings we have evolved and live without any moral compass within us. If some God out of all the other Gods you believe is the true one, is omniscient, why would he or she create us knowing the kind of life which has been predestined for us under the guise of a free will. Can you really have a free will when your God already knows how you will exercise it? Roland Francis Toronto
