Pearly Gates

For most religions, I'd say the afterlife for their sinners, heretics, and skeptics is almost as unimaginative as it is horrifying. There's not much to eternity for souls on, say, a Baptist's naughty list. It's just a mass of people--Muslims, Hindus, Mormons, Catholics, gays--all writhing right along with the murderers and rapists. People gnash teeth at each other in regret impossible to fathom, and in pitch black hell fire.

Motivating, sure, but really? You can only take Pascal's wager so far in manipulating people before the extreme threats make its faulty logic apparent.

Of course, the earliest versions of a human afterlife were even more mundane, if not more humane. Hades' underworld, for example, wasn't as much tortuous as it was boring and gloomy and it took all comers. Similarly early Judaism just had the one, Sheol. But, when aiming for believers, the value of splitting up an afterlife into eternal punishment or reward was irresistible and now most successful religions use it. Everyone from Buddhist to Scientologists offer escape from torment.

To the LDS faith's credit, they've done a good deal of work to make their afterlife more humane for it's sinners and skeptics. Though the supernatural claims don't mean much to me, I am grateful. It's easier for some other religions to devalue the life and rights of their beloved sinners in this life when an eternity in hell fire is what they have coming, and, hey, they'll never see them again.

Nevertheless, the LDS afterlife can have some funny quirks. We were having dinner with my parents, and started talking about my mom's history for some reason and we got on the topic of her first husband. It was a marriage arranged by my grandmother to an older man, a friend of the family well regarded and a leader in their church. My mom did what she was told was her duty back then and they were married in the temple. Anyway, long story short, my mom's first husband quickly became abusive and she, going through medical problems, almost going blind, didn't feel she could leave him. Fortunately, for her (and my existence, a couple decades later) my dad saved her from that marriage long ago. Funny, I owe my existence to divorce, I guess, but it wasn't much of a marriage.

Now we still see this guy today off and on. He's remarried. The woman he married, just so you get the picture, told everyone her son died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, when he was actually in prison (guess she never considered the fact that he would be let out and resurrected, in effect). She also, after she met my family at some function, went on and on at her table about how horrible it was that we had children, telling her table that they should be taken away before we teach them to sleep with each other. Yeah, a repugnant human being, one not many people can stand for an hour, let along eternity.

So we're talking, joking about my mom's ex and his wife--to be clear, my mom finds the humor in it too nowadays--and I realized she never got her temple marriage dissolved and my parents were never sealed in the temple. "Mom, do you realize that if the LDS church is right, you'll be spending eternity with that man as one of his two wives?" Now, I'm not sure if the LDS leaders would back that position today, but it got a good laugh. There's been a running joke competition in my family over who is closest to me, and so we spent the rest of the evening, my dad and I, planning out our days in the terrestrial kingdom while my mom was stuck helping her nauseating sister-wife attend to her husband in the celestial.

Seems one person's heaven can be another's hell :-).