How 'bout that Heaven!

I've been thinking about heaven.

I don't think I'd like gold streets - they'd get pitted and I just think that it's the wrong aesthetic for a street.  I also really don't want a mansion - had one of those in an earlier life and they're a pain in the keister to maintain.  What I want is a loft on the top floor with a pool where all I have to do is think of what I want and gorgeous, intelligent women go get it for me.  That would be cool.  But perhaps heaven is like Douglas Adam's legendary planet manufacturer Magrathea where you're heart's desire in the way of planet-ware can be fulfilled, no matter how disgusting (think purple jello planet with tasty fried locusts and sumo wrestlers doing the backstroke).

But I think the most interesting thing about heaven - well, aside from God, Jesus, the angels, the cherubim, seraphim and the bottomless pitcher of perfect Pina Coladas - will be who's there.  Or more to the point, who's not. As I understand modern reformed theology, it is Jesus the Christ who separates the goats from the lambs.  Just looking at their SV (Sinicculum Vitae) you would not be able to tell Billy Goat from Little Lambikins.  So as much as it may appeal to my sensibilities, there is not likely to be a Nazi Room at Satan's Palace where Adolph and the boys reprise all their choicest brutalities on themselves.  As a matter of fact it is a point of reformed pride that there is not an (un)Goddamned thing we can do to save ourselves.  Perhaps the only reliable way to tell the damned from the elect is that the damned will tend to be screaming.

Which raises a rather ticklish question:  will we remember them?  The damned I mean.  Because presumably there will be a lot of them, they will be in a really nasty pickle (if not, then Jesus most certainly committed the sin of advertising 'puffery') and at least some of them will be people that we knew.  I sort of imagine that as we arrive at the Pearly Gates and get checked in there will be a kiosk where we can use Godgle to search for loved ones who've gone before - or perhaps they'll be there to greet us.

So say I get to Pearly Gate Intake Station Bravo and look around "gee, where's uncle Al?", the Seraphim First Class holding the door shrugs, St. Peter turns to one of his Cherubic (really!) assistants who looks rather sheepish and behind an absolutely adorable, chubby little hand points downward.  So Pete turns back around "I'm terribly sorry Mr. - he looks back down at his clipboard in a maneuver designed to convey to me just how really really insignificant I am - Reeves but your Mr. Uncle is not here."
"Well then where is he?  In hell?  I mean I buried him so I sure hope was dead"
"I'm sorry we don't have any information on any other eternal destinations, if you would please move along".  Which would upset me because uncle Al had the best collection of dirty jokes...um, well never mind.

So:  if you get to heaven and find out that some of the ones that you loved and cared about were 'not there' what are you to make of it?   And since the God who is hosting the greatest hootenanny of all time is also slipping away during breaks in the action to check on 'the rest' of the 'operation' what do you think of Him?  I mean it's one thing to mourn what happened to poor old Uncle Al but another thing altogether to find out that your new bestie is what is happening to poor Uncle Al - again and again and again.....  How secure in your salvation can you really be when its author and guarantor is also the Universes' premier concentration camp commandant?  And after he's already told you that you are at the party purely on his sufferance and whim.  But you kids have a good time!

Knowing something of remorse and fear I can tell you that to me it wouldn't feel like heaven at all.  It would feel both tragic and terrifying.  So I'm assuming God, being perfect and all, has planned for this eventuality.  And as I reflect upon it, I think he has two broad options for dealing with the "Uncle Al" problem.  Change us or change the reality around us.

He could change us in two different ways:  The first is selective memory removal.  All references to Uncle Al and the other 'detainees' would be excised from our memories.  They would cease to exist as would the experiences that we had with them.  This would certainly solve the problem but only at the cost of making some new ones:  first of all what if Thomas Edison was a 'detainee'?  Does that mean that ixnay on the ightbulblay?  If Bob Gibson is getting a slow roast do the Cards have to give back his World Series wins?  Tricky.  And there is the 'big O', the real objection to memory removal.  In a real sense 'I' am only 'me' because of the sum total of experiences that have accumulated in my wetware and have informed the development of my soul.  Getting rid of Uncle Al doesn't just do violence to his memory, it gives me the soul equivalent of serious brain damage.  Without the memory of people and the role they played in my life can I really say that what is left is still me?

But never fear, there's a second me modification option: drugs.  Or more accurately the uber euphoric Joythatpassesallunderstanding better known by it's street name "Joy" or "Whee".  Perhaps the elect will experience such overwhelming Joy all of the time that the lack of Uncle Al will cease to matter.  "Uncle Al? who gives a shit, gimme another hit!".  Then again, perhaps not.

The other option to 'solve' the problem could be to change reality around us. For example, simply eliminate our memories of all other humans, replacing them with a billion redaction dummies doing the same things but having no identity in our memory banks so we can't miss them.  Or alternatively God could populate heaven with Icthus 2000 cyborg replicas of all of the damned.  So Uncle Al would appear to me just the way he did back in the day except for his sudden inability to tell a single dirty joke.  "But I could still feel bad about my dog Boots, where's he?"  "OK, dogs too, dammit."  But I don't really think that God would disguise the reality around us.  That would make him a big fat liar.

So we're back to changing me.  And the thing that these 'solutions' have in common is that they violate or obliterate the integrity of 'me'.  If I can't remember or am drugged to not care then in a real sense am I still me?  And if not who's been saved? (I always imagine that this is the scene from the movie where Ronald Reagan discovers that he had lost his legs: the "where's the rest of me" moment) And that doesn't even begin to deal with the question of sin.  Do I have free will?  Can I sin?  If so, how is heaven different than earth?  If I have no free will, can't remember or am drugged not to care and am systematically duped it stands to reason that what has been saved is not 'me' but a me shaped mannequin who God puts in a new pose once in a while'.  And if that's the case then I wouldn't want to be in Jesus' shoes when he gets the call from the Advertising Standards Board - can you say 'false and misleading?'

And there's another, even bigger problem: Even if there is some other option that miraculously skirts all of the free will and Uncle Al issues, then why didn't the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent perfect God use the same tech to rescue the world when Adam and Eve did their big awshit?  Why produce 60 billion (!) stiffs with all their pain and sin if you already know how you're going to solve the problem?  Time crunch? The mother of all procrastinations? Or was the solution still a bit buggy at Redeemer labs when Eve committed the most disastrous single act of nagging in human history?

Oh well, I'm sure God has it all worked out.  After all he's not only perfect, he's becoming more wonderful every day in every way.  Hey! Who's been putting crap in my coffee?