Do You Really Want to Leave Earth? Does God Really Need You?

I rewrote this blog post from a week or so ago and added a little bit.  I wanted to address the "God Needed Him" excuse I hear when people die.

Do you ever wonder about the mindset of Christians, who revel in the coming destruction of our Earth?  The earth being annihilated is seen in a positive light, and they anxiously await the second coming of Jesus, where he will battle those who are not “on his side,” scoop the good Christians up to fly away with him, and then destroy the earth months later.  This insistence on death before the few obedient ones receive their reward is the embodiment of a death cult.  The worship of a bloody sacrifice is the symbol of a death cult.

Why are the religious so joyous about the earth being destroyed?  Don’t they want their great grandchildren to have a good life on Earth?  When comparing any descriptions we have of Heaven to the beauty and variety found on Earth, from our forests to mountains, to jungles to prairies to lakes and rivers, why isn’t Earth seen as the real Paradise?  Do you really want to leave this boundless sphere of beauty?

I could more easily get on board with variations on the Buddhist theme, with belief in reincarnation, where people come back and relive their lives, but their lives become better each time they come back.  Wouldn’t you love to return as yourself and have your friends, but be able to travel more to exotic places, and not make the dumb mistakes you made in the past?  Yes, that would be a great improvement!  It would be closer to Heaven than going to some place to worship, not know your family, and be surrounded by white and gold clothed egotists.  Why more people do not latch on to Buddhism is beyond me.  Perhaps they just have not thought about any religion beyond the one they were raised in.  (This does not mean I believe in reincarnation, because I see no evidence for it, and am a “stone-cold atheist.”  I just would be happy if it were true – probably because I had a great childhood and would want to relive it – I am sure there are many out there who had childhoods that were miserable, but would want to live someone else’s life instead the next time around!)

I do understand how people in our past came to think about the spirit being separate from the body.  My friend’s husband recently died, very suddenly, of a heart attack, and as she stood in front of him at Visitation (which is another way we torture the surviving spouse), I looked at Mike with his dead grayish skin covered in flat foundation, and thought that primitive people would see a person there, but no personality, and they could easily make the assumption that the personality floated away somewhere else.   But that should have been cleared up long ago, with our understanding of how our brain produces our personality, and how our brains die when we die. 

The common excuse the religious use for death, even a very painful and unfair death, is that God needs the person in Heaven.  Really?  Does God need a three year old who died of bone cancer?  Does God need an athlete in Heaven?  Why would someone “all powerful” need a person in Heaven?  Please enlighten me – try to think of an answer! 

Certainly God does not need another choir member.  After all, not only are there a lot of people in Heaven already, but God could make a lone spirit voice sound like 100 spirit voices if he wanted to have a choir.  There is no need to kill someone in order to have another voice in the choir.  

I think all Abrahamic religions’ concepts of death are very anticlimactic, after the beautiful earth we inhabit, and do not see the draw of these religions at all.