We’ve all heard of Heaven, but beyond that the concept is pretty fuzzy depending on your culture, your religion, your upbringing, and your personal interpretation(s). There are probably as many worldviews of Heaven as there are people who think about it. My own unique spin on the concept not only envisions Heaven as a physical place, but a high-tech one as well – not the home of Yahweh (God) the deity (who doesn’t exist) but Yahweh the extraterrestrial – once Captain, now ex-Captain of the Starship Heaven. That is, Heaven is a spaceship (or was – it’s gone away now).
Let’s start the ball rolling here with a little sci-fi story: Stardate - 4004 BCE: You are directed in this your first command, Captain Yahweh, to proceed at warp speed with your crew of the Starship Heaven to the Sol planetary system in the Alpha Quadrant, third rock outwards, and quietly, discretely, and inconspicuously infiltrate and assist the primitive native hunter-gatherers in the region called the Middle East to attain the next socioeconomic level upwards on the road to their becoming a modern civilization we can openly have diplomatic and trade relations with. Any violation from this Prime Directive will result in the recall of you, your ship and crew to face court-martial.
Postscript: Unfortunately, Captain Yahweh proved unfit for command, suffered a mutiny against him, disobeyed orders, and the rest, as they say, is history. Apart from a modern token presence (UFOs), they (Captain Yahweh, First Officer Jesus Christ, and angelic crew) have all gone now – maybe voluntarily; probably not. So, was Heaven just a spaceship?
Now my basic premise is that God and the Son of God (Jesus Christ – hereafter abbreviated to J.C.) collectively are not supernatural deities but flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials. Recall John 8: 23 “And he [J.C.] said unto them, Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world” or John 18:36 – “Jesus answered: My kingdom is not of this world”. In order for extraterrestrials to get from there (wherever “not of this world” is) to here (Planet Earth), they will need a spaceship or starship. Since God seems to be the Top Dog, let’s assume he is in command of just such a starship, and since Heaven is considered the place where God dwells or resides or calls home, then I’ll equate the name of his starship with Heaven. God the ET is the Captain of the Starship Heaven. Is there anything in religious texts than helps confirm or contradicts this idea?
There is no absolute agreement among the world’s religions or peoples as to exactly what Heaven is. Some deny the existence of a Heaven in any shape, manner or form. To some, it’s nebulous, even just a state of mind. It might be all in the mind (a spiritual ‘place’ or feeling) or a never-never land like another dimension or higher plane-of-existence (whatever that phrase really means as it’s never been adequately defined to my satisfaction). To others, Heaven is a physical place, your Great Retirement Home in the Sky. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll focus on the traditional monotheistic concept – Heaven is a physical place. Heaven has to exist in our normal four-dimensional space-time in order to accommodate all those past, present and future retirees, except that in reality there actually have never been or will be any heavenly pensioners. But that doesn’t alter the physical reality of Heaven.
1) Location; Location; Location: Where Exactly is Heaven Located?
Firstly we need to distinguish the heavens from Heaven. The heavens are just another name for the universe or the cosmos – that celestial dome or vault over our heads and ultimately home to all the gods from all societies. But Heaven is where Yahweh (hereafter God) lives.
Well Heaven, God’s home, has to be fairly close by if God is to keep tabs on his Kingdom on Earth since not even God is immune from the restriction posed by Einstein (and confirmed many times over) that being the finite speed of light. So God has got to be close to where it’s all happening – where the action is – so as to fulfil his mission and look after his Chosen People.
Heaven certainly can’t be placed on top of or inside a fluffy white cloud – that’s a kiddie’s version of non-reality.
Heaven cannot be located here on Planet Earth since there are many Biblical passages that distinguish the two – Luke 11:2 “Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth” or Matthew 6:10 “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” or for a different example, Deuteronomy 4:39 “Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the LORD he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else.”
Heaven tends to be associated with the direction we call ‘up’ or ‘above’. Heaven isn’t sideways in any compass direction, nor is Heaven downwards. Heaven is somewhere far above the surface of the Earth. It’s often synonymous or at least closely associated with the sky or space, especially to the ancients. Well, when we launch our spaceships, we launch in the upwards direction. Our spaceships have to travel through the sky to each space. Of course to the ancients sky and space were synonymous as they couldn’t identify a boundary between one and the other. When we look at our orbiting satellites and spacecraft or where our Apollo astronauts trod the Moon, we don’t look down, we look up. However, when looking up, is there any actual real estate, any physical place, we can associate with ‘paradise’ which is what Heaven is supposed to be? No! The ancients could only have known about the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. None of these abodes, viewed in the ‘up’ direction, could remotely be described as a paradise – though the ancients didn’t know that. Since no natural solar system abode serves as a heavenly paradise, and even abodes discovered more recently like Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are hardly paradise-city, we must look elsewhere.
If Heaven isn’t the Starship Heaven, if Heaven isn’t a spaceship, and if Heaven isn’t on Earth or within our solar system, then the next nearest location of Heaven has to be over four light years away, something quite beyond the comprehension of Biblical scholars of that time. That also introduces that finite speed-of-light restriction since any development on Earth that needed God’s attention would take over a full eight years before that development got resolved.
2) Let’s Get Physical
Probably most Christians consider Heaven a physical place. A spaceship is a physical place.
Heaven is a kingdom, that is, it has a ruler. Well all ships, aircraft and spacecraft have a Top Dog, usually called the ‘captain’. So, the ruler of Heaven is Captain God. Large ships and aircraft, and presumably spaceships (like the fictional NCC 1701 Enterprise Enterprise
Now a kingdom must contain abodes, living quarters, where officers and crew live or reside. No doubt Captain God resides in his Starship along with his other officers (archangels) and crew (ordinary angels). In John 14:2 we have J.C. saying that “In my Father’s house are many mansions [or dwellings or rooms]”. Again, think of Star Trek’s Enterprise
Also you tend to have references that people, even J.C., ascend “into” Heaven, not just go up to Heaven, just like you go into your home or into an aircraft. For example: 2 Kings 2:1 “And it came to pass, when the LORD would take up Elijah into heaven by a whirlwind, that Elijah went with Elisha from Gilgal” and later 2 Kings 2:11 “And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven”. That sounds a lot like a shuttlecraft transporting an ordinary mortal up to God’s spaceship!
Author’s note: All Biblical quotations taken from the King James Version.
To be continued…
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