Heaven isn't the place for the virtuous

By: BRYAN PATTERSON

Melbourne Herald-Sun

September 2002

I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants -- A. Whitney Brown

EVERY good man wants to go to hell. Only bad men want to end up in heaven.

The famed 19th century American preacher Frank Wicks shocked his congregation with that thought in 1914, a time when many sermons were still about the agonies of hell and the ecstasy of heaven.

His words still have the power to shock. Wicks' theory was that the traditional hell, where some souls ended up because they did not believe the ``right way'', was unacceptable to all good men. Who could be happy in heaven when so many were suffering in hell? Rather than go to a heaven, the truly good would rather end up in hell. Only the bad would choose to go to heaven, he said. The only man fit to be damned was the man who would accept salvation on those terms, Wicks said. ``Any man who would purchase a salvation that meant eternal bliss to himself and eternal perdition to his neighbour, is so lost in selfishness that it would take considerable fire to purify his nature,'' he said.

Wicks' thoughts echo a Chinese legend of the madonna Kwan-yin, who refused to enter paradise so long as a single soul was excluded. ``Never will I receive individual salvation,'' she said. And to this day she remains outside the gates of paradise.

Noted American agnostic Robert Ingersoll reflected that he realised early in life that some members of his family were governed by the hope of heaven and the fear of hell ``that caused many to lose the little sense they had''. He heard of an old farmer in Vermont who was dying. The minister at his bedside asked him if he was a Christian. The old man answered that he had made no preparation, that he was not a Christian, that he had never done anything but work. The preacher said that he could give him no hope unless he had faith in Christ, and that if he had no faith his soul would certainly be lost. The old man was not frightened. He was perfectly calm. In a weak and broken voice he said: ``Mr Preacher, I suppose you noticed my farm. My wife and I came here more than 50 years ago. We were just married. ``It was a forest then, and the land was covered with stones. ``I cut down the trees, burned the logs, picked up the stones and laid the walls. My wife spun and wove and worked every moment. We raised and educated our children, and denied ourselves. ``During all these years my wife never had a good dress. I never had a good suit of clothes. ``We lived on the plainest food. Our hands, our bodies are deformed by toil. ``Now I am about to die and you ask me if I am prepared. Mr Preacher, I have no fear of the future, no terror of any other world. ``There may be such a place as hell -- but if there is, you never can make me believe that it's any worse than old Vermont.''

INGERSOLL said the theory of a hell with eternal pain was ``a frightful dogma that founded the Inquisition, darkened the lives of many millions and made the cradle as terrible as the coffin''. ``It enslaved nations and shed the blood of countless thousands,'' he said. ``It sacrificed the wisest, the bravest and the best. ``It subverted the idea of justice, drove mercy from the heart, changed men to fiends and banished reason from the brain.''

Wicks said fear of hell never made a bad man good. ``Love, only, makes good men,'' he said. ``The man who loves does not need to have a heaven built for him. He has found it. ``If a man wanted good company he would never go to the traditional heaven. As someone has said: `Heaven for climate, hell for company'.'' Wicks said there was no such place as the traditional hell, or the traditional heaven. ``Hell is the base spawn of hate and fear. ``Hate and fear first made a god after their own likeness, and this god made a hell to their liking.''

Reproduced with permission