A Christian, a Jew, a Muslim and a Hindu wake up in the afterlife.
A Christian, a Jew, a Muslim and a Hindu wake up in the afterlife.
A Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, and a Hindu wake up in the Afterlife
A Christian, a Jew, a Muslim and a Hindu were close friends. They used to gather regularly to have dinner in a local restaurant. One day they were eating together when an earthquake struck and destroyed the restaurant and killed all of them. They woke up in the afterlife, surrounded by their friends and sitting on the grass by the side of a road. “Well, this is strange,” they all thought. They got up and walked along a tree-lined road, enjoying the scenery, and continuing the spiritual discussions that they enjoyed on earth, and wondering which one of their various views of the afterlife this was.
After a while, they came to a high, white stone wall along one side of the road. It looked like fine marble. At the top of a long hill there was a huge, white arch that gleamed in the sunlight. When they got closer they saw a large magnificent gate in the arch that looked like mother of pearl, and the street that led to the gate looked like pure gold. Sure enough as they approached the gate, there was a man by the gate that looked like Saint Peter.
“I was right!” remarked the Christian. All four of them walked up to gatekeeper, who was sitting at a beautiful carved desk off to one side of the gate. The Christian called out, “Excuse me, but is this heaven?” “Yes, it is, sir,” the man answered. “Wow! It is just like it is described in the New Testament with the pearly gates and the streets of gold!” the Christian remarked. “What did you expect?” the gatekeeper responded, “May I have your name?”
The Christian gave him his name, and the gatekeeper looked it up in his big book. “Yes, your name is recorded here in the Book of Life. You are cleared for entrance. Enter into the joy of the Lord!” And the pearly gates opened up to receive the Christian. He started walking in, then he paused and said, “How about my friends who are here with me. They are very devout and moral people, even though they are of different faiths. This friend is a Muslim, and he is a Jew and the third a Hindu. Can they come in with me?”
The gatekeeper said, “Oh, I am afraid not. If they are not Christians they are not allowed in heaven. The Hindu is a polytheist, the Muslim follows Muhammad, and the Jew does not acknowledge Jesus as Messiah. Sorry, they are not permitted in heaven.” The Christian responded, “Well if my friends are not allowed in, then I am not coming in either.” “Suit, yourself,” said the gatekeeper. And he closed the gate.
The four friends turned back and continued along the road. After a long walk, they reached the top of another hill, and he came to a dirt road which led to a farmhouse with a picket fence. As they approached the gate, the saw a woman just inside, sitting in a rocking chair in the shade of a large maple tree, reading a book. “Excuse me!” the Christian called to the reader. “Do you have any water? My friends and I have been on this road for a long time and are thirsty.”
“Yes, of course. There’s a pump over there,” the woman said, “Come on in and make yourself at home.”
“How about my friends?” the Christian asked. “I am afraid they are not Christians. One is a Muslim and one a Jew and one a Hindu.” “They are all welcome here,” the woman replied. So they walked through the gate and, sure enough, there was an old-fashioned hand pump with a dipper hanging on it, and they all quenched their thirst.
After they all had enough to drink, they walked back to the woman, who was sitting under the tree waiting for them, and asked, “What do you call this place?” “This is heaven,” the woman answered. “Heaven? Well, that’s confusing,” the Christian said. “It certainly doesn’t look like heaven, and there’s a man down the road who said that his place was heaven.”
“Oh, you mean the place with the golden streets and pearly gates? No. That’s hell.”
“That’s hell?! Doesn’t it offend you that they call it heaven?”
“Nope. It actually saves us a lot of time. They screen out the people who are willing to leave their friends behind.”
One of the scandals of religion is exclusivism. It is an expression of duality that claims heaven for their own faith and excludes all others. It finds its most extreme forms in fundamentalisms of all sorts, but is found in more subtle forms even in progressive forms of religion. Unfortunately this exclusivism is part of my religion of Christianity. I have come to the conclusion that it is an expression of the same bigotry that we find in racism.
I recently read a fascinating book that opened my eyes to the pervasiveness of racism in society. It is entitled Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson, who is the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. It focuses on race, using the US, India, and Nazi Germany as examples and drawing the parallels between them. It is a sobering and at times frightening book. She talks a lot about how caste is used to exclude people from the benefits of society. Religion has been complicit in those societies. Even though religion was not the focus of her book, I could not help thinking about the role of religion in racism in our country.
My alma mater, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has been in the religion news recently over calls to rename four buildings on campus that were named after founders of the seminary who were slaveholders. I know two of those buildings well because I was the custodian of them while I was a student there. The seminary has resisted any attempt to change the names. In defense of that position the recently retired history professor Tom Nettles wrote a piece defending slavery on biblical grounds as morally acceptable! It was unbelievable. Furthermore he was backed up by the president of the seminary. It makes me sick.
What makes me just as sick is the doctrine of hell. In my opinion the doctrine of hell is the theological equivalent to lynching. In Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, she has a chapter that helped me understand the roots of hell in racism, even though she does not explicitly address the topic. One of the chapters is called “The Urgent Necessity of a Bottom Rung,” in which she explains how people near the bottom of the social and economic ladder feel like they need someone below them. No matter how bad their situation is, they need someone worse off, who cannot advance to their level. This bottom rung is called the basement in the next chapter entitled, “Packed in a Flooding Basement.”
Hell is the theological bottom rung. It is the basement of the Christian afterlife. If you have ever read Dante’s Divine Comedy and especially the Inferno, you get that feeling intensely. Hell is religious violence. It is theological terrorism. You can’t get any more violent than justifying torturing and tormenting people for all eternity in the name of God, simply because they do not accept your religion!
White Evangelical Christians in America feel like they are being increasingly marginalized. They feel like they are losing power and position in our changing American landscape. But at least in their hearts and minds they can throw all those people who disagree with them, especially liberals and Muslims, into hell. The idea is not new. Dante put Muhammad in one of the eighth circle of hell, as well as several of Dante’s personal enemies. This eternal torture of hell is supposedly ordained by a loving God, who is pictured in Western Christian Art as an old white guy.
On the other hand Satan is always pictured in art as dark skinned. In 2013 the History Channel had a miniseries entitled “The Bible” and the role of Satan was played by a man who looked suspiciously like Barack Obama. It caused outrage in the African American community. The producers of the miniseries, both white evangelicals, said the resemblance was not intentional. Which is probably true, and is exactly the point! Racism is unconscious in white people.
Exclusivism in religion is unconscious. We don’t think we are discriminating against people with our schemes of salvation, but we are. We are discriminating against people based on their creed and religion, which are closely related to race and ethnic and national origin. This is profoundly anti-American and racist. It is duality in its extreme form.
It can be found in all of us. Even the story that I told you about the four friends is dualistic. It is just a more acceptable type of dualism. It just put different people in hell – those damned fundamentalists! See how insidious our ego is? Reality is nondual, beyond heaven and hell, beyond God and Satan, beyond good and evil, beyond right and wrong. All is one. This is the way that Lao Tzu called the Tao or Jesus called the Kingdom of God or the Buddha called Nirvana. To abide in this nondual reality is what I call Heaven. In this heaven all are welcome.