Who Goes to Heaven?
One obsession among fundamentalists is the question of who, exactly, qualifies for heaven. Basically, the answer comes down to "us". I.E: Christians. Not all 2Bn of them, but only those who are "true" Christians. If you question an American fundamentalist individually about who gets to go, denomination by denomination, then you learn that a fraction of a percent of those they claim as Christian (when boasting of how many they are) actually qualify. (List of Christian denominations) Catholics, the vast majority of Christians, are not eligible according to fundamentalist thought. Here's an excerpt from a recent youth Mexico Mission blog:
"Later we were sitting outside and I asked her how long she had been a Christian. She told us that when she was seven she wanted to be a Christian but her parents wouldn't let her and made her go to a Catholic church.
I guess when her parents died, she was able to actually actively follow God."
I've been to her church, and this is what they are taught: Most forms of Christianity are heretical cults. But what of, "All dogs go to heaven"? What is a cat's incentive for goodness? How about Bees? As the video implies, that any human may expect to go to a particular heaven is an artifact of the heaven having been invented by humans. If such a place existed, why would any innocent organism be kept out?
Almost nothing annoys me more than the bemoaning of the future as an immoral, uneducated, unenlightened time. Many people- of both conservative and liberal ideologies- call up sunny images of a past where people were happier, smarter and "better". Usually we can point to political and technological advancements that demonstrate this is not the case.
My deeply-held belief is that the future is bright and brimming with promise, that today's youth are not hopeless or devolved, and that new fangled technology will not cause the collapse of our species. When bad things arise, we are tempted to look to the past with a fond and foggy nostalgia- as if fundamental human problems were not always the same. Bringing apocalyptic rhetoric into the discussion of modern problems is inappropriate, I think, because every generation has its big, scary troubles. As this comic advises, we should always look to the evidence and not catastrophize.