Heaven: You Can't Get There From Here. William Miller
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Foreword
For the curious, I’ll share a bit about how this book came about.
I hadn’t planned all my life to fill a file cabinet full of clippings from newspapers and magazines about God, religion and evolution, etc. and likely can credit the habit to my mom who collected clippings for her writing as a published romance novelist. But after sharing each article throughout the years with as many family members as happened to be around at the time, save them I did and over the years I compiled a substantial amount of material on the topic. Reaching one’s sunset years has a way of providing opportunities to survey what you’ve accomplished in your life. For me, the firm mental grasp on this topic painstakingly assembled over a lifetime, along with the mountain of research material begged the question; why not make this into a book to organize, preserve and share in the hopes that the scales get tipped ever so slightly more in favor of science and reason rather than blind faith.
To that end I dedicate this book to family, friends and future readers that will have the responsibility to carry their beliefs into what someday will hopefully become a more peaceful Society in which my descendants will be able to live.
Introduction
I recall vividly my grandma waving the Bible at me, and telling me that I’d better get to reading it and do what it says if I wanted to go to Heaven! I must have been eight or nine years old when the fear of dying pushed me to take grandma’s advice, and so I took up my first reading of the “Good Book.” I had to force myself to read it cover to cover, a little each night, because I couldn’t understand most of it. I got the part about “be good” and believe in God and his Son, but I could never understand that if God made everything good, how could man have gone so wrong and why? Why did people choose to be bad; when if they were good, they’d get to go to Heaven and on to eternal life?
Since at the time in school we were taught that we were all “created equal”, why would so many people defy God throughout the Bible and risk losing their spot in Heaven? What with Adam and Eve getting thrown out of the Garden of Eden and all the bad guys in the ‘Little Black Book’, I got the impression that man was generally bad and the only thing that saved us from Gods wrath and total destruction were the good folks who went to church. Which is where mom hauled my two younger brothers and me every Sunday, up to our early teen years.
Church for us ‘country boys’ was a rural Methodist Chapel up the road a few miles from our eleven acre farm, also attended by the area farmers and their wives. I started out in the Sunday school basement, and eventually got old enough to go upstairs with the elders where I figured God was. He wasn’t in the basement.
On the holidays though, mom and dad would take us to the “big grey stone church” up town where we were baptized, but they never attended services in the country chapel with us, they just dropped us off to get “churched” and picked us up afterwards.
It was here where I was reassured that everything in the Bible was true. That God was a loving and forgiving Father; as he had sent his only son to die for our sins, so that someday most of us could join him and his son in Heaven for all of eternity - if you were good and followed the rules of course.
The first rule was you had to believe in God and his 10 Commandments. Then you had to believe Jesus was his Son who had the absolute power to decide whether or not you went to Heaven. There would be a Judgment Day, where you will put on your Sunday best, shine your shoes and stand before God to be judged. St. Peter will be on the left of the throne and Jesus on the right giving a thumbs up or down to each new applicant. Those good enough to get in would enjoy the radiant beauty of Heaven and God’s love for all time. Just believe and be good, it was that simple. Sometimes though, the emphasis was on “believe” more than on “be good” and that puzzled me from very early on. Why wouldn’t you believe this if it was the truth?
Our farm had two Holsteins (one I milked by hand) one pig, chickens, geese, ducks, guineas and two horses. We hunted, trapped and fished along with raising a garden to supplement Dad’s income uptown as a draftsman.
We butchered our own animals, so I understood about death at a very young age. Nevertheless, when our family collie was run over by a hit and run driver and died alongside of the road in my arms, death became profound for me. I think I was nine or ten at the time and as I look back I think it was then that the image I had that God was loving disappeared. How could God allow a dog to die like that, especially my best friend and companion everyday rain or shine? This act wasn’t anything close to love as I knew it and I began to have doubts about God.
In my early teen years I took up the Bible again because the nuclear threat hung over our heads and we were made to feel that any day we could be blown to Heaven or Hell (depending on your point of view). The Russians could put Judgment Day on us at anytime and we could be standing before God tomorrow. So I thought I’d better brush up on my do’s and don’ts for my heavenly entrance exam in case I got nuked.
This time through though, I got the impression that God, our Father in Heaven, and his Son had a mean streak. For example, why wouldn’t a grandfather (which God was to Cain and Able) praise his grandchildren equally? Both were doing their best to please him, but God was unloving and mean to Cain, a poor farm boy like me.
We stopped going to church altogether when the farm became a nursery at the end of my twelfth year but I learned to love trees as well as animals and I was appalled when Jesus, hungry, came upon a fig tree that was barren and killed it because he was upset it was fruitless, (Matthew, 21:19). Whoa – was the fig tree in a rest cycle (like our apples every other year)? Was there pollination that spring or frost or lack of water to form fruit? A God should know that, right – why kill the tree? Why not put figs on it instead? This strikes me as ‘humanly’ mean, dissolving the “loving Jesus” image I vaguely carried. Today, anger management classes would be recommended for him!
The Bible, however, has always harped upon Gods wrath; you could be punished here and now for bad deeds and eternally if they were bad enough – like not believing for example. In fact I have a friend who doesn’t go to church because he fears Gods wrath. The good book sure put the “fear of God in him.” So you learn in the Bible that you have to fear God as well as love him – isn’t that a contradiction? I, for one, found I couldn’t do both. I loved and feared my father at the same time, but I shouldn’t have to fear my “Heavenly Father” in any way.
In spite of my fading faith, the youthful “imprinting” I had received in the little country chapel left me with an uneasy feeling that maybe “Ol’ Satan” might use my soul for charcoal and if I didn’t shape up and buy into the Christian faith, I could be greasing the hubs of Hell for all eternity.
Then I ran across a little book that set me free – Albert Einstein’s The World As I See It. In speaking about cosmic religious feeling Albert said – “The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation; cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events – that is; if he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A god who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man’s actions are determined by necessity external and internal, so that in gods eyes he cannot be responsible, anymore than an inanimate abject is responsible for the motions it goes through. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punishment and hope of reward after death.” ~A. Einstein
Here was the brightest man who had ever lived, a member of the “chosen people” whose hair could even think, relieving me in one paragraph of all the fears of the Bible that had been “imprinted” in me long ago! I felt I could reason outside the box without a bolt of lightning smokin’ me. The guilt of “original sin” was off my back!
But, the book that finally pushed me over the edge was Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis. It had some “missing links” in our human past fossilized in stone, connecting us to the rest of the primates. Finds in Africa by Raymond Dart and others had shown we were ALL connected to the apes through evolution over great lengths of time. Ardrey implied that Eden was in Africa, that Adam and Eve looked an awful lot like