If religion teaches us to abandon our earthly desires and reject materialism, why is the concept of heaven itself so heavily centered on materialistic rewards?
Every scripture that ever asked men to starve their appetite made the exact same promise on the back page: starve now, feast forever.
Is this a lie?
Does this mean the pious man who starves his appetite is not just anti-materialist, but is the ultimate hyper-capitalist?
I believe the paradox is embarrassing.
A religion that truly wanted it's followers to abandon material desire would never have needed to describe heaven at all. Silence would have been enough. "Trust me" would have been enough. Instead, every faith that ever asked for renunciation felt compelled to hand its followers a brochure. Gold. Jewels. Feasts. Youth that never fades. Bodies that never break.
What follows is not a rejection of Christ. I love the light but I'm just cynical of the hands that built his chapel.
It is simply an observation why the human mind needs a selfish reason to pursue an unselfish good.
Why religion gave the human imagination a heaven it could understand.
And why people began worshipping the reward instead of becoming worthy of the good it represented.
What makes the observation tragic is not that man reaches for God, but that he brings his earthly hunger with him.
Religion, in its highest conception, is supposed to loosen the grip of appetite. It asks man to become less possessed by greed, pride, fear, and selfish desire, and to orient his life toward a love that does not depend upon what it receives in return.
They knew that man is a moral animal.
He is not just a beast driven by instinct, hunger, and heat. A man cannot commit his greatest acts of sacrifice simply out of animal appetite. He requires a narrative of righteousness. He needs to believe that his hands are clean, that his cause is just, and that his actions are aligned with the ultimate structure of the universe.
Perhaps the strange thing is not what heaven contains, but how recognizably human our descriptions of it are.
We speak of abundance, security, beautiful gardens, precious things, reunion, and endless pleasure. Even when attempting to describe the infinite, we keep reaching for the objects our earthly lives taught us to desire.
This is not Christ being small. It is humanity being unable to think large enough.
We are creatures of appetite trying to imagine existence without appetite. So we construct an eternity of abundance because we cannot yet conceive of a happiness that does not depend upon having more.
That's why the mind begs you to look away, to swallow the doubt, to accept the pre-packaged answers, and to retreat into the comforting fog of unexamined tradition.
But once you see that you can get human beings do anything if you can convince them it is moral, you simply cannot unsee or not just question why the earthly church and its doctrines have taken their current form.
Try to imagine an eternity with no body, no appetite, no contrast, no friction, no beginning and no end and no edges — just pure undifferentiated awareness, forever. Does it feel like peace?
Maybe this is the reason religion simply does not destroy materialism; it merely postpones it and inflates it to absurd proportions.
A self needs a border to know it exists. Take away hunger, and you take away the pleasure of the first bite. Take away time, and you take away the relief of a hard day's ending. Take away the body, and you take away the only proof you've ever had that "you" are a thing separate from the rest of the universe.
So when men were asked to imagine the highest possible reward, they didn't pick the honest answer.
For them heaven had to be materialistic. For them there is nothing wrong in wanting something more than dirt and hunger.
I repeat myself again: none of this is an argument that nothing sacred exists, or that every man who kneels is a fool.
If the simple belief that there is a God, and someday he will judge us based on our actions we commit in our daily lives motivates people to do more good than bad, is actually wholesome. The discipline itself — the silence, the stillness, the sharpened attention that comes from wanting less noise in a loud life. This isn't the part of the lie.
The lie is when the people who happened to be holding all the gold ask people to sacrifice your claim on it now, in exchange for a bigger claim on it later.
Accept that as long as you inhabit a physical body on a physical rock, your existence is fundamentally tied to matter, force, and land. Do not apologize for engaging with the physical world, and do not pretend you are above it while secretly hungering for its celestial imitation.
Never surrender real, immediate ground, or truth today in exchange for promises framed in abstract, unverifiable tomorrows—whether spoken by priests, institutions, or your own defensive rationalizations.
I will not suppress my life for the preservation of my spirit.
— Marcus | Stern Stoic
P.S. Further reading and dispatches:
Essays on human contradictions that dares you to question better, to decide better, and to see through complex paradoxes and illusions.
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