A Breath Away

What if we’ve got it all wrong?

There was once a funny New Yorker cartoon that showed a line of people standing outside the pearly gates. The gates of heaven are festooned with bumper stickers and signs that say things like “Guns Don’t Kill People; People Kill People,” “Meat: It’s the Right Thing to Do,” and “U.S. Out of the U.N.” The man at the front of the line is looking plaintively at St. Peter. St. Peter is unmoved. “What?” asks heaven’s doorman. “You didn’t believe what the liberal media was saying, did you?”

You’ve got to feel for the poor liberal at the front of the line; he thought he was living an ethical life, but he was wrong. It’s a nightmare that no one ever has, but it would be quite a nightmare: you wake up one morning, and the world’s ethics have changed. Everything you were supposed to do yesterday in order to be a good human being is the opposite of what you should have been doing.

If you fear hell, it might be the worst nightmare of all.

It has been said that God loves an honest doubter, and I’d better hope so, because I doubt a lot. If you think about your ethics at all, sometimes you probably end up questioning them, especially when following them leads to negative outcomes. I figure it’s natural to doubt, though, because that leads to changing your mind sometimes, and if you can’t change your mind it means you can’t be convinced of things. And if we’re not meant to be convinced, what’s the point of ethics in the first place? They’re meant to be shared and spread.

Sometimes it seems like there’s not enough room in the world for honest doubters, and I don’t understand why. Fealty to one’s principles is admirable, but it’s important to remember that stating your principles is not the same as acting on them. Along the same lines, expressing doubts about your principles is not a betrayal of those principles. Doubt may be the absence of faith in old principles, but it is also the beginning of faith in new principles.

Priests and kings have maligned doubt over the centuries, because priests and kings often have a lot invested in people following the old principles. Priests and kings are often smart, and sometimes old principles are worth keeping alive. But I think we should always be suspicious of priests and kings when they tell us that doubting in our minds is evil. And we should be especially suspicious when they threaten us with hell over our doubts.

It might very well be true that our doubts will send us to hell, but this only means that we’re all going to hell. Everyone is human, so everyone doubts. We doubt because our brains have the ability to perceive alternate possibilities. And, perceiving these possibilities, sometimes we wonder whether they might be better than the way things are. It doesn’t matter if everyone we’ve ever met has told us that the way things are is better than the way they might be; we’re still going to wonder.

You can denounce doubt at breakfast, but you’ll be doubting again by lunch. You can denounce it on your deathbed, but doubt will creep back into your consciousness between the breath you use to denounce your doubt and your last breath.

Just for the record, I don’t think heaven, if it exists, is empty. I think it’s full of honest doubters and people who weren’t always sure that they were doing the right thing and people who changed their minds about what the right thing was. I think that God knows that the rules are not always crystal clear, and that God can forgive a lot, maybe anything. The heaven that makes sense to me is a place where truth conquers everything, and the only punishment for having done great evil is the fact that you’ve made yourself into a person who has done great evil.

So, what if heaven is full of everyone who’s ever died? Gandhi, Stalin, and Winston Churchill too? Well, then I guess God will have to sort us all out. Not to worry; I bet God is good at that sort of thing.