What awaits us in the afterlife? This dilemma has haunted humanity since our primordial inception. Unsuprisingly, this question still looms over us in the supposed ‘age of reason.’ Yet in the midst of one of life’s great mysteries lies a vastly oversimplified solution manifested in the form of the good place and the bad place. How exactly did we get to be so sure of our fate? Perhaps it’s the existence of a seemingly omnipotent faith system that claims to hold the keys to heaven. Maybe it even stems from our innate tendency to convince ourselves our own faith is supreme and unambiguous. I am not attempting to tell you why you believe something. Rather, I seek only to comment on the current state of afterlife affairs. Here’s the deal. According to mainstream Christianity, if you join the right circle, fabulous prizes await you. Choose the wrong side, and well … I sincerely hope you brought sunscreen. But while the thought of blindly accepting a get out of jail free card sounds sublime, I cannot help but interject with what I hope is a more accurate portrayal of the finality of the destination. Sheol, Hades and Gehenna are the three words most often translated as hell in the English Bible. Sheol, in its most basic Hebrew form, means a big question mark, as in ‘who knows?’ I respect this about Judaism. They accept that they don’t know precisely what lies beyond the grave. For one to comprehend Hades, or the underworld, one must recognize the Greek world in which Paul employed the term to address. As for Gehenna, it actually refers to a valley outside of Jerusalem where waste once burned. I’ve been there – it’s not so bad. For the good place – heaven as some like to call it – the word most often translated as paradise refers to a park, possibly referencing the Garden of Eden. This is the concept Jesus employed as he told his adjacent condemned comrade that he will join him in paradise that same day. We also have the kingdom of heaven. This can mean numerous things depending on who had the pen in biblical literature as it invokes numerous themes throughout the entirety of the Bible. So there are the simple facts. And somehow they have devolved to the oversimplified Americanized terms of heaven and hell. What we must now ask ourselves is ‘how is this relevant?’ Can we continue to cast aside those who fall outside our socially ingrained worldview of saved and unsaved? Greater still, is a deity who would cast the vast majority of His or Her own children into everlasting torment for the sake of relative dogma worth serving? I leave it up to you. For now, as the world continues to ‘go to hell’ (pardon the expression), either we relax and wait for our death and the impending apocalypse or we work toward creating heaven, jannah and all other versions of paradise that await us in the next world now. A life of humble seeking and compassionate servitude trumps a life of misconceived answers in my book. Until the day of our demise, perhaps our efforts are more earnestly spent deliberating life’s great questions rather than deceiving our own finitude with promises of a material reward for an immaterial life. Kierkegaard was perhaps correct; faith for this life may indeed trump faith for the next life. Andrew Robertson is a 22-year old religious studies senior from Baton Rouge. — Contact Andrew Robertson at [email protected]