"We're All Trying To Get To The Same Place!" Answering Critics!

When a conversation shifts to world religions, eventually, someone in the group will make a statement like; “Well, we're all trying to get to the same place anyway”.

I usually don’t bother to respond. I giggle under my breath instead. I do not delight in making a person look silly or ignorant in front of others. This statement is simply not true. At best it's misguided, at worst just pain silly. Anyone making this kind of statement is displaying little knowledge of world religions. Are we, “All trying to get to the same place?” No, we are not!
Please do not misunderstand me. I'm trying to be antagonistic here. But I do realize many people are not use to being challenged.

Listen, I am not saying other religions will not go to heaven, I'm saying they don't want to go to heaven. The place many want to go to is nothing like heaven at all. There life desire and longing is for something else.

At the risk of being overly simplistic. Let's compare other religions places of after life with the concept of Heaven in Christianity.

A) Muslims Don't Want Heaven. They Want to go to Islamic Paradise. Where they will recline on couches and the Huris, or virgin hand maids of heaven, will wait on them and serve them wine. The men will marry as many of them as he chooses. Muslims who devote themselves to Jihad are told they can look forward to having sex with a "100 virgins" in Paradise. They don't want to go to heaven, they want to go to Paradise.

B) Hindu’s Don’t Want To Go To Heaven but Reincarnation, then to Nirvana. There prayer is they at death of the body their eternal soul will be reincarnated (More accurate - term transmigration of the soul) back in a new from as something better. Transmigrating the soul into human, plant or animal form. There karma (good or bad deeds) effects what they are in the next life. The old them is gone, lost and no longer exists. When they finally become sinless with perfect Karma, there final or last reincarnation being to the state of Nirvana. Nirvana is the state when all desire, suffering, and individual consciousness is extinguished. The goal is to loose consciousness and emotions and desire of any kind. Like an empty shell, we are freed from the restrains of the body and one with the cosmic force.

C) Buddhists Don’t want Heaven. They seek to become Enlightened. Similar to Hinduism (it's origin) Buddhists long to become one with the cosmic universe and loose their own existence, life, soul and meaning to this cosmic energy. They don’t want a body in heaven, rather to lose and be freed from their body. Buddhists do not what to be, or remember themselves. They desire to loose self consciousness, self awareness, to the point that they no longer exist as they blended with the cosmic energy of the universe.

D) Agni Animists- Want to go to another place on the earth, where they can not be seen by the living. There they can be with their ancestors and then help control the affairs of their living relatives by inhabiting trees, rocks, water sources, mountains etc. If proper respect is not shown to the ancestors memory by respecting these "sacred" trees, waters, tombs or mountains they inhabit, they can be vengeful if need be.

E) Mormon’s What to Go to the Celestial Kingdom & Become a God : One of 7 levels. There desire is to reach the highest level where they can, as a god, have multiple wives and populate their own new planet with the spirit children they have made up there.

F) Christians want to go to heaven for eternity and worship around the throne of God & the Lamb Jesus

We are self- aware, fully self-conscious of the life we lived, still the same person, simply in a transformed and redeemed body that is raised from the dead and re-united with our Soul at the resurrection. We have a home there. That is what heaven is. Heaven is a teaching taught by Jesus Christ and it's the place Christians are striving to reach, and as you can see it's nothing like the place many people are trying to reach.

Heaven is a Christian word that many in the western hemisphere twist to mean, "Anything I believe about after life". Heaven is just another catch all word for after life. Sorry, it does not work that way! Unless you're inventing your own religion? If not you don't get to define the terms from the outside.

All us "religious" people who worship via one of the major religions of the world simply giggle when you tells us "We are all trying to get to the same place". No! We are not! Sorry, I simply do not wish to lose my self-awareness, self- consciousness as I blend with the "stuff" of the universe, even though some look forward to that idea.

Are you inventing an after life place of your own? Do you want to go to heaven? If you want to go to heaven, you need to read the scriptures and read what Jesus said about the path to there.

What place are you trying to get to, and exactly how do you think you're going to get there?
Just wondering!