Heavenly delights
Q:What is your vision of heaven? What images - from Scripture, tradition, culture or your personal experience - best describe heaven for you?
The Qur'an describes heaven as a lovely garden, with clear springs flowing beneath laden fruit trees. Those who believed in God and did good works in their life will find ease and contentment, with beautiful abodes, good food, the service of beautiful young men and women, and the perpetual joy of knowing God is pleased with you. In heaven, the prophet tells us, we will be with our loved ones, those we hold near and dear, we will be young again, and never get old, nor will we suffer even for an instant. The blessings of Heaven, we are told, will be so great as to make even the worst suffering in this world seem trivial.
Many Muslims take this description of Heaven as precise and literal. Others, like the Sufis, focus more on reunion with the Divine, the return of the soul to its Source. Heaven is unity with God, while Hell is separation and disunion. As the head of the Nimahtullahi sufi order wrote: "The Sufi's heaven is closeness to God, and the Sufi's hell is distance from Him. Hell is in the world of the ego; when you are liberated from it, everywhere is heaven" (from "The Crucible of Light").
My personal beliefs about heaven and hell are constantly in flux. Heaven seems far too generous a reward for a few years of belief and being a good person. Even more so, Hell seems a disproportionate punishment for even a lifetime of barbarism. And yet the Qur'an is quite adamant about the truth of Heaven and Hell.
The Sufi teaching that heaven is ultimately the annihilation of the self in union with the Divine is appealing -- the idea that the isolated, splinter of spirit that God breathes into each of us when we are still in the womb flees the body at death, hastening to the reunion with the Divine Source, and being reabsorbed into that Divine source fits with my heart's feelings that death is the end of the person. That there is nothing more after death.
And yet, the Qur'an acknowledges that this feeling that death is the end of the line for each of us is the natural one. Over and over, it describes people's incredulity at the notion of heaven and hell, and gives us parables to show how we may perceive a thing to be dead, but God can revive it if He so chooses.
I guess I'll just have to wait till death comes to know which vision of life after death (or not life after death) is true.
By
Pamela K. Taylor
|
March 23, 2010; 7:16 AM ET
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Posted by: coltakashi93 | April 1, 2010 7:56 PM
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Athena4 -- the Qur'an mentions that we will be served by Houris and Ghilman. Ghilman means young men... preferably virile young men with smoldering eyes...
The Qur'anic citation for this, for those who demand scholarly rigor, is "52:24 Round about them will serve, (devoted) to them. Youths like Pearls well-guarded."
Posted by: momtotsan | March 30, 2010 9:24 AM
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The closest thing on earth to a Muslim paradise is what used to take place in the gardens of the Arab caliphs. Guess where they got their plans from? It is a celestial, continuous and eternal orgy on a large scale along the shores of rivers of milk, honey and glittering water through gardens of all the kinds of fruits that could not grow in the deserts of Arabia.
Posted by: abrahamhab1 | March 28, 2010 8:59 PM
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Pamela... I've always wanted to know. If a male Muslim jihadi gets 72 virgins when he dies, what does a female jihadi get? I mean, we have female suicide bombers now. So, do they get 72 Chippendales? That's what I would pick! :D
Posted by: Athena4 | March 28, 2010 12:13 AM
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Pamela's & yasseryousufi is two faces of moderate Islam, & fanatical Islam. One turns into a mushy goo, about what her beliefs are or what her vision is or her feelings. Nowhere does she make an assertive claim of what it is. The fanatic on the other hand spews venom at her apostasy because it is definitely in variance with most of the stupid verses of Qoran. The stupid verses in Quran are plain assertions that cannot be shown to be true, and everyone else is supposed to buy it hook line and sinker. You both need take a deep introspective look into your thoughts before putting on this blog.
Posted by: Secular | March 27, 2010 1:09 PM
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Muslim Reality 101 as dictated by the worst book ever written aka the koran:
1a) 179 killed in Mumbai/Bombay, 290 injured
1b) Assassination of Benazir Bhutto and Theo Van Gogh
2) 9/11, 3000 mostly US citizens, 1000’s injured
3) The 24/7 Sunni-Shiite centuries-old blood feud currently being carried out in Iraq, US Troops, 3477 killed in action, 896
non-comabat, 95,545 – 104,244 Iraqi civilians killed, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ and
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf
4) Kenya- In Nairobi, about 212 people were killed and an estimated 4000 injured; in Dar es Salaam, the attack killed at least 11 and wounded 85.[2]
5) Bali-in 2002-killing 202 people, 164 of whom were foreign nationals, and 38 Indonesian citizens. A further 209 people were injured.
6) Bali in 2005- Twenty people were killed, and 129 people were injured by three bombers who killed themselves in the attacks.
7) Spain in 2004- killing 191 people and wounding 2,050.
8) UK in 2005- The bombings killed 52 commuters and the four radical Islamic suicide bombers, injured 700.
9) The execution of an eloping couple in Afghanistan on 04/15/2009 by the Taliban.
10) Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan: US troops killed in action 661, 195 killed in non-combat situations as of 12/15/09. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported that 2,118 Afghan civilians were killed by armed conflict in 2008, the highest number since the end of the initial 2001 invasion. This represented an increase of about 40% over UNAMA's figure of 1,523 Afghan civilians killed in 2007.
11) The killing of 13 citizen soldiers at Ft. Hood by a follower of the koran.
Posted by: YEAL9 | March 27, 2010 10:45 AM
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"Heaven seems far too generous a reward for a few years of belief and being a good person. Even more so, Hell seems a disproportionate punishment for even a lifetime of barbarism. And yet the Qur'an is quite adamant about the truth of Heaven and Hell."
The agenda of Pamela Taylor is to spread the false Islam of Neocons and Daniel Pipes. SHE IS NOT A MUSLIM!! She will use every available opportunity to mock Islam be it on the Female Imams and mixed Jumma Congregations or legalising homosexuality or as she just now admits, the concept of heaven and hell. She is a treacherous liar who would never condemn the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine and murder of a million innocent muslims.
Posted by: yasseryousufi | March 26, 2010 11:45 AM
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AN OPEN INVITATION:
A new blog tackles Church abuse, separation of Church and State, Atheism, Buddhism, Existentialism….
Posted by: Schaum | March 25, 2010 3:38 PM
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The poster points out a problem with the justice involved in condemning people to hell for eternity based on any specific criteria. for some Christians, you get thrown into hell just for not being their kind of Christian, no matter how objectively good and kind you were during your life, even if you never had an opportunity to hear christianity (as is the case with many Muslims in Muslim nations where Christian preaching is prohbitied). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ("Mormons") responds to the injustice by asserting that (a) people who act righteously, no matter what their religion, will NOT suffer Hell, but be rewarded with a heavenly future, (b) that those who have intentionally chosen evil acts will suffer remorse for those actions, with a perfect understanding of all the evil consequences and pain that they caused in life, but that this experience will only last until the end of the Millenium, 1,000 years after Christ's Second coming, whehn the "unjust" will finally be resurrected and relieved of further suffering, having paid their debt.