It just comes to me that believing in heaven is somewhat narcisitic. It's somewhat the same as saying "I deserve all the good that can possibly be and will ever be."
If someone walks up to me, a friend even and just say that exact sentence I would say "Fuck you."
"Who the fuck you think you are?"
Funnily enough, I can't think of something more narcisistic than admitting that and really really believing in that.
The phrase between "Wishful thinking" and "straight up delusional" has seem to be completely blurred out.
You are made out of nothing and you shall come back to nothing. In other words, you deserve nothing.
You do good out of the feeling that it gave you for doing good. Adding an extra flavor of heaven should not influence you to do good than what's already sweet enough of a deed of a good deed.
I found it inherently troubling to believe that you do X, Y, or even marriage, for the sake of "Because it's what God wills me to do." Or I donate to charity because I will be granted even better good for me in the afterlife.
Notice on how those phrases have the same point? Everything leads back to him and his personal God. That he is granted or deserving of something.
Let me tell you something in case you haven't heard it from anybody. You and I are no different, and there should not be any ideologies that can beg the differ, that can devalue me out of sheer belief rather than my own acts and volitions. I should not see you less of a human than what you already do or say or what you believe in, what your religion is.
Heaven is COPE, as much as religion is cope.
Something about the nature of life and the nature of existing frightens people so much that they need to cope the need of afterlife just so they can be free of the shackles of uncomformity of the inevitability of death.
A friend recently asks me why I'm an atheist and my answer is very simple, "is because I can decide on my own morality, I don't need God to tell me what's right or wrong, we as a civilization continue to progress to decide what's right and wrong that goes beyond what religion tells us."
As I walk through time, the less I see the need for religion and everything in it, including heaven.
I used to think that hell as eternal punishment was one of the most bothering idea that convinced me to left religion, now I think that heaven is almost weigh equally the same amount of weirdness.
Why are you deserving of heaven and why am I not if so? You and I are not any different? Is it just because I don't pray 5 times a day or go to church every sunday? Does it seem just to you? Have you ever had any of these thoughts at all?
However, if the answer is yes, then you are a narcisist, or you are just straight up plain ignorant. It doesn't bother you enough to tell the difference between a killer and a law abiding citizen, just because they don't pray to your god, they will end up the same way, to be unrelentlessly tortured for the longest time--beyond your comprehension of time itself.
But I don't blame you, since there are no "You" in the formation of your thoughts, actions, and habits you carried out from day to day, there is only an illusion of "You". For all I know you can be simply too busy with work to think about all these isoteric thoughts, it bothers very little to you as it affects you very little yet you still carry out prayings as if God is actually exists, in which that is to me, nothing more than wishful thinking cuts deep into the tranches of delusion, albeit a socially acceptable one.