Ooh heaven is a place on Earth

Sometimes I think, like Belinda Carlisle and her high-waisted belt are clearly thinking in that photo, what is heaven like?

I don't mean, like, is it all cloud-print carpeting and gates made from the souls of a million slaughtered oysters, or are there little cherubs fluttering about playing Enya muzak on their harps all the fucking time?

I mean, like, if there is a heaven, who is there? Who would I be spending eternity with (assuming gay men with a penchant for purple skinny pants are allowed)?

And I don't mean that tired Christians, Jews, Muslims WHO IS RIGHT?!? debate (the answer is clearly June Squibb. She is the alpha and the omega.)

What I wonder about, and what I feel is so ridiculously under-discussed is abundantly obvious fact that if heaven does exist, it is almost certainly filled with 99.99999% shitty, shitty people. 

Think about it. Of all the people who have lived and died in the history of mankind, how many lived during a time when you were told to be nice to gays/minorities/women? How about during a time when slavery was an across-the-board abomination to everyone? Very, very few. Hell, it's only been really the last decade or so that America has majorly turned the corner on gay rights, and only the last few years where transgender citizens are getting a long-overdue spot in cultural discourse (and they still deserve far more consideration and acceptance than they're getting right now). 

Think about it more. You could've lived an upstanding, uber-Christian life in 1733, done everything society told you was correct and good and necessary for securing a one-way ticket to St. Peter's Sandals resort, and you were still likely a complete monster by today's standards. 

Way back in those comparably primordial times, not hitting your 15-year-old wife too hard was a "good thing." Selling your slaves at a fair price was a "good thing." Helping Goody Sanders dunk the witch when her arms got tired was a "good thing." You could've done all these horrific things, lived to the ripe old age of 51 and died thinking "Yep. Nailed it." 

And what about all those good religious folk who said please and thank you and died of old age in the 1950s, who never had anyone tell them the N-word was fucking awful or that gays weren't deranged perverts or that hitting your kids was bad? It's easy now to say they should've known better (of course they should have!), but they didn't because literally no one told them their entire lives. And, they didn't murder anyone, or covet their neighbors wives, so to them, they were heaven bound.


And I'm not absolving them of being horrible. On the contrary, I'm suggesting , based on our own simplistic understanding of heaven, either they must've gotten a free pass into the after-life on a bogus technicality, or they got blindsided by a trip to hell. Or neither actually exist, but shh, we're not talking about that. 

MY QUESTION: If no one is around to tell you what you're done is not just wrong, but horribly, astonishingly, ridiculously wrong, then can heaven still reject you?

This brings up three possibilities:

1) Yes, they're rejected, and heaven has like six people named Claire in it.

2) Everyone who acted horribly for millions of years, but had no real context in which to understand their horrible behavior, gets in through some sort of "You didn't know better" clause, and goes through some quick adjunct-taught orientation class titled This Is Actually How You Should Have Acted You Shitty, Shitty Human before they're given the keys to their Heaven Condo and let loose on the streets of Heavenburg. 

OR

2) WE'RE like those people in the 1730s and we just don't know it yet. Maybe when we die, decades from now, OUR grandkids will be embarrassed of US.  Even though after a life of saying please and thank you and using progressive terms like cisgender and learning to (rightly) call each other out on our misogyny and racism and homo- and transphobia, we die and are like "Yep. Nailed it." And then we go to heaven and God is like "Ohhhkkayyy. So, it says here you led a traumatized animal by a rope tied around his neck his entire life and called multi-soul-tarians by the slur 'schizos' and killed thousands of electronic humans in video games--turns out they had a rudimentary sentinence. And oh wow. You ate a fuckload of carrots. FYI, they actually have highly developed souls and an extreme sensitivity to pain and are my most prized and perfect creation, so fuck you very much, Donna B. from Souix City, Iowa." 


But we didn't know about the dog leash thing or the carrot thing because no one told us it was wrong and if they did, we would've thought they were loony, the way someone calling for gay equality in 1659 would've been considered loony. And we find out that although we're millions of light years ahead of our shitty, shitty ancestors, we're still monstrous by comparison of the Actual Good Way To Act, and we get filed into This Is How You Actually Should Have Acted You Shitty, Shitty Human, taught by alpha and the omega June Squibb.

I guess my point is, every single person in the history of humankind who thought he or she was the most evolved, socially and emotionally, you could possible be, has been dead fucking wrong. We've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. 

Also, there is nothing logical about the concept of heaven. But look at Belinda's catsuit! Rarrr!