Those Born in Paradise

My old Jehovah’s Witness friend, from all those Saturdays ago, stopped by this morning! He says he’s just started doing door-to-door work again since the Pandemic started. He had with him a young Asian man, as they do, always traveling in pairs to avoid temptation and all.

As well as catching up on life and all, and him showing me the latest jay doubleyou dot org interactive Bible teachings and stuff, we talked a little about religion and philosophy.

He talked about how Jehovah has a name (“Jehovah”) as well as various titles (“God”, “Father”, etc), just like people do. (I didn’t ask where the name came from, although I am curious.) He said that, as with humans, Jehovah has a name because Jehovah is a person. I asked what that meant, and it came down to the idea that Jehovah has “a personality”. I tried to ask whence this personality came, and whether Jehovah could have had a different personality, but that was apparently a bit too advanced.

They claimed that one of Jehovah’s personality traits is humility, and this … surprised me. Their evidence for this was two pieces of Bible verse, one which has nothing whatever to do with humility, and the other being Psalms 18:35, which the KJV renders as:

Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation: and thy right hand hath holden me up, and thy gentleness hath made me great.

but the JW’s favorite translation, the New World Translation has as:

You give me your shield of salvation,
Your right hand supports me,
And your humility makes me great.

Given all of the contrary evidence, about being jealous and wrathful and “where were you when the foundations of the Earth were laid?”, I was not convinced of the humility thing, and we sort of dropped it.

(The Hebrew is apparently “עַנְוָה” (wheee, bidirectional text!), which is variously translated as either “gentleness” or “humility” or “meekness”, with suggestions of “mercy”; imho “gentleness” makes more sense here, as I don’t know by what mechanism God’s humility would lead to David’s greatness, whereas God being gentle and merciful (about David’s flaws) is a better candidate.)

Anyway :) what I really wanted to talk about was the thing I’ve alluded to before, the puzzle where, in the JW theory, once we (well, the good people!) are in the Paradise Earth, there is still free will, and there is still sin, at a presumably small but still non-zero rate, and as soon as the sinner sins in their heart (before they can hurt anyone else) they just cease to be.

(I wrote a microfiction on this theme here, and it’s also a plot element in the 2020 NaNoWriMo novel . Just by the way. :) )

“Those Born in Paradise”, made with MidJourney of course

My concern with this JW theory was that, given eternity and free will, everyone will sin eventually, and so the Paradise Earth (and even Heaven, assuming the 144,000 are also like this, I’m not sure) will slowly slowly ever so slowly empty out! Uh oh, right?

But in talking to my JW friend (who opined that at least people wouldn’t sin very often, even though as I pointed out Adam and Eve were in roughly the same circumstances and they sinned like two hours in), it turns out that there is still birth on Paradise Earth!

That had not occurred to me. He was quick to point out that there wouldn’t be enough birth to make the place overcrowded (perhaps that’s something that lesser doubters bring up?). I said that sure, I guess there’s just enough to make up for the rate of insta-zapped sinners! (I did not actually use the term “insta-zapped”.)

So that solves that puzzle. It does seem inevitable that eventually the only people will be people who were born in the Paradise Earth (or heaven?), and who therefore didn’t have to go through the whole “world dominated by Satan” phase, but only learn about it in History class or something.

Which seems kind of unfair to the rest of us! But there we are. As I say, some interesting stories to be written in that setting.

Neither my JW friend nor the younger person he was going door-to-door with seemed entirely comfortable with my theory, even though it’s the obvious consequences of their beliefs. I hope I didn’t disturb their faith at all, hee hee. (I like to think that there is some sort of warning next to my address in their list of people to visit, not to send anyone unsteady in their faith; it’s not very likely, but I like to think it anyway.)

The buzzing of distant bees

Is there evil in Heaven? And is there free will?

I know it doesn’t really make sense to spend too much time wondering about the details of fictional universes (“if Peter and his friends could only fly when they were having happy thoughts, why did Tinkerbell, who was after all the source of the pixie-dust that let them fly, seem to have no trouble flying even when she was upset?”), but I am somehow fond of these questions at the moment.

It’s a subject that I don’t remember coming up in the average Internet discussion of (Judeo-Christian) religion, and it seems to me like a real quandary.

Seems likely that there is free will in Heaven (otherwise why give it to us on Earth?), and seems unlikely that there is evil (it being Heaven and all); and yet if God can make a place where there is no evil even though there is free will, why didn’t he do that on Earth?

(I started to wonder about this after hearing a couple of different theist types talk about their ideas of Heaven on NPR or something: the Jewish one said that there must be a wonderfully just afterlife because he strongly believes that the universe is just, whereas the evidence he has suggests that life isn’t just, so there must be some really very just stuff after life to make up for it; and the Christian one says that Heaven is a place where we all get whatever we truly want, and we all have learned to live together in harmony. Ha ha funny people, I thought, and also thought the “well if God can make it happen in Heaven, what’s his excuse for not doing so on Earth?” thought that we consider here.)

(Ooh, here they are! The Rabbi and the pastor; so you can judge for yourself how badly I’m misreporting their statements above.)

The usual answer to the Problem of Evil, that is comes about as a direct and inevitable result of imperfect beings with free will, seems to sort of evaporate if (as seems hard to avoid) Heaven is a place where imperfect beings have free will, and yet there is no evil there. So evil can’t really be the inevitable result of free will. So the Problem of Evil, it would seem, remains.

I did have a rather detailed discussion of this with my Jehovah’s Witness friend back in the day. He (and therefore I assume the JWs in general) have a pretty complete and interesting (if maybe sort of creepy) picture of life after the umm Big Thing, where (in the case of the JWs) the 400,000 special people or whatever it is go to live with God in Heaven or something, and all the other good people live on Earth under their direct governance more or less.

He said that yes in that world people would still have free will, and that in fact they would be able to do evil. They wouldn’t do it very much, because they would be good people living in a great environment, but it would still happen, and in that case God (i.e. Jehovah) would look into their hearts, and between the time they made a really bad decision and became evil and the time they were able to actually do anything bad as a result, He would stop them, in a very final way.

Since the JWs don’t believe in Hell, and think that all the stuff about burning and fire and stuff in the Bible is just a way of talking about ceasing to exist altogether, what happens to you if you freely chose evil after the Big Thing happens is that you just cease to exist.

Pretty weird, I thought!

And this got me thinking of a story set in that world, which I’ve never gotten around to writing, but which I think I will try to set down a general idea of here.

And in the meantime, you can ask your local rabbi or pastor or Judeo-Christian friend whether there is free will in Heaven, and whether there is evil there. I wonder if that is a hard question…

“I cannot follow the Elders anymore,” he’d said, that night, as they walked back from the orchards where they had been picking the perfect fruits that Jehovah provided for them in this perfect Earth.

“Jeremiah,” she’d exclaimed, “what can you mean, you cannot follow them? How could anyone do anything but follow them? We know that they are the appointed ones of Jehovah, that they have only our welfare at heart, that they are good and wise men. You cannot doubt, when you have seen Jehovah and His Son moving about on the Earth with your own eyes.”

“I have.” They were walking close together, hands brushing each other now and then, innocently, like brother and sister. “And I do not doubt that the Elders are those chosen of Jehovah. But…”

“But what? What is it that you can doubt?”

He’d taken a deep breath. He looked, she remembered thinking, like someone who was not quite sure of what he was saying, and speaking as much to convince himself as to convince her.

“I do not doubt the facts. The Elders are the chosen of Jehovah, and they do truly intend the best for me. But I doubt, no, I reject, their authority over me.”

“What can you mean by that, Jeremiah? Jehovah is the source of all authority, of all rightness, and He has given them their authority! It cannot be doubted, or rejected.”

“But I do reject it,” he’d said, his voice louder but still with an undercurrent of uncertainty, “I reject it as I am free to do, using the free will that Jehovah has given me. It is my right!”

She’d stopped, and taken his hands, looking very seriously into his face. The others walking in the same direction continued along, and were soon out of any danger of hearing.

“This is blasphemy,” she’d said, “this is not the use we are supposed to make of the freedom that has been given us. Can you truly do this? Do you truly, of your own free will, reject the authority of Jehovah?”

She had meant it rhetorically, really, or so she told herself afterward, saying it only so that he would say no, of course not, not that. But his face said that he took the question very seriously, and was considering it, somewhere deep inside. When he spoke again, the uncertainty was gone from his voice.

“Yes, Sarah. Yes, I d–“.

And before he’d finished that last word, her head was filled by a strange sound, like the buzzing of distant bees, and her hands were empty. And Jeremiah was gone, forever.

So now, in her bed at night, she lies curled tensely after her prayers, telling herself, telling Jehovah who can see into her very heart, that she does accept His goodness and His authority, that she is His true daughter, and that she would never reject Him.

And she cries until sleep comes.

Something like that, anyway…