It appears that
most Christians out there believe that should they be
good during this lifetime, they will be afforded passage
to a wonderous Heaven upon their earthly demise. Sounds
good. Nice new harp, new cloud, tons of prayer and
praise, you might even bump into God or Jesus. Or that
nice Holy Ghost fellow. Yeeeeeeee Harrrrrrrrr!!!
But what are
the odds? Well, let's do a little simple maths. Let's
examine the numerals. Let's remove the uncertainty. It is
plain in the Book of Revelations that the number seen in
heaven is 144,000 souls.
One-hundred-and-forty-four-thousand. Big number huh? I
will make a few assumptions - all of which are in favour
of any Christians who happen to be reading this page. I
will assume for the sake of this article that the Bible
is the inspired word of a Christian God, that the Bible
is unambigouous, that the book of Revelations was written
about 1,900 years ago sometime after the death of the
Jewish Rabbi Jesus, and the number of souls prior to the
writing of Revelations that have made it into heaven is
10,000. (Not a good percentage for pre-Christian souls if
we consider that the 10,000 is spread over 4000 years or
so.)
OK, here goes.
Read your
bible. 144,000 is the number of human souls that will
make it into heaven - no ambiguity there.
Subtract a
small percentage of good God praising souls (from the
creation of the earth to the year 100) already in heaven
- less than 10 percent of 144,000. Say, 10,000.
Which leaves
134,000 Christians who can make it into heaven over the
period of 1900 years from the year 100 to now.
And my
calculator shows (rounded up) that on average 71 of the
most superlative Christian souls will have made it into
Heaven every year for the last 1900 years. Yippee and
ouch!
Right,
Christianity is quite a popular religion. Even I cannot
deny that! There are approximately six-billion people on
this planet. Six-thousand-million. Let's say that 10% of
the worlds' population are Christians. It could be more,
it could be less - I don't know. That's 600,000,000
Christians world-wide. Six-hundred-million. Nowadays
people have a longish lifespan, lets say planet-wide on
average most people live at least until the age of 70.
One seventieth of the worlds' Christians will die this
year (more people are born than die, but let's assume
birth rate/death rate parity - it makes no real
difference).
8,571,429
Christians will die this year.
It also means
that there are 8,571,429 minus 71 Christian souls going
straight to hell for all eternity this year alone.
In this year of
2000, 8,571,358 Christian souls will be sent to suffer
hellfire torment for all eternity. Which doesn't elevate
most Christians above anyone who practices any of the
another religions, above atheists, or above Satan
worshippers. Ironic isn't it?
But of course
at the end of this year Heaven will be full. So, even if
your God skims off a few of the less pious Christian
souls and slings them off to eternal damnation every
year, it's not looking too good for you is it? Unless of
course you are significantly superior at prayer, praise,
sacrifice, obedience of the hundreds of Biblical
commandments, hatred of your relations and all the other
wonderful instructions contained in the Christian Bible,
to an incredibly high percentage of all other Christians.
It wouldn't
look too good for the vast majority of Christians if
144,000 or even 1,400,000 souls were welcomed into heaven
every year
would it?
Doh.