Scholars of religion, history, and art asked these questions during a panel discussion at the Getty Museum, in which they explored the ways different societies have imagined and depicted the afterlife and what the images we create of heaven and hell say about life on earth.

Producer and documentary filmmaker Jody Hassett Sanchez opened the conversation by asking UCLA Buddhism expert Robert Buswell where, according to the Buddha, the heavens are located.

“There are many different heavens in the Buddhist system,” said Buswell–as many as 27. But they don’t have a geography: the heavens are a level of rebirth, like existence as a human being or an animal. In fact, going to heaven is “kind of a consolation prize” for Buddhists. The real goal is to experience nirvana, which can’t be located, measured, desired, or experienced.

In medieval Christianity, heaven is above, while hell is below. There’s an opposition between going up and going down, said Martin Schwarz, the curator of the Getty exhibition “Heaven, Hell, and Dying Well: Images of Death in the Middle Ages.” And while hell is usually depicted with a lot of detail in medieval art, heaven is shown with much less specificity–it’s not in one particular place.

On the other hand, for Native American tribes of the West, heaven was something very literal, said UCLA anthropologist Peter Nabokov. In Pueblo Indian society, there is no idea of sin, so everyone gets into heaven. A picture of heaven he found contains a certain number of trees, a pile of dead rabbits–for an imminent feast–as well as corn being harvested. In heaven, your ancestors are also waiting for you.

Quoting Belinda Carlisle–“Heaven Is a Place on Earth”–Hassett Sanchez asked UC Santa Barbara religion historian Jeffrey Burton Russell about whether heaven and earth ever come together in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

“Heaven is where God is,” said Burton Russell. The location is beyond space and time, however. Up until the 1600s or 1700s, Christians believed quite literally that you traveled up to heaven–via a ladder or stairs, or circles as in Dante’s Divine Comedy. And even though Dante described hell specifically, he used metaphor to describe heaven. Heaven, said Dante, was beyond language.

Even medieval artists, in depicting heaven, did it in a way that showed that it lies outside human perception–viewing it through a window or even choosing to hide it behind a wall, explained Schwarz.

In Buddhism, said Buswell, there is a physical body in some heavens, but in higher levels of heavens there is no physical embodiment. You can’t even try to paint these heavens.

Nabokov brought the conversation back to earth. “I’d like to introduce a little history and reality into all this conceptual talk,” he said. “For colonized people around the world, the 19th century was the end of the world.” For Native Americans in California and indigenous people around the world, the 19th century was a hell on earth, and their visions of heaven were those of release from mass murder and disease. In California, Indians came together in earth lodges and prayed for the world outside to be cleared of white people and hogs (who ate the acorns), for the land to be re-carpeted with wildflowers, and for those who had been killed by disease to return. These “very concrete, very practical cosmologies of what heaven on earth would look like” were developing all over the world at this time, according to Nabokov.

So how does one get into heaven, anyway?

While today we desire a quick and painless death, for a medieval Christian, said Schwarz, a quick death was the worst thing, because you couldn’t prepare for the afterlife.

In the Christian tradition, said Burton Russell, if you’re a sinner and you repent–even at the moment of death–it’s enough to get you into heaven.

In Buddhism, the process of death involves “very elaborate visualization exercises,” said Buswell. These can take up to 40 days, as a person is guided through rebirth.

Before turning to the audience for the question-and-answer session, Hassett Sanchez asked the panelists whether our fixation today on living well rather than dying well is a luxury. Do other cultures, past and present, think of the afterlife differently because their life on earth is so difficult?

Nabokov said that the primary concern of Native Americans in life and death is the community rather than the individual. In Pueblo Indian society, the health of the community is much more important. When the community is thriving, people live in the present; when the community is suffering, they imagine alternative heavens in response.

Said Burton Russell, “It is indicative of our modern society that we tend to think of ourselves as individuals divorced from the rest of people.” Today, we see death as being far into the future–we try to have fun on earth to avoid it. But living a good life, in western religion, is not about having fun–it’s not the point.

In the question-and-answer session, the audience asked the panelists to talk more about the intersection between religion and history. How did the plagues of the Middle Ages affect people’s conceptions of heaven and hell?

After the Black Death in the 14th century, said Burton Russell, you saw more terrifying and immediate representations of death. The image of the skeleton, said Schwarz, is often related to the plague.

Have horrifying images of hell been used throughout history to keep people under control?

In the middle ages, said Schwarz, people paid a lot of money to commission books full of beautiful but terrifying paintings of hell. In Buddhism, said Buswell, there are very elaborate depictions of suffering in hell to encourage good behavior.

Overall, though, heaven and hell have a disappointing record when it comes to discouraging vice. Or, to put it another way, heaven and hell have been more successful in inspiring good art than in inspiring good behavior.

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Read expert opinions on contemporary attitudes to the afterlife here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

The post Heaven’s Nice, But Hell’s More Fun To Paint appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Few Americans, not even 5 percent, are strict atheists. But roughly a fifth of Americans subscribe to no organized religion and maintain a general skepticism toward religious faith. This is an increase over the past few decades, and it’s particularly pronounced among younger Americans. What does that mean for heaven? In advance of the Zócalo event “What Does Heaven Look Like?” in conjunction with the Getty Museum exhibition “Heaven, Hell, and Dying Well: Images of Death in the Middle Ages,” we asked several scholars for their views on contemporary attitudes to the afterlife. Has the rise of atheism made death and the afterlife irrelevant in American society?

The afterlife is still relevant–and death even more so

Most Americans are still religious, so the simple answer to the question of whether death and the afterlife have become irrelevant is no. Most Jews and almost all Christians and Muslims believe in some form of resurrection and reward in heaven and punishment in hell. Other religions, from Hinduism to Scientology, have different ways of denying the reality of death, by insisting that the soul, atman, or some other essence survives death and gets reborn or merged with some underlying reality. Even some atheists believe in reincarnation or ghosts–another means of denying death’s reality.

Still, without some transcendent and eternal reality such as God or karma driving the system, the most logical position for the atheist to take is that there is no afterlife. So for many contemporary American atheists, the afterlife is irrelevant.

Whether that makes death irrelevant is another question. Some atheists have suggested that death has lost its sting. “Why should I fear death?” asked Epicurus. “If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?” Isaac Asimov sounded a similar note. “I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism,” he said. But I suspect most atheists (and most theists) are not so dispassionate. As for me, I fear dying (since it may hurt), but I do not fear death. Death’s relevance for me lies in the significance it gives to my finite time alive.

Herb Berg is professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

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We’re scared as ever of death–we’re just dealing with it differently

The share of Americans who are no longer affiliated with an organized religion is 16 percent. Many Americans under the age of 30 are no longer sure of the existence of God. Certainly, the idea of hell as a burning inferno to punish sinners has lost its fearsomeness for many believers, having become a place of existential angst for the alienated and errant. Most atheists have no belief and no fear concerning punishment or reward after death.

But death has not lost its grip on the sensibility of contemporary Americans, despite the rise of secularism and a naturalistic outlook. We may not fear eternal punishment for transgressions, but we dread the loss of consciousness itself.

The issue of immortality has shifted from the belief in a permanent soul to a hope that science will provide a continuation for our bodies or, at the least, our minds. We anticipate that science will find perpetuation for our physical selves with new technologies, such as life-extending drugs, genetics, or biological engineering.

Many of us count on scientific research to provide imperishability for the human brain, with its accompanying all-important consciousness. Some contemporary thinkers and researchers believe that individual consciousness may eventually be uploaded to a computer. So far, physical immortality remains a sanguine desire, far from realization.

The issue of death and immortality is as relevant as ever in contemporary American society. The difference is that we now turn to science rather than religion to provide us with what we hope is some form of eternal life.

Mary C. Taylor is the author and researcher for AtheistScholar.org.

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With or without God, we still get religious about death

In a word, no. Death and the afterlife are by no means irrelevant to American life. In fact, I would say that the rise of atheism has made death and the afterlife even more relevant to contemporary society. Whether we are talking about the new atheists militantly opposed to religion, or the rise of the “nones,” who are a curious mix of those who declare no affiliation to a religious tradition, or soft atheists who are members of the Unitarian church or practice yoga–religious behavior and beliefs do not necessarily disappear if you take God out of the picture.

Historically, in America, Christianity, especially white Protestantism, set the public terms for what was possible after death. But now anything is possible. Forget heaven and hell. Immortality can be achieved through athletic performance, scientific discovery, or another celebrity overdose. The resurrection may or may not come, but medical knowhow is transforming the boundaries of life and death and profoundly altering what it means to be human, to be a life. An eternal soul is a nice thought, but the disintegration of the body and the reintegration of those elements into a larger evolutionary process has its own charms and appeal for many.

The rise of atheism is a sign that the deep-rooted Protestant religious culture is diminishing in influence, but it does not mean that death will cease to pose religious questions about the meaning of life. Death and the afterlife, even when unhinged from God in our diverse, multivalent society, will remain as points of fixation in American culture–for atheists and non-atheists alike.

Gary M. Laderman is professor of American Religious History and Cultures at Emory University. He is the author of Sacred Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, the Living Dead, and Other Signs of Religious Life in the United States (The New Press, 2009).

*Photo courtesy of Gord McKenna.

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