In reality this shows a lack of imagination. If God is all powerful and the idea of Heaven is that it is the nicest place possible, than why limit yourself to creatures that have actually existed? You could ride dragons or anything else out of the Monster Manual. Why would you be limited to riding them when you could be them?
People talk about the “problem of evil” but they don’t talk about the “problem of heaven.” If Heaven is conceived as a wonderful place of pure joy and infinite happiness, it implies that such a place is possible and that stands in sharp contrast to the universe that He created for us. So we are currently being punished (for our “original sin” if you’re Catholic). The universe itself is proof that God is not omnibenevalant. If Heaven can exist, than why would a truly loving God force us to spend years in this relative shithole.
I can only speak to Catholic dogma, but that says yes. Recently reinforced by Pope Francis’ statement during a Papal audience: [From 2014] During a weekly general audience at the Vatican last month, the pope, speaking of the afterlife, appeared to suggest that animals could go to heaven, asserting, “Holy Scripture teaches us that the fulfillment of this wonderful design also affects everything around us.”
So the sharks in heaven will have a never-ending supply of humans to eat (for those sharks who have developed a taste for them), and the humans will totally be into it?
I don’t even want to think about black fly heaven. Or is that human hell? Are heaven and hell the same place, just for different souls at different times? How is that different from life on Earth?
If that’s what Frankie meant, then clearly he’s just dispensing anodyne pabulum (the kind the faithful love to lap up) and has not thought this through. If animals go to Heaven, do all of them go to Heaven? Because we kill and eat billions of cows and pigs and chickens every year — 50 billion eating chickens per year, not counting the billions more surplus males that are killed — and it doesn’t matter how big Heaven is, it is going to fill up sooner or later with all these animals we’ve killed for our own pleasure, not to mention all the others that die from whatever cause. And what about mosquitoes and fleas and other baleful insects? They’re animals, too. And all the fish and other sea life? Uncountable numbers of animals have died since the first of them showed up.
And if not all animals go to Heaven, who decides which ones? It is only the ones that interest us? Do only our pets get to go to Heaven? What if we have a beloved tarantula or skink — are they waiting for us when we arrived? And if this is the case, then it appears that we have the ability to confer souls upon animals, which poses a difficult question: how did we get to be so powerful that we determine the non-human population of Heaven? Why should God allow in this particular rat but not that one, just because no human loved it while it was alive?
The idea of Heaven is already an ugly, messy thing: it just gets uglier and messier when non-human creatures are shoehorned into the equation.
My first interaction with evangelicals was in the 80’s during the satanic panic and all that. A family that I knew (I worked with one of the sons) left the Catholic church and attended one of those massive places in town with 1000s of members.
I remember mom telling me that someone from their church explained to everyone that he had seen heaven. The gold streets and angels and a bunch of other nonsense. In my head I was like "how in the world are they believing this childish hocus-pocus?? Now full disclosure, at the time I was 18 or 19 and still occasionally attending church with my mom (she’s Episcopalian) but not too long after that I remember sitting there with all these nice people and thinking THIS is also nonsense and I felt bad because I did like the people I knew there, but it was hypocritical of me to still attend.
She’s presenting a child’s view, like you get to play and fly and ride tigers. Maybe that’s valid for some people, constant adventures you never get bored of. Maybe for some it’s like that pleasant satisfaction of heroin, where the house could burn down around you and you don’t care. Or intense unending joy, with no need for minor details like riding a tiger or pterodactyl. Non-corporeal infinite orgasm.
If she were on some call-in show, It’d be interesting if someone were to ask “Is there sin in heaven? Because I am a devout Christian, and have avoided all temptation, always walked the righteous path, however I have had homosexual urges since I was a boy. In heaven do I finally get to. . . do it?”
I had a similar revelation. I had always felt “this is all kind of pomp and hocus-pocus nonsense, rituals to placate you”, but at that age I started thinking “I can’t in good conscience keep this up, it’s dishonest, which ironically is a sin too. In theory god knows all and knows that I’m faking it, you can’t really pretend to believe.”
This is no more preposterous than everything else I have been told about God. People can say this is ridiculous but also accept eternal torture as a reasonable punishment from a just, loving God.
There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.
