The If you were asked to describe your concepts of heaven and hell would you be able to do it easily? At first when choosing this question to write about for my second Crucible blog post I thought this would be a pretty simple task. However the more I thought about it, the more I asked myself what actually are my ideas of heaven and hell? I’ve always had a notion in the back of my mind that heaven is the afterlife for the good and hell for the bad but I’ve never truly thought in depth about it.
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Growing up I wasn’t very religious at all. So I don’t really know where the history behind the concepts of heaven and hell. From my understanding the ideas of heaven and hell come from Christianity. Although I don’t really know all that much about Christianity’s or the bible. So I decided to expand my knowledge and research into the concepts of heaven and hell.
Heaven and hell are two concepts of the afterlife that actually are a huge part of many religious outside of Christianity. Although they might not have the same concepts about the afterlife, they share the idea which explains what happens to someone after they dies. Hinduism and Buddhism for example believe in reincarnation. Instead of going to heaven or hell in Buddhism a person goes through death and rebirth until they reach the ultimate goal of Nirvana (which in some ways is similar to heaven). In other religions such as Christianity’s heaven and hell are based on your beliefs and faith to god. If someone is faithful and believes in God they will go to heaven. Whereas someone who doesn’t believe from a Christian’s point of view will go to hell.
Buddhism - believes in rebirth
As I mentioned earlier in this post religion and God are big ideas in the crucible. The play is set in the late 1600s and back then if you weren’t a follower of God then you were thought to have been a witch. Even in everyday scenarios if anything was a tiny bit out of the ordinary it was thought to be the work of the devil. Christianity is a one of the main topics of this play and even just throughout the first two scenes we’ve read you can see how heaven and hell relates to the main idea.
After thinking and researching into heaven and hell I can kind of better explain my understanding and opinion. For me I believe more in heaven than hell if that makes sense. Instead of believing in there are two drastically opposite places you can go after death. I believe more so in the idea that if you do good you will be rewarded with the afterlife.
This staircase represents each good thing you do leading you to heaven:
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I believe that the people who have a life where they try to be the best version of themselves while also loving others should be repaid with happiness after life. This doesn’t mean that if you do one thing wrong you won’t get to go to heaven, it means learning from your mistakes and growing as a person. I don’t know what heaven looks like, to me it’s more of a concept of what happens instead of a place you go to.
In my opinion people in heaven would also be able to see how their loved once are doing when they are gone, by watching over them. Rather than this being sad that they are gone it’s more in a sense of reassurance that their loved ones are well