A HISTORY OF HEAVEN AND HELL AND ITS SOCIAL OUTCOMES
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The belief that the established intellectual priesthoods are the 
stepping-stone to heaven became firmly rooted in their minds when 
the intellectual era of society moved along. Regardless of whether 
this belief was good or not, it helped to build and maintain the 
solidarity of society.

Although most common people could not understand why, their devotion 
to these intellectual priests or to the spirituality propagated by 
the intellectual priesthoods helped them to progress spiritually and 
to assimilate sublime ideas. It would certainly be inappropriate for 
people to hold a grudge against the intellectual priests and refuse 
to recognize this important fact.  But the intellectual priesthoods 
tried to maintain their dominant position and continue their 
exploitation by extolling their own greatness.

In some regions, the undeveloped warrior mentality would worship all 
those leaders, or "gods", by offering them their (the warriors') 
favourite foods in order to propitiate them. After those leaders' 
deaths, all such food would be burnt in a fire, thereby going to 
waste, for the supposed satisfaction of their souls in heaven. Even 
in the intellectual age good-quality food and drink was destroyed by 
offering it to an imaginary god in a sacrificial fire. Moreover, the 
intellectual priesthoods received a commission for doing this. 

In the same way that the weak were exploited by the strong in 
warrior societies, the less intelligent were exploited by the more 
intelligent in intellectual and religious societies - though on 
paper the intellectual priesthoods do not approve of exploitation. 
The intellectual priesthoods who formulate social codes contend that 
even if society takes no action against sinners, they will still 
suffer the consequences of their sins in hell. Although in such 
religious and priesthood societies there is no system for 
eliminating the hunger of the oppressed, intellectual priesthoods 
say that it is virtuous to feed the hungry. And although in practice 
they support a system which discriminates against people on the 
basis of high and low, on paper they accept the idea that human 
beings are essentially brothers and sisters. So although the 
religious and priesthood social system is not as strong as that of 
the warriors, and although in practice it is generally lacking in 
magnanimity, on paper it is more magnanimous than that of warrior 
society. Warrior cannot be said to be social parasites, but it is 
not incorrect to say that intellectual priesthoods are. Although the 
intellectual priesthoods understand the defects in their social 
system, they nevertheless use their grandiloquence to try to 
maintain it; such is the nature of intellectual priesthoods.

The intellectual priesthoods have invented and are still inventing 
new ways of exploiting different communities of people in different 
parts of the world. In some places they have lured people with the 
prospect of eternal heaven, injecting into them at the same time the 
fear of eternal hell. By claiming the doctrine of some particular 
saintly intellectual leader to be the word of God, they have blocked 
the natural expression of the human intellect and made people 
intellectually bankrupt.  With the intention of permanently securing 
for themselves an exalted position in the eyes of the ordinary 
people, some priestly leaders have declared themselves to be the 
incarnation or the appointed prophet of God. Through their own so-
called scriptures, they have indirectly let the common people know 
that no one can achieve the same proximity to God as they - so that 
an inferiority complex will remain forever in the minds of the 
masses, and due to this inferiority complex the masses will always 
follow their teachings, either out of fear or out of devotion. That 
is why even intellectual people have fallen into their trap and have 
been compelled to say, "The goal is achieved not by reason but by 
faith" or "There is no room for reason in religion".

Even today there is a group of intellectual priests who keep 
shouting about "religious education", or rend the air with their 
calls for a "religious state", but what they really want is to 
entangle the minds of children, which are naturally inclined towards 
rationality, in a net of religious superstition, so that later they 
will become puppets in the exploitative hands of the priests. 

In some countries more than one woman might be compelled to be 
married to one man; devious means were employed to bring this about. 
By creating a fear of hell in the minds of women, by maintaining 
social strictures through severe punishment, and by crippling women 
economically, women were made so dependent on men that the very idea 
that polygamy might be unjust was effaced from their minds.

At times when the art and literature of the intellectuals failed to 
convince the common people of their greatness, the intellectuals and 
priests composed countless fanciful mythological tales, stories 
about gods and goddesses that satisfied their own standards, and 
colourful mythological tales, all designed to dazzle people's eyes 
and confound their intellects. They also warned the masses that if 
they failed to follow the teachings of these stories, or doubted 
their veracity, they would most certainly go to the deepest level of 
hell.

In some communities intellectual priesthoods claim to have the key 
to heaven. People even say that for the donation of a sum of money, 
intellectual priesthoods will sing a constant chanting of the name 
of God on behalf of the donor to ensure his or her passage to 
heaven. It is said that if others sing spiritual songs and chanting 
in the donor's name, the donor will receive the benefit and go to 
heaven. What a wonderful philosophy for condoning sin!

Anyway, we can see that intellectual priesthoods never have missed 
an opportunity to exploit human weaknesses, nor do they miss such 
opportunities today.

Intellectual priesthoods with a simple type of philosophy used to 
say, "Your father deserves to go to heaven, so make sure that we 
perform his funeral service" or "The soul of your father needs 
subtle food. Give us ordinary food and we will send it to him in a 
subtle form." 

Later on the cunning intellectual priests, whom you can call 
intellectual satans, tried to turn the minds of the people from 
practical reality towards an imaginary void by preaching contrived 
philosophies. The essence of their voluminous treatises and verbose 
annotations to lengthy aphorisms was: the world is an illusion; 
therefore renounce the world and do not be attracted to its 
illusions. Become desireless, detached and self-abnegating by 
offering all your wealth at the feet of the intellectual 
priesthoods. Of course such philosophies did not preach that the 
world was also illusory for the intellectual priesthoods who 
received the offerings - clearly because it was through such ploys 
that they were able to achieve their objectives.

In this regard, excessive concern about the future is also a bad 
trait of some intellectual priesthoods. The priests have exploited 
the common people by infusing imaginary ideas about heaven and hell 
into their minds. And at the same time they themselves, persuaded by 
that outlook to ignore the past and the present, have also been 
harmed. A doctrine that emphasizes an imaginary heaven and hell and 
considers the traditions of the past and the solid earth of the 
present as false and illusory, is extremely dangerous for society. 
One expression of this type of intellectual thinking was the 
doctrine of illusion, based on non-dualism, which tried to reject 
the existence of livings beings and the world, and accept the 
unmanifest Non-Qualified Supreme Entity as the only truth.  But all 
is relative and the world is a relative truth whose causal root is 
the Supreme Cognition.

In places where, for whatever reason, intellectual clashes among the 
intellectual priesthoods were not very intense, their philosophy was 
very simple. They would say to the people directly, "I am or 
represent the angel or incarnation of God. The things I have said 
are not the words of a human being but the words of God" or "I have 
received the divine revelation that you will eat this and not that, 
worship in this way and not that, and offer this to God. If you obey 
my commandments God will bless you and you will go to heaven; 
otherwise you will be burnt to death in the fire of hell." The 
people were fooled this easily.

The intellectual priesthoods used to tempt people with an imaginary 
heaven and inject in them the fear of an imaginary hell. In this way 
they would accomplish their objectives; their exploitation would 
proceed smoothly; and moreover the fear they aroused in people's 
minds would turn those people into fanatics.

It is noticeable that in the fanatical religious communities that we 
see in the world today, there is very little intellectual clash 
among the intellectual priesthoods. However, whenever fanatical 
religious communities made systems of social rules and regulations - 
in other words, whenever they made some effort to build a social 
structure - their social systems would be stronger than those of 
societies which followed a subtle philosophical theory or those of 
warrior societies. Where there were intellectual clashes among the 
intellectual priesthoods, each priest would have his own supporters, 
and their different supporters would never think of themselves as 
belonging to the same group. As a result those intellectual 
priesthoods were unable to build a strong social structure. Though 
their philosophies may or may not have had some good in them, the 
Buddhists and Hindus were unable to build strong societies because 
of their subtle mentality.

Socially, although the priests understand what is going on, they 
cannot do anything about it. They look up towards heaven, hoping to 
see the arrival of better days. They think, "When will the 
downfallen intellectuals, warriors and labourers unitedly save human 
civilization from the all-devouring greed of the capitalists. When 
will people realize that it is not the desire of providence for some 
to exploit others." Due to the utter despair they feel, the 
subservient intellectual of the capitalists gradually become 
consumed with remorse recalling how they themselves once exploited 
others.

If God is considered to be the perfect ideal, it will have to be 
accepted that God is always just. Even though God loves everyone, He 
punishes sinners. But it can be said that when He punishes sinners, 
His aim is not to give them pain but to rectify their behaviour. 
This concept of God is the highest concept. If God is considered to 
be the Universal Father, He should not have any racial, national or 
communal feeling, or any other type of limited feeling. If this is 
true, how can the intellectual priesthoods contract that the soul of 
a certain dead person will reach heaven?
(HUMAN SOCIETY PART 2, THE INTELLECTUAL AGE)

They say, if there were a heaven a person's body would not contain 
solid and liquid factors, but luminous, aerial and ethereal factors 
will remain. The enjoyment of heaven is like this. 
(THE PSYCHO-SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION OF HUMANS, A'nanda Vacana'mrtam Part 
5, 26 November 1978, Bombay)

The intellectual / religious era illustrated self-aggrandisement 
without wanting to inquire into the tragic plight of the common 
people: the scholarly priests were hardly accessible to the common 
people. The innocent masses were busy appeasing the priest with 
oblations, honorariums and floral offerings. Where was the time for 
them to take of the needy families of the poor neighbourhoods who 
were perhaps dying of starvation? And what would be the material 
benefit of such an action? Service to the poor would pay nothing, so 
let them go to hell, let them die en masse. So nobody had anything 
to do with the poor. And anyway, the priests were busy with worship, 
prayer and observance of sacraments. All their energies were spent 
in the appeasement of the gods and goddesses enthroned in the 
temples, churches or mosques. There was simply no opportunity to 
inculcate more humane qualities. 

According to their intellectual scriptures, a temple made of bricks 
and wood was of more value than humanity itself. Suppose an old 
beggar, numbed with the cold chill of the night, is standing wearily 
in front of a temple, his begging bowl empty. The temple is 
reverberating with ringing bells, and the deity is being worshipped 
in accordance with the scriptural dictates. While the devotees stand 
before the deity with hands folded in reverence, the beggar shivers 
bitterly outside. On completing the ritual, the people leave the 
temple one by one, followed by the priest. The beggar entreats him 
to let him sleep in one corner of the temple, but the priest replies 
emphatically, "I can't afford to pollute the temple for your sake." 
And the old man has to trudge into the world of uncertainty, and 
perhaps bury himself in the coffin of the cold. The sanctity of 
inert wood and bricks is valued more than a man's life.
(SOCIAL VALUES AND HUMAN CARDINAL PRINCIPLES, A Few Problems Solved 
Part 2, Prout in a Nutshell Part 7, Supreme Expression Part 2, March 
1970)

What is the proper approach?

God