How To Crash The Party In Heaven

Comes Judgement Day I have a suggestion about how to sneak into heaven. Have you noticed that when people go to church the right side tends to fill in first? I think this has something to do with our predominate righthandedness. Now imagine the great plain on Judgement Day: people are running in to fill up the best spots, mostly on their right. But when our Lord Jesus comes to face the crowd in judgement those on the right will be on his left. The gospel says that Jesus will separate those on his right and left; the charitable on his right going to heaven and the selfish on his left going to hell. In other words those who depended on their own right will be on the left.

Well, our Lord’s standard of loving service may be too high for someone like me. Here’s my two part plan to get by. First I am going to try my best to practice humility in this life. Why? I don’t think there is any guarantee that the intellectual concept “I must remember to go to the left, Jesus’ right” will survive the experience of death and judgement. I want to be so practiced in humility that I will automatically let everyone in ahead of me and be forced to go to the few places left on the left. (This “automatic” tendency of the will is a virtue.) The second part is this: I want to pray to Jesus’ mother Mary as much as possible. After several billion people have filed past our Lord and I am close to the Gate, I want to wave at Mary the Queen Mother and say “Hail, Mary!”. I hope she will then recognize my voice and give me at least a faint smile. Jesus will see this and think anyone who’s a friend of his mother is alright with him and let me pass.

Global Smoking

My natural tendency is to doubt popular analysis of public issues. The popular misconceptions about “population explosion”, abortion “rights”, two-party “democracy”, etc., etc., shows the public is easily misled by whoever owns the media. So when the popular media chants together about the dangers of global warming I am on my guard. I listen very carefully to any voice raised in disagreement. My caution is re-enforced when proponents of the idea of human activity increasing global average temperature engage in alarmist rhetoric. Heidi Cullen of the Weather Channel originally seemed to suggest that anyone who disagreed with the above idea should have their credentials revoked. Later she said that she would listen to others – once – and then move on. A recent episode of her show was promoted with the blurb that the Florida Everglades were “on the brink of extinction”. The phrase “on the brink” in a promo does not imply that forty or fifty years from now the Everglades will vanish, it seems to warn of their disappearance in four or five years. The Everglades, just like the Mississippi delta, have been severely damaged by mistaken water management. They are not going to disappear tomorrow if corrective action is taken.

Yet despite my misgivings I sense the issue of global warming is historically comparable to the issue of tobacco smoking. If you ceaselessly pump toxic smoke into your lungs and bloodstream you can expect negative consequences. If we ceaselessly pump pollutants and greenhouse gases you can expect negative consequences. Those who oppose this general concept of cleaning the environment remind me of those scientists and businessmen who downplayed the dangers of smoking to health. Doing things to make our energy production and consumption less damaging to the environment is the same as quitting smoking.