Treasury of Joy & Inspiration Read Online Free PDF Page B

said. “Of course, you are going to hell.”
    On another day, in Colorado, Walters sat down with Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals. They are the most vocal force in U.S. religion today, with 40 million members. Walters asked if a person who did not accept Jesus Christ as his Savior was destined to go to hell. Haggard’s answer was equally unambiguous: “Yes.”
    The interviewer herself, who purposely did not argue with her subjects, allowed afterward: “There are so many ways of looking at life and death. You just cannot say this belief is right and that is wrong. I think one of the major problems today is people saying that only my religion is right, and if you don’t agree with me, you are not going to heaven.”
    At least for now, that view is not predominant in the United States. According to a recent Newsweek/Beliefnet poll, 79 percent of Americans believe that someone of another faith can attain salvation and go to heaven. But views of what heaven is vary widely among religious groups.
    The world’s 2.1 billion Christians believe that the purpose of life on earth is to get to heaven, a place of unending peace and tranquility where all tears and mourning cease. They believe that in heaven there will be an actual resurrection of the body. “We will look as we would want to look,” says Cardinal McCarrick. Christians fully expect to see the people they loved on earth who preceded them. There will be no need for earthly pleasures there. Joy will come from being at one with God, roaming the universe in another dimension.
    Muslims have a different, but equally rapturous, vision of heaven. In the Koran, paradise is described as a place where there will be lavishly comfortable homes with beautiful gardens and servants to attend to Islam’s followers. (There are currently 1.2 billion of them.) Food and wine will be plentiful, and sex will be enjoyed by both men and women. Other Islamic texts promise that martyrs will be among the righteous Muslims who will be rewarded by sex with 72 virgins, a misunderstood concept, according to an Islamic scholar. The number was never meant to be a precise figure, he says, but an indication of “a surfeit of this kind of delight.”
    But not all religions have such a specific view of heaven. For most Jews, the idea of an afterlife is less important than what you do on earth. Still, almost all of the 14 million Jews in the world believe that there is life beyond death, when the body and soul separate and the soul goes off to be with God. The resurrection of the dead will occur at a time when the Messiah initiates a perfect world.
    Buddhism doesn’t teach that heaven is the soul’s final resting place. Instead, the world’s 350 million Buddhists believe in different heavens that lead you not to God but to nirvana, a place of enlightenment. Buddhists are born again and again, living many different lifetimes. Their behavior on earth determines the quality of their next life, and whether they return as a lowly animal or a person. Tibetan Buddhists believe that the Dalai Lama is godlike, the 14th reincarnation of a semidivine being.
    To meet him, Walters traveled across the world to the village of Dharmshala, on the edge of the Himalayas in northern India, where the Dalai Lama settled when the Chinese took over his homeland more than four decades ago. “It was raining, and I was chilled to the bone for four days,” says Walters, “but I was deeply affected by the Dalai Lama.” Charming and charismatic, with a childlike giggle, he assured her he was not a god. Gods, he pointed out, did not get eye infections like the one afflicting him that day. “He said the purpose of life is to be happy,” Walters remembers, “and the way to happiness is through compassion and warm-heartedness.” In a world where wars are fought over religion, it struck her as a stunning concept. “For