A reader writes:
When I was a senior in (Catholic) high school, I took part in a theology class that debated the very tenets of the Catholic faith, using the writings of C.S. Lewis and St. Augustine, as well as religious-themed films like The Last Temptation of Christ and Dogma. Our teacher, a rather progressive priest, told us that we could not rest on the "argument from authority" to base our theological answers in the seminar-like class; rather, we had to follow Thomas Aquinas and Lewis to come to a rational explanation for our faith.
Within the first couple of weeks of class, we came to a rather interesting depiction of God. Adhering to the idea of God being ganz andere – that is, wholly unlike us – we tried to find a rational explanation of what God is. The only description on which most of the class could agree was, "God is Love." I was the lone holdout to this description, because if God is completely unlike us, then "love," a human concept, cannot apply to Him any more than happy or hungry or sexy. In the years since, however, I've come to reevaluate this concept.
I don't believe in God (at least not a personal one), but I do believe in a sort-of Heaven/Hell duality: Heaven is Love. Conceptualized like this, there is no reason we can't have Heaven, or Hell, on Earth. The most glorious of moments, the moments when we feel the most love, are our Heaven; the moments where we feel none of that love, then, would be Hell.
Though I have a healthy respect for it (and occasionally wish I too had it), I no longer share your faith that there is something after this life. But a lot of that is actually helpful to me in that it doesn't leave me waiting for some kind of redemption that may or may not come. Rather, it makes the immediacy of this life of the utmost importance. I strive for love. I love feeling love. And I can only imagine that someone who has never felt that kind of love, someone who has been deprived for his or her entire life of that beautiful feeling – THAT would be Hell. To me, it's a lot more horrifying to imagine living without the love of others than to imagine living without God's love.
If it turns out that I'm wrong and there is a God, I am relatively certain that He would prefer that we lived our lives by giving and receiving as much love as possible, rather than eschewing Earthly love in pursuit of some obscure divine.
The Dish 