I keep thinking how we create hells on earth (torture, slavery, colonialism, war, pollution, sweatshops, factories, sacrifice, genocide, gas chambers, executions, mafia, gangs, poisons, concentration camps, suicide, terrorism, horror films, gladiators, nuclear bombs). Maybe this was Jesus’ point – if we don’t follow his advice hell is where we will end up. The more you use violence the worse it gets. So the only way to stop us all going to hell is not to use violence at all. You have to get out of the vicious circle. However what he didn’t make clear is, where hell was. I propose we’ll create hell for ourselves, we won’t get sent there, we’ll bring hell to us.

We never create paradise, there are places that seem like paradise, but the earth created them, not us. We tear down paradise and put up parking lots. We go to places of paradise (America, Africa, India and Australia), kill their children, steal their workers, their gold and everything of value. Then use everything we take to butcher each other and our children in new and inventive ways.

The only bit we missed in the trip to hell is that there was no judgement day. It turns out it would be too easy if there was a warning saying ‘Judgement Day next Friday’. There was no final warning, just a billions of small voices shouting from inside each our consciences. Jesus the sneaky bastard could have explained that better. Maybe he did in Aramaic and it just got lost in translation. Or maybe judgement day is the day you die. The judgement currently is you die knowing that the world is in pain, that you’ve lived from other’s suffering.

You don’t go to hell when you die, its much worse, you send your kids and your grandkids to hell. You create the hell for them to be born into. The abuse of the poor still continues, just not in our own countries. The abuse of animals still continues in our very own countries. Until this violence, against all that nature creates, stops we will keep turning our paradise into hell. Following this reasoning, things can get much much worse. We haven’t stopped the violence. We still carry it on. What we have remaining of paradise is going to be turned into hell. What could be worse about hell than knowing that you created it? That you took heaven and destroyed it. That is mental torture for you and all your genetic future generations. We may think we have only one life, but our genes live on, so the torment remains.

Tolstoy said the same as Jesus, so much of what he speaks about in The Kingdom of God is Within You came true after he died. We didn’t listen to his warnings. Maybe Tolstoy was the second coming, once he died and we ignored everything he had to say we ended up exactly where he said we would, butchering each other again and again, then raising butchers among the butchery to carry it on for the generations to follow. Judgement day arrived the day Tolstoy died. Maybe we’ll have to wait another 2000 years (give or take a century or two) until the next one shows up.

Maybe suicide too is our own personal hell. Animals almost never commit suicide in the wild except to protect their family – which I don’t view as suicide, I mean suicide that isn’t self-sacrifice or martyrdom. I mean the suicide when this place has become so like hell to you that you’d rather just leave now than wait around to see it getting worse. Nature is merciful, but ruthless. You can get out of hell if you just kill yourself. The angel of mercy that puts you out of your misery. Once you die the pain will stop. However you’ll die knowing you left hell behind for the ones you love.

Beyond that God isn’t human, but Satan is. Further, there isn’t one Satan, there’s many Satans and many more waiting to come. If you think Hitler and Stalin were the last ones, the other Satans are here, just waiting for their opportunity. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince people he didn’t exist. He exists alright. Our punishment is knowing that we allowed him to come and take over. We carried on our wars and created weapons ready for when he comes. God doesn’t want our weapons, trees and birds aren’t interested in our weapons, but Donald and Vladimir or their future replacements sure are. Maybe even scarier it could be any of us. Inside each and everyone of us is a brain that is capable of creating the next layer of hell. You don’t need a lot of intelligence to lead a nation (George W. Bush taught us that), just some messed up belief that what you’re doing is right. Satan believes he’s the good guy. It’s that fucker nature that keeps getting in the way. Once we’ve destroyed nature once and for all we truly will have created hell on earth. The final hell looks a lot like Mars – a red and dead planet.

Indeed maybe that’s what the Fermi paradox is about. Genes are selfish and the sad by-product is that they don’t know how to stop once they’ve conquered the planet they’re on. They just carry on wanting to reproduce at the expense of everything else. The cancer or the virus that kills the host. So on every planet where life occurs the genes kill themselves off before getting off of the planet.

But if we want paradise, we just have to realise its already here. Nature, the living world around us, that’s paradise, that’s heaven. Err… Heaven really is a place on Earth.