By Agba Jalingo
The Hindu Heaven referred to as Bhuva Loka or Swarga Loka, meaning Good Kingdom, is a paradise full of pleasure and good food, where most of the Hindu Devas, reside along with the king of Devas, Indra, and beatified mortals.
The Christian heaven is a gold plated paradise of everlasting peace and life for those redeemed by Christ, with God.
The Muslim heaven referred to as Jannah, is described as gardens of pleasure where those who have lived a good life will go.
The Buddhist heavens are blissful abodes whose present inhabitants, the Devas, gained rebirth there through the power of their past meritorious actions.
The Judaism heaven, referred to as Shamayim, is the dwelling place of God and other heavenly beings, and a place of reward, where all souls, whether good or bad, will return to, after death.
In African Traditional Religions, the word heaven is a western construct.
But the ATRs generally believe in an after life that will exist in ancestral communities who reward our deeds.
Where a transited life becomes an ancestor and moves on to join the community of ancestors who lived before.
Since none of us has ever gone successfully to any of those heavens and returned, we cannot say with exactitude which of them is true or which is false. Remember always that if you can concretize your assumptions, they become belief.
Everyone of these faiths concretized their assumptions about where the afterlife will take place and left us these choice destinations.
Now, the heaven everyone of us wants to go to, is our choice.
But bear in mind regularly that, every heaven was constructed by those who founded, and are controlling these various beliefs.
All the beliefs have their control centers.
For it is those who serve God truthfully and diligently and treat this world with compassion and consideration that will inherit any of those heavens.
Agba Jalingo is an investigative journalist and publisher in Nigeria
