Should Teachings About Paradise Be Changed?

Relatives of dead people often talk of their sorrow as something that their own death will remedy: They are looking forward to meeting the deceased in an afterlife in "Paradise"/"Eden". When I see interviews with these people I feel sorry for their loss, but also for their - in my opinion - false hope of being reunified with the lost ones. To believe something like that one must have a faith in eternal life that makes it plausible. The same people who believes this also are dreaming of a resurrection like the one they think Jesus had. All of it dreams and hopes of millions of people that keep them in place, so to speak: Flimsy hopes turn into the glue that keep the structures of society together and makes genuine social changes difficult or even impossible.

As to the Paradise that is supposed to give the souls of the dead a new habitat then it's nothing less than "the garden of God (or Eden)", and, what's more, it didn't start out as something up in the sky, but was "down to earth", so to speak: "The location of Eden is described in the Book of Genesis as the source of four tributaries. Various suggestions have been made for its location: at the head of the Persian Gulf, in southern Mesopotamia where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers run into the sea; and in Armenia." (Wikipedia) I've never heard of anybody finding the geographical area of Paradise, but I'm sure many have been looking for it, both as an area on this planet and as a metaphysical picture of eternal bliss. However, when the war god, Yahwe, became the main - and solar - deity he and his godly garden were set in the sky. To me that signals a mind-over-matter fight of some kind which may have its roots in the ideological battle of female and male deities. The idea of the omnipotent "Sky Daddy" was born and has been with us ever since, just like the belief in a heavenly "garden of god". 

To hear bereaved relatives talk about their belief in future meetings with those they lost to Death is difficult when you are not a believer. You don't believe in the Biblical Paradise, the afterlife nor in the chance of these people ever coming to see their lost ones again. Actually this should be what was taught in school - or taught in another manner. The teachers should go from telling tales of never proven, and extremely unsubstantial Biblical myths to telling the truth about their historical changes through the ages of human life. Or they should never tell these tales of Biblical events and characters without adding the word "myth" - and that goes for ALL tales of a Biblical nature ....

 

Wikipedia