Huckleberry Finn didn’t think much of heaven. In the opening chapter of Mark Twain’s classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck is living with the spinster Miss Watson, a starchy, crabby old woman who is bent on his reform. She is going to knock the wildness out of the boy and stuff him full of manners, using the lethal weapon of enforced religion. She bludgeons him with Bible verses. She threatens him with hell. And she coaxes him with heaven. In his streetwise, cocky, cockeyed way, Huck tells us what he thinks of that: “She went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn’t think much of it… I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she said, not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.”14

Twain is writing satire, of course, but he touches a real nerve. We’ve all met people who feel exactly that way. Talk to a nonbeliever, who has given little thought to the matter, and you’re apt to get a predictable response. He screws up his face into a scowl and says, “Boooooring!”

In one of his Far Side cartoons, Gary Larson captured this common misconception about heaven. In the cartoon, Larson pictures a man with angel wings and a halo sitting on a cloud, doing nothing, with no one nearby. He has the expression of someone utterly bored. The caption under the cartoon reads “Wish I’d brought a magazine.”

Pastor and author Mark Buchanan admits to the fear that heaven might just be the extension of a particularly dull church service. He admits to getting a little antsy after an hour of church. He yawns, his backside aches, and his stomach growls—and he’s the pastor!

Then he thinks about heaven as often presented in all kinds of art: plump, cute angels whizzing around on silken wings or kicking back on fluffy clouds; people playing their harps and singing really old music. “Everything is soft, wispy, dainty, pastel, languid,” he writes. “And this is supposed to inspire us?”15