Heaven is… a book of facts

Heaven is traditionally pictured as angels, playing harps while sitting in clouds, which is possibly one of the dullest concepts man could have come up with for imagining a place of ultimate joy and happiness. I’m pretty convinced heaven is more exciting than this. For now, I need to contain that excitement.

On a personal level, I am hoping heaven will bring access to The Book Of Facts. With God being omnipotent, it isn’t too much of a stretch to hypothesise that this wealth of information might be documented somewhere. Heaven must have an archives section! Therefore, while some might be indulging in their favourite activity, be it surfing or baking cakes, I’ll be sat down, slowly ploughing through page after page of enlightening statistics, and I’d have eternity to do it.

Here on earth we have imperfect knowledge. We might marvel at Usain Bolt’s 100m run of 9.58 seconds and claim him as the fastest human being over that distance, but there is so much we don’t know and never will. For instance, how many wombats have ever lived? Who, in their life, has spent the most time waiting at traffic lights? How many hundreds and thousands are in an average pack? What is the mean number of legs on a millipede? Heaven will surely answer these things and it will truly be a revelation.

I am anticipating ranking tables to be available. Would I make the top 100 in any category? Since the categories are endless and the possibilities limitless, I suspect I might, but which ones?

Then there are those questions that it would be great to answer, such as what happened to Lord Lucan and Shergar. Did Shakespeare actually pen the Complete Works of Shakespeare? Was that really swine flu I had last week? Did Saddam Hussain actually have weapons of mass destruction?… okay so there are some things we do know the answer to already, but as humans we’re a bit short in the whole knowledge department, often relying on guestimates and approximations.

All of this wealth of information could be the basis of the greatest quiz ever made. Forget if Carlsberg did pub quizzes, in heaven they would would be awesome. There would also be a more interesting version of the perennial summer fete competition of guessing the number of sweets in a jar. No-one cares how many sweets are in the jar; the answer is inherently boring, but imagine the fun of playing “guess the number of stars”, with the winner earning a meeting with God himself. Of course, this ignores the fact that an integral part of heaven is based around meeting your maker anyway, but this is in danger of becoming a bit heavy for a blog as shallow as this one.