Top Highlights

• From that point on, I had no doubt: I was going to heaven.
• over a number of years I moved into a liberal form of Christianity that cherished questions and thinking more than belief based simply on what others told me. Finally I left the faith altogether.
• Pew Research Poll showed that 72 percent of all Americans agree that there is a literal heaven where people go when they die; 58 percent believe in an actual, literal hell.1 These numbers are, of course, down seriously from previous periods, but they are still impressive.
• One of the surprising theses of this book is that these views do not go back to the earliest stages of Christianity. They cannot be found in the Old Testament and they are not what Jesus himself taught. Then where did they come from?
• the ideas of heaven and hell were invented and have been altered over the years.