There is no limit to the amount of suffering in the world, despite our continual attempts to assure ourselves that life is a wonderful bounty of gifts for which we should all be eternally grateful. Indeed, some people are only grateful for the fact that life is temporary, a purgatory among the stars from which one escapes through the door of a coffin. And this is the case in part because, with every desire comes a concomitant amount of suffering that is both proportional and inseparable from the desire itself.
The desire for heaven and God, for example, can not be separated from the concomitant suffering that comes from not having obtained such things already, the way hunger is a suffering for food one has yet to acquire or consume. This is our perennial paradox, for our desires seduce us with the hope of attainment on the one hand, while simultaneously punishing us with desires unfulfilled. Desire, in short, is always both a carrot and a stick, which is why the Buddhist understands the need to abandon both.
The Christian who is seduced by their desire to be like God in their moral perfection, in this sense, is equally punished by their realization that they can never attain such a perfection, at least in this life. And they can never attain such a perfection because the "perfection" they are seeking is itself a mirage, one that dances on the horizon of our ideals, which we perceive as "perfect" only because it is out of focus just enough to hide from our imperfect mind just how imperfect it truly is. This is like falling in love with the perfect mate, before we discover they are only as imperfect as ourselves.
Love and hate are not mutually exclusive ideas, as such, but ones that can only be understood as the necessary interaction between the two. Good cannot exist without evil, after all, since the former can only be so defined by comparing it to the latter. The theologian sidesteps this problem by arguing that one is the absence of the other, the way darkness is the absence of light and death is the absence of life. But such dichotomies are as much a product of our environment as our own mind.
For example, heaven is said to be a place where there is no death, and thus no absence of life. Imagine if the world we lived in operated in such a way, where no one could ever die. What would be absent in such a situation is our ability to imagine the absence of life itself. And if we could not imagine such an absence, or even if we could conceive it but could not actuate it, then the idea of death would be like imagining the abscence of all imagination, or thinking about what it would be like to not be able to think at all.
Put more simply, "death" and "darkness" would be words that have no meaning whatsoever, if they could not be actuated as contrasts to life and light. In the same way we cannot conceive of a third option to the dichotomy of life and death, then, which is why we have no word for such an option, so too we have no word for the opposite of something that is not necessarily dichotomous. While the opposite of hot is cold, we have no word for the opposite of temperature itself.
This paradox is the navel of all of our ideas and ideals. Religion blames this inability to unscramble this riddle, let alone define or even obtain "perfection," on the "stain of original sin," as if the gift of being born human carries with it the punishment of not being born a god. In true paradoxical fashion, however, laying such blame at the doorstep of our humanity is to smite ourselves for being human, even as our religions claim we are "special" among all of the other species ever created, endowed as we are with an intelligence that can conceive only in theory that which it is incapable of ever putting fully into practice.
Nor are such paradoxes limited to the individual and their lofty ideals; it is also true of our collective desires as well. The greatest source of poverty and suffering in the world, for example, is the direct result of the accumulation of wealth and pleasure, for in a world of finitude, accumulation in one place necessarily requires deprivation in another. We deny this, of course, by convincing ourselves that we live in a world of infinite abundance, as if Earth contained all the inexhaustible abundance of heaven itself.
Such a "belief" amounts to believing that all those starving in a lifeboat are not the result of those hording the bulk of the provisions for themselves, behind a wall they've created in the boat which is protected by armed guards who are paid handsomely from those provisions, but the result of those starving fools who have yet to tap into the "power of attraction," or the "prosperity gospel," or to adequately understand the brilliance of "capitalism," or compound interest, or any number of other ideas we can come up with to assure ourselves that our "beliefs" are valid, our systems are mostly moral, and that none of the suffering in the world is in anyway our fault.
Our suffering is as inexorably linked to our desires just as much as any one man's deprivation is inexorably linked to another man's accumulation, and heaven is necessarily built on the backs of those the rich and powerful cast into hell.
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