Perhaps one of the great problems of Christianity is not only how it fosters a denial of the true impermanence of life, but by convincing people that such a denial - which only swaps a false “belief” of immortality for the truth of our mortality - is the greatest virtue that should be practiced everyday, it actually foments ever greater anxiety about life than enjoyment of it.
In fact, the potential threat of eternal hell leaves Christians to fret away their lives worrying if they will be among the lucky few who win the lottery ticket to enter heaven or the unlucky many who the Bible assures us are unavoidably destined to eternal tortures.
Only by accepting the impermanence of life, however, can we begin to actually learn to enjoy life, for only by accepting that we are destined to forever lose our life can we be less anxious about how we choose to live it.
Otherwise, our hope of a better afterlife predicated on how much suffering we offer up in Christ like fashion, only incentives us to endure a life that may only increasingly be causing us pain and unhappiness. Rather than understanding that such unhappiness should help us to change our life for the better, in other words, religion incentives us to maintain our misery by allowing us to think we are imitating Christ’s suffering on the cross.
And since Christianity calls us all to “be like Christ” on the one hand and focuses extensively on the cross above all else on the other, we are seduced by the apple of our suffering with the promise that it alone can “make us like God,” as the serpent promised, “knowing right from wrong.”
It just never occurs to us that by such a lie, which is championed the world over today, everything we hold to be “right” just happens to be wrong.
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