This is a refrain I've seen from a handful of atheists. Essentially, the idea is that because heaven is eternal paradise and earth, well, isn't, Christians should be ecstatic about any natural cause that would cause their death (as suicide is clearly not an option - but this is clearly god determining over life and death, rather than humans). Terminal brain cancer, car accidents, you name it. A Christian shouldn't be unhappy when they get a prognosis of "a few months before you die", they should be happy that they get to be reunited with God that much sooner.
This, obviously, is not how most believers think. I'm pretty sure there's something pretty obvious that I'm missing in scripture as to why this attitude isn't commonly held, but I'm not quite sure what it is. Can anyone help me out on this one?
I think your question prepossesses a somewhat Gnostic approach to Christianity; not your fault of course, this is one of the biggest problems in modern Christendom.
For most of the ancient Gnostic sects they maintained a duality between matter and spirit, with the world of matter being at best irrelevant and at worst evil while the world of spirit was good and true. To that end the eschatological goal of the Gnostic was to escape the imprisonment of the soul in the body and return to the world of pure spirit. To achieve that goal it was necessary to have the right knowledge (gnosis) by knowing oneself as not a lowly creature of matter but as a being of spirit, a pure soul which, tragically, has been imprisoned in a material body due to the ignorance of the Demiurge (variously called Ialdaboath or Saklas), often associated in Gnostic cosmology with the Jewish God YHVH.
In contrast the historic orthodox Christian faith has maintained that this world is the good creation of the good Creator God revealed to ancient Israel as YHVH. This God has made Himself known by becoming one of us, by becoming human, as Jesus Christ of Nazareth; who came to rescue the world. That this world is being redeemed, made new, restored. That Christ's death and resurrection brings new creation, and the hope of the Christian is in the future resurrection of the dead (bodily) when Christ comes again and makes all things new, all creation restored, and we dwell right here on God's green earth for all eternity. The New Testament consistently talks about new creation and resurrection, but doesn't have much of anything to say about what happens between death and resurrection; consistently in the writings of the ancient fathers, in the Creeds, and taught right down to the present time is that Christians hope for resurrection and life everlasting in the age to come--not some disembodied existence far and away in a place called "Heaven".
Yet, somehow within the last hundred or two hundred years Christianity in the West started focusing less on resurrection and more on what happens after we die, and this place called "Heaven" where popular imagination started to place us on fluffy white clouds strumming harps like baby cherubs in old paintings.
And so now one may, indeed, hear sermons and statements by modern Christains that speak of death not as a tragedy that is overcome by Christ and His (and later our) resurrection; but death is spoken of as a mere door opening us up to the world of heavenly bliss. Death is not the tyrant as in historic Christian teaching, but a companion that leads us to the world of celestial wonder away from this dirty rotten world.
And so your question is a reasonable one considering the quasi-Gnostic sentiment of much of modern Western Christianity, my response would be to criticize modern departure from historic Christian teaching and go back to the historic Creeds of the faith, to the biblical teaching on the meaning of the Incarnation, the death, resurrection, ascension, and coming again of Jesus, and the hope of God setting all things right and taking this world and making it into the good and better world renewed and refreshed in Jesus Christ. After all, the most central prayer of the Christian religion is the one Christ taught us to pray in which we say, "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name,
Your kingdom come, Your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven."
We do not look for something "up there" but for what God will do down here.
-CryptoLutheran
