100 Places to Go After You Die

The Paradise Earth

Jehovah's Witnesses

In the heaven envisioned by Jehovah's Witnesses, God's chosen are resurrected as immortal spirits and reign alongside Jesus Christ. (Since Witnesses don't believe in the Trinity, the Jesus who governs heaven is not the same as God/Jehovah, but rather His first creation.) The main difference between Jehovah's Witness heaven and the one in mainstream Christianity is population. According to Witnesses, only 144,000 "anointed" Christians will make it to heaven. No more, no less.

This strict afterlife quota isn't a zoning issue. It's based on a literal reading of Revelation chapter 7, in which John learns that "the number of those who were sealed" is "a hundred and forty-four thousand, sealed out of every tribe of the sons of Israel." When the Witnesses were a small millenarian sect in the late 1800s, this cap made sense. But over the following century, the denomination's growth created a problem—not a theological one so much as a math one. There are now 8.2 million Witnesses worldwide vying for just 144,000 spots. In other words, heaven now has a worse admissions problem than Harvard.

In 1935, Joseph Rutherford, the second president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, solved this problem by broadening the group's view of the afterlife. He announced that, while Jehovah has still reserved a place in heaven for 144,000 elect followers, everyone else gets a very nice consolation prize: the chance to live forever on earth. And not our current, lame earth either. A paradise earth.

As the Witnesses read Isaiah, the Paradise Earth is a perfect place, free of death, disease, and unhappiness of all kinds. Everyone lives in beautiful homes and works together as friends. It's what the Garden of Eden could have been if Adam and Eve had cut out the inappropriate snacking. Its millions or even billions of residents belong to what the Jehovah's Witnesses call the "great multitude of other sheep," and they're not the least bit bummed to miss out on being among the elect running the show in heaven.

If the lush acrylic paintings in every issue of the Watchtower magazine are to be believed, your eternity on the Paradise Earth will be something like a laid-back corporate retreat. In these illustrations, groups of multiracial people in polo shirts lounge on the grass amid eye-popping natural splendor. You’ll be picnicking, guitar-playing, and having a lot of fun with animals. Often majestic predators like tigers and wolves are pictured chilling nearby, in fulfillment of the biblical prophecy about lions and livestock lying down together.

Paradise will be populated by those who, sooner or later, accepted Jehovah and did His will. What about the wicked? There is no hell in the Jehovah's Witnesses' theology. Remarkably, the dead stay dead. "The dead know not anything," as per Ecclesiastes 9:5. Hell is non-existence.

As a result, if you're an atheist and two nice Jehovah's Witnesses in severe skirts ever knock on your door, you can tell them you already agree on many things. You believe that atheists like you won't live on in the afterlife—and so do they!