Meditating on our place in the universe as taught to us by science should make us humble. We live for a brief time on a small planet spinning around a sun that is one star in a galaxy that is only one of the millions of galaxies in the universe. How insignificant we are. As a result, I sometimes think that the hardest act of faith for a modern person is believing that God cares about us.

Believing that God loves us—that we are not just a blink of an eye in the history of the universe—is at the core of religious faith. For Christians, that is what the incarnation and the resurrection are all about—God loves us so much he became one of us and raised Jesus up as a sign of our everlasting life. Heaven is everlasting life with God.

Who goes to heaven? Those who choose love, those who love.

Matthew 25 makes this explicit: “Come, blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me.”

But we are free not to choose God; we are free not to love. God does not condemn us to hell; we go there freely. Hell is not a place of fire. Hell is the absence of love, the absence of God who is love.

Do only Christians go to heaven? No, anyone who loves can go to heaven.