Heaven is a place onto which we project our ideas of what a perfect world might be, and so it must contain everything that we hold dear. Yudhishthira, the ethically tormented king in the great ancient Indian poem, the Mahabharata, would also have agreed with Ms. Thomas; he refused to go to heaven unless he could bring his dog with him, challenging the Hindu view of dogs as polluting and hence banned from any holy place.

For some people, heaven is just a metaphor—heaven is dancing cheek to cheek, or heaven is in your eyes, and so forth. For Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, earth itself “is hell, nor am I out of it.” Jean Paul Sartre agreed: hell is other people. But others would say that heaven is other people—it is, above all, the place where they hope to be reunited with loved ones who have gone before. For such people, heaven is much more than a metaphor; it’s a hope and a fear. A fear because, if there is a heaven, there must be a hell, a place without dogs (pace the widespread ancient myth of the Hounds of Hell).

The unquenchable human thirst for life and for justice is what creates heaven. The observable fact that justice does not reign on earth (or that, as Tolstoi nicely put it in the title of a short story, “God Sees The Truth But Waits”), combined with the fact that we do appear to die, though we cannot imagine a world without us in it, gives rise to the hope that after death we will live on, rewarded for our virtues while other people will go to hell and be tortured for their sins.

The tenacity of the hope for heaven is demonstrated by the fact that when the Hindus invented a much more complex and satisfying response to the problems of both death and justice, the theory of reincarnation, they still kept heaven, simply adding on reincarnation. They said that first you went to heaven, then to hell (or the reverse, first hell, then heaven: counter-intuitively, people who had done more good than ill went to hell first, to pay for their small record of evil, and then to heaven, to enjoy their rewards; whose who had done more evil than good went to heaven first, then to hell), and then you got reincarnated anyway, still according to your just desserts. Indian hells, both Hindu and Buddhists, are brilliant evocations of punishments that fit the crimes; adulterers spend eternity crushed and impaled within red hot Iron Maidens. In the Hindu heaven, however, enemies are reconciled, and imperfections of the body are healed.

The fact that cultures all over the world have imagined some sort of heaven shows how deep a human longing it is, and the fact that they all describe it differently strongly suggests that no one has ever seen it (“that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,” as Hamlet so nicely puts it) and that there is therefore no evidence that it actually exists.

For some cultures, paradise is a garden (which is what the word “paradise” originally meant in Greek and Persian); when Voltaire’s Candide ended up deciding to cultivate his garden, now, here on earth, he was implicitly denying the possibility of cultivating it anywhere else. If there were a heaven for me, it would have to be the kind of garden in which no one minds when your dog, in hot pursuit of rabbits, tramples down the peonies.

But I can’t believe in heaven, because I no longer believe in the possibility of justice; I cannot even imagine a world in which there is perfect justice. Even if there were a heaven, all the wrong people would get to go there, just as all the wrong people down here get to go to the Italian Riviera. I do still cherish some hope of an afterlife, but more like reincarnation than heaven, a recycling of what we know life to be, with all it flaws, a living on in memory, a rebirth in people whose lives we have touched. At best, perhaps, rebirth in a world in which, as in heaven, we are together with the sorts of people whom we have loved and who have loved us—perhaps, indeed, rebirth as dogs.