The reason God created the universe was to make spiritual free will possible, so the decision to go to heaven and relate to Him is meaningful.  God could have loved Himself more perfectly than anyone outside Him could love Him. But self-love is the essence of aloneness, of evil. God, Who is good itself, has the essence of good love and happiness - the love of someone outside of self who can return that love. So He created the human race, with the ability to return love. But men and women did not have to. For if they had to do good and love God, God would in effect just be loving Himself by remote control. In other words, if God did not allow us to do evil He would be evil, or self-centered. Thus it is that everyone begins life in our physical universe, where there's no proof of God or spiritual reality (for proof by definition interferes with free will).  [More about this: Creation: Why and How, Who is God?]

God allows people to do all the sad and terrible things they do since, again, you're not really free to choose good if you could not also have chosen evil. However, as a flower may spring from the darkest soil, so God's Providence sees to it that nothing evil is allowed to happen unless something good and useful can come out of it. [More about this: Divine Providence and Evil]

You go to heaven or hell of your own free will. You are the same person after death that you were in this world except that you can no longer hide your motives. Hypocrisy of any kind is impossible. If your motive in life was to do the best you could according to your principles, you will want to be with other people with the same motive - in heaven. If you basically love to have your own way and are hard on other people, you will want to go to hell. Although they're always free to do so, no hellish person ever wants to go to heaven - they can't stand the company. [More about this: Heaven and Hell, Life After Death: The Details]

Dying is not an end but an awakening. Your spirit is already in the spiritual world, but you are not aware of it. At death you become conscious in that world as you lose consciousness in this one. You leave the body your spirit has been driving around in this world and take on a new spiritual body that's far more perfectly fit to the "real (spiritual) you" than your present body.  The Writings provide a lot of information on the death process.  [More about this: The Death Process]

Life in heaven and hell are more real and vivid than life here.  There are mountains and plains, trees and rivers, houses and towns, lovely in heaven,  grim and ugly in hell (because that's how the inhabitants prefer it, in both cases).  Men are men and women are women in every detail. [More about this: Heaven and Hell, Life After Death: The Details]

Men and women are spiritually different.  In a true marriage, they are spiritually "in the image of God" as neither can be alone.  Each is incomplete for each is only half of "man" - as in humankind. It is man, male plus female, that is the image of God-Man. This is why it is said in Genesis that God created "man [as distinguished from "male and female"] in His own image" (1:27) and called "their name Adam"(5:1). ("Adam" is Hebrew for "man.") In true marriage, the two halves become one spiritual wholeness. The love of husband and wife mirrors the love between God and the human race. In those two relationships are found the happiness for both God and humanity that is the purpose of creation. [More about this: Building a Spiritual Marriage]

Everyone in heaven is wonderfully happily and romantically married, even if they had not been married in this world. Death never parts a married pair who truly love each other, and those who have not found their true spiritual partner in this world will find him or her in the spiritual world since, again, everyone in heaven is married to eternity. [More about this: Marriage in Heaven, Building a Spiritual Marriage]

Heaven isn't happy due to endless parties, church services or vacations.  Its secret for happiness is everybody being useful -  a secret that applies in this world too.  There are many aspects to life in heaven, but a central one is that everyone there is useful, because being able to be useful is fundamental to being happy.  The work involved there is better than even a dream job here.  It is literally the most interesting work you can imagine, for it is work fit exactly to what you most love to do. But you don't need to wait until heaven - the idea of what the Writings call "use" is a key secret to happiness here too. [More on this: On Being Useful]

Children who die go directly to heaven, where loving angel parents raise them. The children grow up, as children do here, but in a far more wonderful place.  They then meet the person they will marry in an almost fairy tale way, have a lovely wedding, and move on into eternity where all those who love them will meet them again someday. [More on this: Children in Heaven, and a gentle explanation of this topic for children]

The human race has grown up intellectually. So have God's explanations, up through, finally, the Second Coming. There have been several revelations over the history of the human race, each adapted to the states of people at the time when it was given.  Each contained more truth than the previous one, just as fuller explanations are given to people as they grow from children to having the understanding of adults.  Thus, for instance, the parable-based teaching of the New Testament is more "grown up" in both content and teaching style than the simpler commands of Yehowah in the Old Testament.  And in the midst of His New Testament teaching Christ said, "I still have many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now," (John 16:12) indicating further revelation to come. The revelation given through Swedenborg claims to be be that next, again more intellectually "grown-up" revelation.  It claims to contain the full rational explanation of spiritual reality and spiritual truth, including God's interpretation of the Bible. These truths had previously been known in this depth only by the angels. The Writings, in other words, claim to be, at last,  the full "adult" revelation, providing more truth than anyone can absorb in a lifetime.  They are thus the final revelation, in fact the Second Coming; to learn more, you would need the capacities - and time - of an angel in heaven. [More about this: The Revelation Process, The Second Coming: Revelation Grows up with the Human Race, The Word of God, Swedenborg and His Revelation:  An Anthology]

The Bible is not just history but an enormous parable from God.  Even its apparently trivial details contain symbolically important teachings.  Seen in light of these inner meanings, the puzzling and apparently inconsistent statements of Scripture, its many apparently cruel and strange stories, miracles that apparently violate the laws of science, and its great amount of apparently trivial detail all take on a dramatically new aspect. In this spiritual light, the Bible can be seen far more clearly than ever before to be as full of goodness and profound truth as would be expected in teachings of the God of the universe. [More about this: Correspondences, The Word of God, How Miracles Worked, The Bible and the Writings]

Creation is a parable too, a living physical symbol of deeper spiritual realities. The complex and beautiful relationships of physical ecosystems are symbols of the even more complex and beautiful relationships of the spiritual ecosystem, which in turn is a parable of God. [More about this: Correspondences, Creation: Why and How]

There is only one God and only one Truth. That Truth has been revealed to mankind several times. Each time men have distorted it so that a new revelation was required. Since followers of older revelations often did not believe the newer ones, one result of this process has been the forming of many religions, each with a fragment of God's truth mixed with man-made ideas. The Writings claim to be the revelation that "gets it all together," unifying all the Truth fragments and providing a fuller explanation of spiritual reality than has ever been given before.

As the teachings of Christ were given "not to destroy, but to fulfill" (Matt. 5:17) those of the Old Testament, so the Writings don't conflict with but "fulfill" - give new meaning and insight to -  the Bible. [More about this: The Bible and the Writings, The Word of God]  The Writings also relate the teachings of revelation to the discoveries of science. In the Writings'’ thousands of information-packed pages are found at last explanations of the single seamless web of law that governs all creation, from the spiritual to the physical. For instance, they explain how the Biblical miracles worked. [More about this: How Miracles Worked]

God is a human being, a Divine Human. What makes us human?  Our mind, which is made up of our feelings and thoughts, our will and understanding.  Where did we get that mind?  From God, in whose image it is made (Gen. 1:27).  God is Love Itself and Wisdom Itself.  It is because of that Love that He created the universe, so that there could be people in it whom He could love. It is from His Wisdom that He knew how. [More about this: Who is God?]

God appeared in this world as Jesus Christ. To understand how this could be, it is useful to look at human beings, created in His image.  Each of us has a soul and a body.  In Christ's case, His soul was divine, the "Father," the Yehowah of the Old Testament. His body was, to begin with, that of a mortal man, taken from Mary, but was transformed over His life here into purely divine substance.  That is why no physical body was left in the tomb after His crucifixion.  And just as we all have an effect on the world around us, so did Jesus Christ.  His effect on the world is termed in the Bible the "Holy Spirit."  Soul, body and effect, then, are the "Trinity" of God, all as much a single Person as those three characteristics constitute one person in any of us, created, again, in His image. [More about this: Who is God?]

God and eternity exist outside of time and there is no time (or space) in heaven.  Time here in the physical world is only an appearance.  It is difficult for our minds, which exist in the space and time of this world, to conceive of what it means to be outside of these characteristics of our reality.  On the other hand, it makes it easier to understand how God can foresee the future since, to Him, the Writings teach, all time is now.  [More about this: Time and Eternity]

True religion and science do not conflict.   God created the universe with a single integrated set of spiritual and physical laws.  People are in free will, here as elsewhere, to ignore the spiritual dimension, but in so doing they severely limit their potential for understanding the full and extraordinary sweep of created reality. Integrating the truths of revelation and science, on the other hand, provides answers in areas ranging from "evolution" to the relation of the different planes, or  "discrete degrees," of existence that we will never know otherwise.  [More about this: Science and Religion, Creation: Why and How]

Religion is most fundamentally between you and God, in free will.  We  talk to God in prayer, and, the Writings say, He does answer us, though in a very quiet way. "If a person prays from love and faith, and for only heavenly and spiritual things, there then comes forth in the prayer something like a revelation (which is manifested in the affection of the person who prays) as to hope, consolation, or a certain inward joy." (Arcana Coelestia 2535)  [More about this: Conversation with God, The Lord's Prayer]

You don't have to belong to any church to get to heaven.  On the other hand, you can't choose teachings that may help you on the road to heaven if you've never heard of those teachings. So God, Who always plays fair, provides revelation about the spiritual reality we could not discover on our own. True revelation is given by a process similar to what everyone experiences in the transition to spiritual awareness we call  death. [More about this: The Revelation Process]

Your religion is your whole waking life. Religious study is useful, as is religious ritual. But it is the life-long collection of daily thought, decision and action that defines your basic motive in life (or what the Writings call "ruling love"), the one that will take you to heaven or to hell.  In the words of the Writings, "All religion is of life, and the life of religion is to do good." (Doctrine of Life 1)

The human race, not God, invented evil and founded hell.  The Writings provide the answer to an old puzzle - how could a good and loving God create evil?  The simple answer is that He didn't. He created people in free will and they chose to do evil.  And since everyone lives forever, and the people that choose evil don't want to go to heaven, there had to be a new place for them to go - hell. But God provides powerful tools to fight off the influence of evil and go to heaven.  [More on this: Getting Rid of Evil]

God permits evil, but only evil that can produce good. As noted above, there must be evil for there to be free will.  But God's Providence sees to it that no specific evil is allowed unless it can serve some good use. God sees things in terms of eternity, however, and how events affect where people are going to spend that eternity.  We, on the other hand, with our much more limited understanding, may not always be able to see the good things that He brings out of an evil situation.  But we can draw reassurance from the examples all of us have seen in our own lives of good coming out of evil. [More about this: Divine Providence and Evil]

Are the Writings the voice of God, or just Swedenborg?  The Writings only ask that you read them with an open mind and see. The Writings are without precedent in religious history in terms of their scope, sheer size (30 volumes), and both originality and plain sensibleness of the answers they provide, in many cases to questions that have puzzled people for centuries.  Could a person, even one as brilliant as Swedenborg, have written the Writings (especially when he didn't even start work on them till he was 57 years old)?  As always in matters of religion, according to the Writings, each reader is in free will to decide for themselves.  If God made your mind, truth from Him should make sense to that mind.  All the Writings ask is that you consider the ideas contained in them, like a scientist in effect, to see if those ideas make sense and to see if they lead to a good, useful and happy life. [More on this: Who was Emanuel Swedenborg?, The Revelation Process, Swedenborg and His Revelation:  An Anthology]