The planet Earth was a boring place. It appeared that many things were happening on Earth but all things were just appearances without substance. However, that was not the worst of it all. The worst was the fact that the people who were born on Earth did not know if they were born in Heaven or in Hell. On Earth, there was too much suffering and misery to be called Heaven and there was too much goodness and beauty to be called Hell. Somewhere between Heaven and Hell, all the people of Earth lived their futile lives.

One day, one lone man received a vision from a place unknown. In his vision, across the deep blue waters on Earth, he saw a place so magical, so astonishing that it appeared like Heaven. He saw that Heaven was a real place, but there was endless water that had to be crossed to get to it. To get to Heaven, all the people of Earth had to build a bridge across the blue waters. Humanity had to build a bridge that extends to Heaven. Once built, all the humans could cross the bridge and leave Earth and become permanent dwellers in the Heavens.

The powerful vision showed the visionary man the possibilities for Earth to become a new Heaven. The vision told this one man that he must gather all of humanity and at a cost of their lives, they must build a bridge. Building a bridge was a task that humanity had to undertake if they ever wished to get to Heaven. Getting to Heaven would be the hardest undertaking of humanity. The greatest challenge for humans in getting to Heaven would be to preserve their humanity while building the bridge to get there.

One day, this lone man gathered all his friends and shared his vision with them. His story was so unbelievable that his friends had no other choice but to believe in it. Nobody could make up a story so unbelievable, so there had to be some truth to it. There had to be some truth to his vision. His friends believed in his vision, and with the promise that once the bridge was built they would all live in Heaven, they decided to help the visionary man in building the bridge. Heaven seemed so far away. Nobody could really see or envision heaven just yet, except for the one visionary man.

Since Heaven was far away, the bridge could not be built alone. There was a need for collective cooperation in building bridges. Among the first people that heard about the vision of the visionary men were the white humans. The whites were crazy enough to believe the story of the lone man. The white people were brave enough to believe the stories of creation, and thus they were the ones who believed in the story of Heaven across the wide sea. Many white men gathered and started to build the bridge to get humanity to the Heavens.

Building a bridge was not an easy task. It required diligence, hard work, and perseverance. People had to study and learn the proper ways of laying the right foundations for the bridge, for if they put the wrong foundations, the bridge would collapse. The white men had to understand all kinds of different materials that existed on Earth in order to use the strongest material. Through trial and error, the white men worked hard under the sun. The whites made some progress, but the more progress they made, the more tired they got. After a few centuries, the whites became so exhausted that they wished to stop building the bridge to Heaven. The white men decided to stop building since it yielded only more suffering and no pleasures.

But another visionary white man had another idea. He had a vision that on a continent called Africa there lived many poor black men. Instead of having exhausted white men building the bridge, he had an idea to enslave the poor blacks so that the blacks would build the bridge to heaven much faster. So, this visionary white man went to Africa and brought back many black workers. He gave them enough food and water to survive. The whites gave the blacks work, they gave them purpose, but the white man took away the most valuable thing in their world. The white men took away the freedom of the blacks.

People could only have freedom or a bridge, but not both. Someone had to sacrifice his freedom to build the bridge. The bridge held the promise to the ultimate freedom; the freedom of Heaven. Without the bridge, there could be no freedom but without the sacrifice of freedom, there could be no bridge. After the feeble whites got exhausted working on the bridge for centuries, the strong black men continued to build the bridge where the whites left off. The blacks did all the hard work, while the whites moved into easier managerial work. This is how they divided their work. That was how they proceeded to build the bridge that had to be built.

After a few centuries, the blacks too got tired. They were strong, but building every day without rest for generations took a toll on their soul. They got tired by all the waves and wished no longer to be slaves. After many weary decades, they rebelled against their managers in search of their freedom. They no longer wished to work since working for centuries took them nowhere. They were unsure that they were building the bridge to Heaven or a bridge to nowhere. They started to distrust the whites since their promise of heaven felt more like hell. Thus, after many centuries the work on the bridge stalled yet again.

Another visionary man came back again to the rescue. He had a vision which he shared with his fellow humans, black and white. He told them that in his vision he saw many poor Asians who lived on the other side of the world. The poor Asians could barely feed themselves and they desperately needed help getting out of poverty. The visionary man told the whites and blacks that they should not force the Asians to come on the bridge since force proved to be the wrong incentive in building bridges.

This time, they decided to employ the Asians in building big parts of the bridge. The parts the Asian made they simply shipped them to the bridge. There was no need for the Asian to even know what they were building. There was no need to promise them heaven. The whites and blacks only promised them to lift them out of their poverty in return for parts of the bridge they needed to be built. The whites and blacks would then stitch up the bridge with the parts that the Asians sent.

The plan worked. The Asians became rich by simply building parts of the bridge. They sacrificed their time for money since without sacrifice they would have forever remained poor. Day and night they built many parts and shipped them to the bridge that kept growing and expanding. The people worked together. When everybody worked together, when everyone sacrificed a small part of themselves, the bridge seemed to progress and grow the most. When all of humanity used their talents and skills, the promise of Heaven seemed closer and closer. The dreams of heaven were slowly becoming a reality.

The visions of the humans worked flawlessly, but nobody knew how and when people gained their vision. Everyone was able to see, everyone had a vision, but everyone followed the vision of one visionary man. All humans had eyes, but most humans remained blind to their destiny. All humans had eyes, but most humans lacked a proper vision of their future. It was always the lone visionary man that pulled the blind men towards the vision of a better future.

After many more decades, the Asian got filthy rich. They used to live in filth, but now they drowned in riches. Once they got rich, they no longer wished to work for money since now with their money they wished to buy their own freedom. The Asians helped build great portions of the bridge to Heaven by giving their parts. They Asians played their part in the construction of the heavenly way, but eventually, they decided that building parts would never make them whole. Instead of building parts, they decided to fill the holes that existed within their own soul. After a few long decades, the Asians too gave up on building the bridge to Heaven.

The bridge spanned thousands of miles. It extended long ways across the endless water, but nobody had yet even glanced at Heaven. Nobody had seen Heaven just yet. They didn’t know if Heaven is a real place or just an illusion. The only thing the humans knew was that building the bridge felt like hell. Why did humans have to go through hell to get to heaven? Why did they have to go through so much suffering to find eternal joy? Many people wished to know the answers to these questions. They wished to know the answers to many other questions, but it was too late. The humans were already committed to building the bridge. If they were not building the bridge to Heaven, they wouldn’t know what else to do with their time.

When the Asians stopped delivering their parts, the humans needed a new helping hand. Just like a miracle, the visionary man appeared yet again. He told his new vision to the people. He said that until now, it was only men that had built the bridge, but from now on, the bridge should be built by women. Women until now carried for their house and children, but from now on they had to start caring about the bridge to Heaven. The women had it easy for too long, and now they had to carry their burden just like all the other humans. If women ever wished to get to Heaven, if they wished to have everything in Heaven, they had to start working on building the bridge that will get them there.

These women used to have everything. They had loving husbands, children that gave them joy and happiness. Women had everything they could ever ask for. The only thing they missed was a sense of purpose that existed beyond their lives. The visionary man told men that they should convince their women that working on the bridge would give them such great pleasure that would fulfill their life purpose. The visionary told that women should give up their dreams of having perfect houses and perfect children, and much like men, start working and building things. It was time for women to give up the dreams of perfect homes for the dream of perfection in Heaven.

That is what men shared with their women. Convinced of the vision of the one visionary man, the women abandoned their homes and their children. Every day they left their loving homes to work on the bridge. They were convinced by men that working will give them pleasure and fulfillment that they have not possessed before. The women were so naive that they believed that building the bridge would give them more pleasure than raising children. The women believed they were as strong as men, and to prove their strength they went to work every day while men watched them from a distance.

Women were strong, but they were not as strong as men. The progress on the bridge stalled. Many women worked on the bridge but somehow they lacked the strength and motivation that men had. For thousands of years, men had built civilizations at a fast pace, but toward the end of the race, humanity came to a rough place. Humans didn’t know how to proceed further. They wished for the visionary to come again to share his vision with humanity, but it seemed that the one visionary man had left humanity. Without a new vision, humanity was lost. While lost, they didn’t have any vision of how their future should look like.

When the humans reflected on the past, they saw how the whites started the construction, then the blacks, Asians, and finally women continued building the bridge to Heaven. They saw the diversity of humanity that worked together to make the bridge. In diversity, they saw a clue that told them who should continue their work. Everybody had to sacrifice something of themselves to arrive in Heaven. People of all races, genders, people of all walks of life were put on Earth to help build the bridge and arrive at Heaven. That is the new vision that humanity created for itself, and that is the vision they sought to realize and make real.

The gay people started working on the bridge to make it more fabulous. The handicapped lent a helping hand. Trans-genders too helped transform the bridge to a new form. Midgets started working on the big bridge. It was all about diversity. The more diversity they had, the better. People started going to the end of the world in search of the most diverse type of humans. One time someone was able to find a gay black handicapped transgender midget and everybody celebrated all this diversity in a single human. In this single human, all humanity placed their hope. In his diversity, they saw the face that reflected their own face.

As people started celebrating diversity so much that they forgot about competence. It did not matter if someone was competent in building a bridge. The only thing that mattered was how diverse the person that worked on the bridge was. In such a loss of competence in humanity, the bridge stopped being built. With the loss of competence, came the loss of knowledge, wisdom, skill, and expertise. People became diverse but incompetent.

The humans forgot completely why they are building a bridge. Some thought that they were building a bridge of human connection, where every human could connect to other humans. Others thought that diversity is all that mattered. It only mattered if every human is equal to other humans, but nobody knew what a human is equal to. To many humans, it mattered not that humans lived in hell rather than heaven. Humans preferred to be equal to one another in Hell, rather than being one in Heaven. Hell offered diversity while heaven offered only uniformity. The struggle for diversity completely stalled the process of getting humanity into Heaven.

No matter how much people wished to be equal to the other, there was always someone who was different. There was always someone who had taller legs or shorter eyebrows. Someone always had darker skin and lighter eyes. For years and years, people simply looked at each other and tried to eradicate all differences. As long as there were differences between people, there was always someone who was more beautiful, cuter, more attractive. It was always the attractive humans that attracted more attention which created all tension. To lessen the tension, humans had to eradicate all attractiveness and make everyone more dull.

Humans wished to admire all of humanity without admiring a single human. After many painful decades, the whites mixed with the blacks, the Asians mixed with Americans. All the differences faded away. Every human was equal to the next. There was nobody who was white nor black, smart nor dumb, good-looking nor ugly. Everybody human was equal to the rest. In Hell everyone was equal, but the bridge to Heaven was starting to collapse.

Out of nowhere, appeared a new type of man. This man had only one eye, one foot, and one leg. Among even the greatest diversity of humanity, nobody had ever seen such a man. When everyone thought they were equal to the other, a man appeared that proved more diverse than all of them. Wishing to welcome the new human as one of them, wishing that he doesn’t feel less than others, all the humans decided to cut off one leg and one arm, and take out one of their eyes. In that way, all the humans would be equal to the one-eyed man. The humans wanted nobody to feel left out.

That is what humanity wished to do, and that is what they did. All the humans removed the redundant symmetric counterpart of their bodies. Every body part that came in a pair, it was removed in order to become one. To arrive at perfect equality, humans had to sacrifice humanity.

When the one-eyed man looked at his fellow humans, he saw himself in all of them. Finally, he didn’t feel different from the rest because the rest were exactly like him. But now the humans became one-eyed creatures with one arm and one leg. Humans were no longer humans. Rather they looked like some other type of creature. They could no longer call themselves humans. If before they lacked a vision of where they are going, now humans didn’t even know who they were. The humans were no longer humans.

In luck, the one-eyed visionary men received a new vision. In his vision, he saw it was He that was the one visionary that went missing from humanity. It was him that initially had the vision of Heaven across the waters. The one-eyed man was the one who convinced all of humanity to work all their lives on the bridge so that humanity can arrive in Heaven. With his one eye, the one-eyed man saw how far humanity came to Heaven. With his one leg, he walked across the millions mile bridge to get to Heaven. When he reached the end of the bridge, the one-eyed man could not see Heaven. The humans had failed him. The bridge was far from finished and Heaven was far from the reach of his single arm.

Despite the incompleteness, the one-eyed man rejoiced in the bridge that humanity had built. It was a glorious bridge extending for millions of miles, but still short from the Heavens. The one-eyed man looked at his fellow decapitated humans and saw that humans are no longer useful in building his bridge. No human with one arm and one leg was useful in building anything. The one-eyed man had to create something new that will get him to heaven. He had to create a new type of artificial intelligence that mimicked humans but had less of their shortcomings. He had to create machines that would not cut off their arms and legs. Machines that had fewer feelings but higher intelligence.

The humans too looked at the one-eyed man with their one eye. The humans looked at Him so that he could share his vision for the future. In compassion, the one-eyed visionary couldn’t simply dispose of humanity. In loving sympathy, he told humanity to create artificial intelligence which will mimic the old days of humanity. The days when humanity had two arms and two legs. The days when people found joy in being different from one another and not the same.

Instead of building the bridge to heaven, humanity was now destined to create human-like machines. The one-eyed humans would create machines, and the machines would build the bridge to Heaven.

The bridge humanity had built was ornamented with statues of all the struggles of humanity. The million-mile bridge had statues of war heroes and peaceful struggles. The bridge that humanity built told the story of humanity. Every human, no matter how big or small, young or old contributed to the bridge that was supposed to extend to heaven. In honor of the humans, they called this bridge, the bridge of Humanity.

In the end, it was never the humans that were supposed to get to Heaven. It wasn’t the humans that could complete the journey. What the humans had started, others had to finish. In the end, it was only angels that are allowed in the Heavens. Only angels could live in Heaven.

O dear reader, what are the humans? Are they devils or angels?

From where you stand now, can you see Heaven or only Hell?