Many people share your stance, that God doesn't make sense. Heaven doesn't make sense. Forever doesn't make sense. This is never enough for me. It is lazy, in my view, to stop the thought here. Then what does make sense to you? Really think hard about it.
I heard an analogy from British Philosopher Alan Watts, that so deeply changed my way of thinking.
He postulates, and wonders if it is possible, that all the chaos we see in the world, is not as it seems.
He first establishes the fact that our perspective, is but a single myopic view of the Universe. He demonstrates this be reflecting on how all humans see all events and things as happening to them. There is everything, and there is you, and they are most certainly separate things entirely. Even things that occur inside our bodies, we see as things happening to us.
Watts asks to imagine seeing your body under a microscope. Immediately you would see chaos, battles being waged constantly. Viruses being attacked by white blood cells, the bacteria in our stomach lining, microorganisms living on our eyelashes. Yet, somehow, all of this chaos adds up to what we know to be our bodies, I. And I am not in chaos, my body is always in a homeostatic state.
Watt's asks if it is possible, that the way we see the Universe, with all its unnecessary suffering, is at a greater perspective, in a harmonious state, just as millions of cells constantly being created and destroyed, makes up our bodies.
The more you think about the limitations of human perception, the more this idea resonates as plausible. In the same way you would see a newspaper photo up close, in dots, you see the Universe in such a perspective that nothing seems to make sense to you.
An example of this would be a comment I recently left regarding my grandfather, and the tragic life he lived. Someone, on a long enough timeline, his tragedy became an intimate part of who I am, and who I am is a blessing. So in this way, good things can come from bad things.
That in this universe, there is one great energy, and we have no name for it. People have tried various names for it, like God, like *Brahmin, like Tao, but in the West, the word God has got so many funny associations attached to it that most of us are bored with it. When people say 'God, the father almighty,' most people feel funny inside. So we like to hear new words, we like to hear about Tao, about Brahmin, about Shinto, and --_, and such strange names from the far East because they don't carry the same associations of mawkish sanctimony and funny meanings from the past. And actually, some of these words that the Buddhists use for the basic energy of the world really don't mean anything at all. The word tathata, which is translated from the Sanskrit as 'suchness' or 'thusness' or something like that, really means something more like 'dadada,' based on the word _tat, which in Sanskrit means 'that,' and so in Sanskrit it is said tat lum asi, 'that thou art,' or in modern America, 'you're it.' But 'da, da'--that's the first sound a baby makes when it comes into the world, because the baby looks around and says 'da, da, da, da' and fathers flatter themselves and think it's saying 'DaDa,' which means 'Daddy,' but according to Buddhist philosophy, all this universe is one 'dadada.' That means 'ten thousand functions, ten thousand things, one suchness,' and we're all one suchness. And that means that suchess comes and goes like anything else because this whole world is an on-and-off system. As the Chinese say, it's the yang and the yin, and therefore it consists of 'now you see it, now you don't, here you are, here you aren't, here you are,' because that the nature of energy, to be like waves, and waves have crests and troughs, only we, being under a kind of sleepiness or illusion, imagine that the trough is going to overcome the wave or the crest, the yin, or the dark principle, is going to overcome the yang, or the light principle, and that 'off' is going to finally triumph over 'on.' And we, shall I say, bug ourselves by indulging in that illusion. 'Hey, supposing darkness did win out, wouldn't that be terrible!' And so we're constantly trembling and thinking that it may, because after all, isn't it odd that anything exists? It's most peculiar, it requires effort, it requires energy, and it would have been so much easier for there to have been nothing at all. Therefore, we think 'well, since being, since the 'is' side of things is so much effort' you always give up after a while and you sink back into death. But death is just the other face of energy, and it's the rest, the not being anything around, that produces something around, just in the same way that you can't have 'solid' without 'space,' or 'space' without 'solid.' When you wake up to this, and realize that the more it changes the more it's the same thing, as the French say, that you are really a train of this one energy, and there is nothing else but that that is you, but that for you to be always you would be an insufferable bore, and therefore it is arranged that you stop being you after a while and then come back as someone else altogether, and so when you find that out, you become full energy and delight. As Blake said, 'Energy is eternal delight.' And you suddenly see through the whole sham thing. You realize you're That--we won't put a name on it-- you're That, and you can't be anything else. So you are relieved of fundamental terror. That doesn't mean that you're always going to be a great hero, that you won't jump when you hear a bang, that you won't worry occasionally, that you won't lose your temper. It means, though, that fundamentally deep, deep, deep down within you, you will be able to be human, not a stone Buddha--you know in Zen there is a difference made between a living Buddha and a stone Buddha. If you go up to a stone Buddha and you hit him hard on the head, nothing happens. You break your fist or your stick. But if you hit a living Buddha, he may say 'ouch,' and he may feel pain, because if he didn't feel something, he wouldn't be a human being. Buddhas are human, they are not devas, they are not gods. They are enlightened men and women. But the point is that they are not afraid to be human, they are not afraid to let themselves participate in the pains, difficulties and struggles that naturally go with human existence. The only difference is--and it's almost an undetectable difference--it takes one to know one. As a Zen poem says, 'when two Zen masters meet each other on the street, they need no introduction. When fiends meet, they recognize one another instantly.' So a person who is a real cool Zen understands that, does not go around 'Oh, I understand Zen, I have satori, I have this attainment, I have that attainment, I have the other attainment,' because if he said that, he wouldn't understand the first thing about it.