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I've told this story before at different internet websites but I might as well throw it in here while I'm thinking of it.
About five years ago I knew a fellow employee well enough to say hello to him and chat for a moment, but not well enough that we would go out for beers. Anyway, one day I found out that he had been shot during a crime. He was a bystander down the street several hundred yards away from the actual crime scene. He had emergency surgery and was hospitalized for about ten days. He missed almost a month of work. When he returned, I told him it was good he was back and then asked him about his misfortune. I had heard the details from others but I thought I should ask the victim himself. He stated that he heard a gunshot coming from up the street then immediately felt the bullet's impact on the side of his ribcage. Then came immediate pain. He never lost consciousness until he reached the hospital. He said that the bullet had missed his heart by less than an inch, and if it had struck his heart it would have killed him instantly. He then proclaimed in almost a sermon-esk manner that God had surely been watching over him.
When he was done speaking, I just kind of stared at him dumbfounded, not from the actual incident - I had heard that before - but by his conclusions. I thought: so, you thank God for saving your life because the bullet miss your heart, but yet you dismiss God's inactivity for the allowing the bullet strike you? I did not point out to my coworker his wayward objectivity. All I could do was smile.
While your point is well taken that at some level they don't really believe enough in heaven to be enthusiastic about an early ticket to that particular destination, you must remember that they believe a lot of (not necessarily logically consistent) things about the purpose of their earthly existence and of heaven itself.
Not least of them is that this earthly existence is some sort of training / "test" that will improve their worthiness and effectiveness in the afterlife if properly executed. This allows them to develop earthly attachments (special relationships such as spouse, child, sibling etc) which also gives them earthly responsibilities and commitments to protect and preserve, and to regard their time on earth as part of "god's plan" for their life.
So while your typical Christian has as much of a self-preservation instinct as the next person, they will claim different motivations for it, so that they can claim confidence in and looking forward to an afterlife at the same time they can consider dying (especially "before their time") to be as much as a tragedy as you would.
As a practical matter of course even for a Christian, earthly relationships are immediate and front-and-center for them, some vaguely defined blissful future in heaven is an abstraction that lacks reality. They tend to think that they will magically be suited to the afterlife and quickly adjust to it and that it will be "all good" but often struggle to truly believe this is actually the case.
You will search the scriptures in vain for any real detail about heaven. About all you'll find is that it is bright and shining and glorious, that somehow no one is unhappy ("every tear shall be wiped away"), that there is a nice abode individually prepared for each person, but apart from the descriptions in The Revelation about believers in heaven endlessly worshipping god at his throne, what one does on an ongoing basis in heaven is complete conjecture. Indeed there are some things that many regard as negative ("In heaven they neither marry, nor are given in marriage", so there's no assurance that what might be the most important relationship to you, will be preserved as-is).
When I was an evangelical, my teachers concocted all sorts of fanciful stories about how we would be able to travel anywhere in the universe just by thinking of where we want to go, that we will have interesting projects to participate in. In one case I was even told that your favorite foods would be available to you (in response to a child's question about whether there would be fried chicken in heaven!). All just sheer speculation and daydreaming.
So Christians do have this problem they face where they have their actual life which they know about it all its mundane and inane detail, and they have this afterlife that they know relatively little to nothing about other than vague promises that it's glorious. In the face of that, they tend to cherry pick the main aspect of heaven that actually appeals: they will continue on in some form and will see their departed loved ones again. And the rest of it is just a Big Unknown.
Hahaha, I am a Xian, and I always ask the same thing.
I'm a 9/11-WTC survivor (although I wasn't in a particularly religious frame of mind at that point in my life or for quite some time afterward), and when people say to me, "I guess God was looking out for you that day!" I want to slap them upside the head in a very un-Christlike manner. So why wasn't God looking out for my coworkers who were much better people than I and who died? And who is to say that the ones who died aren't better off than those of us left behind to deal with this mess?
Bullets and terrorist attacks have zero zippo zilch to do with God. They are all the work of human beings.
Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
Hahaha, I am a Xian, and I always ask the same thing.
I'm a 9/11-WTC survivor (although I wasn't in a particularly religious frame of mind at that point in my life or for quite some time afterward), and when people say to me, "I guess God was looking out for you that day!" I want to slap them upside the head in a very un-Christlike manner. So why wasn't God looking out for my coworkers who were much better people than I and who died? And who is to say that the ones who died aren't better off than those of us left behind to deal with this mess?
Bullets and terrorist attacks have zero zippo zilch to do with God. They are all the work of human beings.
Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
Does anyone notice that when a Christian has a close call but survives, THAT is a miracle of God? But when a Christian is killed by some random and apparently meaningless occurrence, it's God's will. In this way 100% proof of God is always achieved, even if a life is snuffed out in the process.
When he was done speaking, I just kind of stared at him dumbfounded, not from the actual incident - I had heard that before - but by his conclusions. I thought: so, you thank God for saving your life because the bullet miss your heart, but yet you dismiss God's inactivity for the allowing the bullet strike you? I did not point out to my coworker his wayward objectivity. All I could do was smile.
This kind of thing drives me NUTS! I have a friend who had brain cancer. She went through many operations, and every single time she would thank "the Lord" for saving her. I really wanted to say, "So all of that medical education and all of the skill of the people at the hospital do not matter? If it is the Lord saving you, why did you go to the hospital in the first place?"
This is an example of one of the hurdles I leaped while transitioning to atheist. I still wanted to believe there was a god, but there are too many examples that there is no intervening being.
This kind of thing drives me NUTS! I have a friend who had brain cancer. She went through many operations, and every single time she would thank "the Lord" for saving her. I really wanted to say, "So all of that medical education and all of the skill of the people at the hospital do not matter? If it is the Lord saving you, why did you go to the hospital in the first place?"
The standard party line is that god works through / uses doctors and nurses. How convenient ... except for the fact that they serve unbelievers and the heathen just as expertly as the believers.
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