Heaven. Most of us have plans for when we get there.

You may be sipping frozen pinoladas by an aqua-blue ocean.

Or reuniting with your favorite grandmother.

Nearly nine in 10 people in the United States believe in an afterlife, according to a 2005 ABC News Poll.

(Sorry atheists, we're leaving you out here.)

Why are we so naturally inclined to turn to religion, to explain what happens after our bodies shut down?

"It's our inability to imagine our non-existence," offers Rutgers professor of religion Stuart Charme, an expert in the psychology of religion.

Even when people think about their own death, he said, they assume that some part of their consciousness is witnessing it. As if watching their own movie, they might say: "Well, my mother will be at my funeral, weeping in the corner."

But we still put ourselves in this picture, behind the movie camera, so to speak.

Trying to understand our own death, without our emotions -- or consciousness still continuing -- that's the challenge.

Enter heaven. The place where our souls go.

"Most religions offer the idea that my personality, my feelings could not be erased," said Charme.

Ask Charme about his own visions of heaven, and he has no answers.

"I'm a professor, I ask questions," he quipped.

And he certainly has many.

"The afterlife is so riddled with contradictions that we so desperately want to believe."

Take, for example, this idea of reuniting with family members and loved ones up in heaven; it has its comforting appeal, of course.

But if your grandmother is going to be there, what age will you be? What about other generations, your children and grandchildren? Will everyone be at the ages that you saw them in life?

There are other practical considerations.

Descriptions of heaven often evoke the five senses: flowing milk and honey, warm light.

But if we don't have our bodies, how do we see and taste?

Let's try not to be too much of a downer here, because the idea of heaven indeed serves its purpose here on earth.

Religion has long used the afterlife as the great equalizer: If we suffer injustices and tragedies in this lifetime, we have the afterlife to look forward to – where justice will finally be served.

It's a general theme in Western religions, said Charme.

But where they vary, he added, is in their emphasis on getting to heaven as the final destination, or trying to improve the world here.

"A longstanding tension in religion is looking for perfection here on earth, or looking for it elsewhere," he said.

While we may have no concrete evidence of the afterlife, scientists at the National Institutes of Health have discovered a gene that affects people's level of spirituality.

Dubbed the "God gene," or VMA2, this gene controls chemicals in our brain that affect the way we feel about events around us.

The discovery gene provides evidence that nature has given us a capacity to believe in the afterlife, that there is some evolutionary reason -- otherwise it would have died off.

What is a given is that beliefs in heaven have thrived since ancient times, and as long we survive, so will our ideas of the afterlife.

Check out this week's respondents as they describe their visions of heaven, and what it takes to get there.

The article above was found on Google and was published originally on NorthJersey.com