If some kind of god exists, I don’t believe for a second that he put us here as some kind of test to see if we don’t like him, like him, or like like him. If heaven exists, I believe everyone is going there, regardless of what kind of life they’ve led or what religion they espouse. There’s just no way to know which is right, and there’s no chance for most people to experience the right set of circumstances that allow them to convert out of the dominant religion of their culture or family, which would make heaven an exclusive club. I wouldn’t want to believe in a god or place like that, but hey, if that’s what floats your boat go for it.
So, assuming there is a heaven, what would be the point our earthly existence, then, if not some kind of way to judge those worth of entry?
How could you possibly know the wonders of utopia without experiencing it on earth? On this plane of existence, most of us will experience moments of pure euphoria and pure hell. If heaven is perfect, we’ll know it because we can compare our afterlives against our lives.
This isn’t necessarily what I believe, but I think it makes more sense than the whole judgement day thing. Life wouldn’t be there so that god and/or some people could have a sense of justice in the afterlife; it would just be a comparison so you could understand the paradise you’ve entered.
Would people like Hitler make it in? Yeah, probably, I don’t see why not. After all, evil people would be essential so that the lack of it would be apparent in heaven. Maybe Hitler was an angel sent to earth as an evil bastard so that we could better understand evil and he’s actually a really cool guy in heaven
I think it is important to treat the Christian God not as some all-powerful buggedy-boo but as a person. If we treat it as this perfect thing-a-ma-bob, there is this whole dealio with a stone so big it can’t lift it and all that. Right? Doesn’t make sense. But if God is a person, it is a whole different game.
So, let’s think of their god as this being that is impossibly higher above us, as we are to a bacterium. Now, when I’m dealing with bacteria in the lab, I don’t think about the damage I am doing, right? I will kill 99.99% of them in the hopes of getting that small percentage I am after. Their god seems to be operating on the same level. While I didn’t “create” those bacteria, I did nurture them and all that. I was “responsible” for them in that regard, but to think that they all need to and/or deserve to exist is alien to me. You know?
Your assumptions only work if people, and/or YOU in specific, are somehow special. Why assume that?
I’m not saying humans are important enough that there must be a heaven. All I’m saying that is if there is some kind of afterlife that is nicer than what we’ve got now, you probably don’t have to be in a special club to get there; and if you do, I wouldn’t want to go anyway.
I just don’t think your opinion would matter, if it were real. That is all I am saying. You seem to be operating as thought my E. coli have some say in my research. They don’t. Neither do my mice, and mice are a heck of a lot closer to mankind than man is to the Christian God. Ya know?
This is not some delusion. I’m just offering up an alternative to the christian judgement model of life. In other words, if you believe in heaven, that doesn’t mean that you have to believe earth is a test.
I agree Christianity isn’t necessarily nihilism, but I think you go too far. If it is all about the journey and not the destination, that makes sense. But to say everyone reaches the destination . . . I am not sure than can jive with their cosmology, nor do I think it should.
I didn’t say it had to jive with christianity; a ‘good christian’ wouldn’t accept this model. It’s for other people who still have an open mind. This was one of my steps from catholicism. At the time, it was too large a paradigm shift to go from blind faith in catholicism to disbelief of it, so I started out with baby steps.
“Well…ok, I don’t have to believe in catholicism because if there is a god he’s not going to send me to hell for this because…”
It might seem cowardly or silly, and I know it was presumptive, but it’s the how I got out of catholicism, and really I think the only way that it would have been possible.
I don’t get the point. You say it’s not acceptable to Christians, and you don’t even necessarily believe it yourself, you acknowledge that it’s silly and a tool from getting from one believe to another…
I don’t see how this is different than saying “Wouldn’t it be cool if there were flying cars?” except about religion.
Heaven with some sort of standard needing to be met in this life in order to get there makes perfect sense in the fullness of Christian theology, but I don’t get the impression that you’re terribly concerned with the reasons why.
But yeah, if I had irrational operators that were driving me away from my religion, and I decided to succumb to those operators, a necessary step would probably be to concoct stories about what God would and wouldn’t like to justify my errors on the moral level, to make them easier to swallow on the rational level. That’s one of the primary dangers of ‘open-mindedness’ as it’s concieved currently- the exact process you described, of making stuff up to trick yourself into getting to the place that you want to be. It’s precisely because that’s so easy to do that not everybody can be a philosopher.
Oh please. I was describing it as silly for your benefit, not mine. I think it was a natural progression for me. No one really thinks that a baby crawling before it walks is silly, but if you think about it from the right point of view it will seem that way.
Anyway, the basis of my departure from religion was the tiniest of all steps: if god exists, he won’t be pissed off that I’m questioning his existence. I was scared to do it, and I had no agenda. You act like I wanted to be atheist so I rationalized it. I wanted to understand things, and that led me on a journey away from theism; not all the way to atheism, though I’m sure I’m not done so we’ll see what the future holds. I’d like to think that I’m somewhere close to where I’ll be settling in, though.
Dangers of open-mindedness indeed. I’ll tell you the danger. It’s when you blindly accept your faith without understanding it, then when you reach a certain point in your life with another ideology you cling to it with the same amount of irrationality. I had a friend who went to church with her family every Sunday, though she didn’t like it. I asked her why she still went, and she had some lame reasons, but she still believed in god or at least was afraid not to. Then she went to the west coast for college, had a horribly rough time in her life, took a course on what happens to the human mind when you die, and decided that there is no god. From theism to atheism in the blink of an eye.
Now which is better, a gradual thought process which can lead to theism, atheism, or anything inbetween, or a violent exchange of paradigms that are both accepted for the wrong reasons?
The words are still out there. I wasn't criticizing the progression as being unnatural, I was criticizing it as being [i]irrational[/i]. Deciding first that you need to move away from a position, and coming up with things to tell yourself to make it easier is certainly irrational.
Not that behaving irrationally is the end of the world, mind you. What you did simply has to be done a lot of the time, no doubt. What I'm saying is, your comments on Heaven here lose a lot of their value when they're understood as a sort of irrational head-candy and not as an argument for or against anything, which is what they initially appear to be.
Consider Xunzian- he spent quite a few exchanges with you explaining that you were mischaracterizing Christianity, and in the end you revealed that you didn't really care if you were or not, your statements were simply a means to an end. And again, that's fine, so long as they aren't mistaken for philosophy.
'Better'? I guess I don't know what you mean. Is the aim to experience 'smooth sailing' that doesn't harsh our buzz regardless of the details of our beliefs actually are? Is the aim to actually believe what is true? Is the aim to believe what a good person would believe if they were in our shoes?
Also, you've got a false dichotomy there, you force change into the situation where it's not needed. A better question to my mind would be "Now which is better, switching from one irrationally held belief to another because it's been drilled into your mind to 'question' things even if you suck at it, or sticking with the tradition you were raised in, and relying on the cooler heads that prevail there until you train yourself to think like an adult, or else don't?"
I don't think your friend had much to gain from changing beliefs at all, violently or silky smooth. They would gain from learning to be a rational person, but as a consequence they would have seen through their previous doubts that lead them to atheism and probably remained where they were.
I’ll agree with Ucci in that I don’t think either method represents a sound way to approach the truth. Ned has written some interesting posts on how Christians need to stop lying to their kids about things like Creationism, and I think that is a good idea because pumping people’s heads filled with ideas that are downright incorrect and have been convincingly shown to be wrong isn’t a very good way to sustain a broader ideology. It results in just the situation you described with your friend. But I don’t think using half-truths, or downright lies in response to half-truths and downright lies is a very good idea. Not only will it create the same situation you described, but reverse (people who leave traditional religions for poor reasons tend to latch onto non-traditional and/or alien religions for equally poor reasons and the problem simply compounds itself). Instead wouldn’t it be better to try and sincerely approach the truth and let the cards fall where they may? Sure some of the methods used to approach the truth aren’t necessarily rational (as I’ve said elsewhere, logic and reason are vital tools to every thinking person, but they aren’t necessarily the only tools) but that doesn’t mean rationality should be simply thrown out the window.
A good reason to leave the religion of your ancestors is because it is wrong. I don’t think too many people will argue against that point. But if it is wrong, it ought be able to be shown wrong on its own merits, right?
Now it can be argued that the religion of one’s ancestors is wrong, but that the individual in question is still attached to it for a variety of reasons, so a weaning process is useful. But I’m unconvinced as to whether that cure is indeed better than the disease. While degrees of irrationality certainly exist, is flirting from one irrationality to another with no sound methodology really the best approach? Do you suppose that path leads to less or more irrationality?
jehovas whitnesses believe that everyone gets to go to the “eternal paradise” in the after life…
where children are depicted playing with lions and pigs sticking themselves to be roasted…
the hitch is that then they only have 1 chance… if they disobey gods law they are somehow ejected from this bliss and thrown into some sort of eternal something… (presumaly not good)
Maybe I explained poorly. I didn’t decide catholicism was wrong and then create reasons for it, the reasons were there and I slowly found them.
What’s irrational is believing the tradition of your ancestors because it “worked”, because they’re “level-headed” and “understand”. If you follow that logic, what did the first people do? Of course, they just made up religion. Making up my version of heaven is no less rational than the first person who made up the christian heaven.
Are you trying to tell me that it’s wrong to think that god won’t punish us if we consider he might not be real? You don’t think he’d prefer us to question?
The conception of heaven I laid out isn’t something anyone should believe; I certainly don’t. It’s just another thing for someone to think about who has swallowed the idea that an individual religion isn’t the answer, but still clings to an afterlife and can’t decide what the point of life is. This is just one possibility for the purpose of life assuming there is an afterlife: experience.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. But the heaven I ‘dreamt up’ doesn’t even have a law, let alone consequences for deviating from it. Any religions like this? Probably more cultish than the regular kinds.
Part of your problem is you are assuming a “first people”. Religious development is an incredibly gradual process, no religion that is presently practiced resembles the origins of that religion in the first civilizations, because of small changes over thousands of years that stack up to huge differences. We’ve come a long way from cave paintings!
Leaving that aside, let’s apply the logic you used here to science.
Does that seem reasonable to you, or in this light does it look a little silly?
Now, for the moment I’ll simply cede that your vision is as rational as the initial draft of any particular idea (I don’t actually agree, but let’s examine this argument on its own merits). What does that yield us, since we aren’t comparing original versions? What we are actually comparing here is a highly derived version that has been vetted and examined from a variety of angles by many, many individuals of great wisdom as well as filtered through the creativity of the masses across untold generations. All that versus the product of one individual mind. I’ll put my money on the collective wisdom as being closer to the truth.
Strange thing is, it required me to be a radical individualist in many ways in the first place in order to end up accepting an age-old tradition as being filled with relevant and useful wisdom. Otherwise I’d just spend a lot of time at the mall and working to make a lot of money and sleeping through a church service. It’s just as important to trust ourselves as it is to trust others. It’s a balance, or a conversation.
