This is mostly aimed at Christians, but those of other faiths who believe in some kind of afterlife are also welcome to comment. Basically, I’m interested in what people think the afterlife will entail. I consider myself an agnostic, and I don’t believe in any sort of afterlife, but I’m still curious as to what those who do believe in one think it will be like.
Tough subject.
I’ve not given it as much thought as hell since I think hell is the most misunderstood and I feel I have some insight there, but Heaven is a bit different. No real reason for me to keep my eye on this as a prize, there is too much work to do here before we can waste time thinking about such, kind of like thinking about going to the superbowl half way through the season, very distracting.
But deducing from what I deeply believe to be true about the purpose of life and the laws that govern it, I would say that heaven is a lot like being with God and all your friends that are rational and logical and compassionate, humble and fully desirous of operating in Love. IOW, the rif-raff is removed and separated forever. I still believe we will do some kind of work and operate as useful sentient beings in a society as I cannot think of a reason to rest and do nothing for eternity. Maybe we will be given a new body and will spend our lives back on this purged earth, not exactly sure.
I’ve always wondered how heaven can be heaven if one of your relatives or friends went to Hell. There must be some degree of sadness there.
Heaven appears to be in a state of decline, soon to be overrun with Muslim social clubs staffed by virgins. This will likely cause real estate values in Hell to rise. It will therefore not be long before renting an apartment in limbo will become the latest afterlife trend.
Haha, I like it.
In all seriousness, when I was a Christian, one thing that bothered me was actually the concept of heaven. No matter how I look at it, eternal bliss just didn’t make sense. I don’t think there can be light if we didn’t have shadow, period amen. Infinite bliss would be monotonous.
I can see how easily the mind could simply mend over this by thinking about happiness, and then extending that onto an eternal timeline, but this shows a lack of understanding of what happiness is. If one was always happy, they wouldn’t know what happiness was.
Yes, some concepts of Heaven do appear to be quickly rationalized compensational alternatives to their opposite extremes on Earth.
If, back in the old days, so many were miserably impoverished with no hope of otherwise, thoughts of equal but opposite compensation in the afterlife kept them out of the suicidal pits of despair, kept our species going, and provided manipulative incentive to fight and die in the leaders’ wars, leaders, by the way, who often didn’t suffer from that impoverished extreme and who thus frequently didn’t believe in that very Heavenly recruiting poster they were pushing on the masses.
A monotonous dose of eternal pleasure in heaven makes little sense, just as a monotonous dose of seemingly unending pain of abject poverty here and now is equally nonsensical.
I believe if we can solve our painful problems here and now, thoughts of an equal but opposite reaction Heaven will begin to subside.
Why would someone need to know what happiness is while existing in a state of contentment?
To compare positive emotions and negative emotions to light and a shadow, you better also include a description of what object is casting a shadow.
If positive emotion =light & neg emotion= shadow… what (emotion?) is the body that prevents light from reaching the shadow?
You can’t just make shallow metaphors, put “period” at the end, and act as if you made a point about something…
Exactly. Our existence shouldn’t be lived by a set of rules in order to gain entry to a place we think we may go to when we die. We have to use the intelligence we have to live our ideal existence now (while not partaking in actions that violate another’s opportunity to do the same).
Hell and heaven are states of mind/existence.
My point is one could not exist in a state of contentment if discontent did not exist.
This is where the misunderstanding lies. I’m not equating shadow to negative emotions and light to positive emotions, I am illustrating the idea of contrast in general.
Hopefully some more illustrations will make this point more clear. Suppose everybody on the planet was Chinese. The concept of “race” would not exist. We would not have a differentiation to label and account for. We would all simply be human beings.
If everybody was equally wealthy, then the idea of “wealthy” and “poor” wouldn’t exist. We would not need a description to account for the difference, nor would we ever consider such.
If, for an infinite period of time, one did not experience any emotion other than bliss, then bliss itself would not exist. There would be nothing to compare bliss with.
Agreed, and to continue with my thought, those states of mind would not exist if we were constantly fixed in one or the other.
Again, your examples don’t illustrate what you are trying to say…
You are attempting to argue that for contentness to exist there has to be discontentness… but, in this example, you are comparing a situation in which there is only ONE race, no alternative, to a contrast between content and disconent.
If anything, this example proves my point: in a state of contentness (which is subjective) discontentment does not exist!
Just as in a world where this is only one race, another race does not exist.
You are speaking in terms of the collective existence… you are using words that come form a language that contains references to different things (whether matieral or not) that exist in the (collective) world.
There is contentment, which means absolute satsifaction, one does not need anything else, and then there is discontentment, in which one needs something else.
How can discontentment exist in an individual at a moment in which tye are content? It is impossible.
As I said, heaven and hell are a state of the mind/existence.
When one is using language, and trying to convey what contentment means, to somebody who doesn’t understand the word, then the CONCEPT of disconent is necessary, in order to explain to the person what contentment is NOT. But contentment itself means lack of the things that discontent refers to.
I’m not misunderstanding what you are saying… you have ignored my point. Contrast can only exist when one’s mind is thinking about something that does not directly express the current state of the nervous system.
Contrast exists in the ability to use language.
I was pointing out that insisting neg emotions are necessary for the existence of pos. emotions by saying that there cannot be light without a shadow is ridiculous.
Light exists whether or not there is something to block the sun from reaching a certain spot, casting a shadow.
What is that something? Our mind. Whether our minds manage to train our brains to look at the shadow, or turn around and face the sun, determines whether or not we exist in heaven or hell.
This doesn’t make any sense. If A exists then A doesn’t exist. Come on man.
What you mean to say is “if one is unable to imagine NEED, then they are unable to understand that they exist in a state of NOT NEED”
As I said before, why would they NEED to understand it?
As i’ve said before. In heaven you are not sinful. But sin is part of who you are. And when you have a new body, does this exclude the mind? For who are we without our mind? We’d have nothing but souls, and our souls would be empty, thus a loss of our identity. We may possibly know what we were, but if we did we wouldn’t feel connected with our true old selves.
In fact I could only see the soul as this. An entity seperate of yourself. It has no part of you but is something you have. Thus quite possibly when you die this is what goes to eternity. The soul will suffer or find happiness. The soul can remember what you were, but it’s not the soul, the soul has been clean slated.
In fact the only way to see what a soul truly is. Is if you were to let it birth, and live alone without anything and no connections. For this way is the only way a life on earth can be fair to the 2 Christian Choices of the afterlife. Influences aren’t fair.
And thus I can only see predestination as the correct belief. God would have to only know what the soul would be like on it’s own, whether or not it would have chose him, and all that’s left now is whether or not the souls that would not have regularly chose him can be influenced into choosing him, and those souls who would have chose him even in unbelief will go to heaven. Does that sound fair?
So like this: 1 is for believing alone as soul, 2 is for not choosing alone as soul.
Soul(1) Influenced into unbelief- heaven or given some option
Soul(2) influenced into unbelief, wouldn’t matter- hell
Soul(1) influenced into belief, wouldn’t matter-heaven
Soul(2) influenced into believing-heaven
So perhaps, this is fair. For those who wouldn’t have chose, it’s not really unfair that they were not influenced into belief because they were going to hell anyway. This only seems unfair now because we want to previously decide for our soul if it had not believed, but that’s not our decision, for we have only be influenced into wanting to do that.
I’m not sayin this is what I believe, i’m only making sense of the mess.
Heaven is a metaphor for God. God is the ultimate reality of all things. Heaven symbolizes God as the goal of human life. Heaven is metaphorically depicted as a place because we are meant to live in the divine presence. In reality God is beyond the categories of space and time. The New Testament speaks more about the Kingdom of Heaven then it does about a heavenly after-life. Jesus as the Christ sought to establish the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is synonymous with the Kingdom of God. That’s because heaven is synonymous with God.