Heaven Makes No Sense

[GT/CS]

I had a dream the other night in which I got pulled into heaven but it was full of cocktail parties and people playing card games. That was not my idea of Heaven. I was so confused I asked someone who works there if I was in Heaven or Hell, because to me it looked like hell. The only way to make it worse is if the other people were architects, and interior designers. The person in charge performed some research and found out they mixed up my Heaven for someone else’s, some old lady named Barbara. To add insult to injury, I wasn’t even supposed to be dead.

Yes, that sounds like “Heaven Can Wait”, but it was a fun dream so I stayed with it. The next day I started thinking about it and about the bizarre concept of heaven.

I don’t believe in god or heaven, but just for fun let’s say Heaven exists. How do people spend their time there? Do they interact with others? If they do interact with others how do the interactions affect those folk’s version of heaven, or are the other people just props? Do married couples reunite in heaven, even if one spouse doesn’t want to? Does the spouse who wants to be married end up with a clone spouse? What if the couple wants to have children. Can they do so? Do the children grow and mature or do they stay children? Where do the souls for these created children come from? If the couple had children in real life I doubt their kids would want to stay children all their lives in Heaven. They’d want to grow up because all kids want to grow up. If people are playing cards, like in my dream, who wins and who loses, or do they play for fun?

If it’s for eternity what do people do to stay busy and not get bored? Do they go to sleep every night and forget what happened the previous day? Do they sleep at all? Do they eat? If they eat do they poop?

I realize they get to hang out with God but BFD, he’s a sadistic, egomaniacal, a-hole. Why would anyone want to hang out with that guy?

I don't know, the whole thing just doesn't make sense to me.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

It's like the 'happily ever after' in fairly tales, the story ends there, no need to think beyond that point.

 

[fromdownunder]

I have often wondered about 3 week old babies who die. Does their mother have to nurse them in Heaven? Will they remain a pooping milk drinking blob for all of eternity? If they have not had time on earth to learn anything, and the mother has to cart them around for ever, I cannot see a whole lot of fun in their future.

Or a naturally aborted faetus, of which there would be Billions, if the "soul" is created at conception.


See also: Alzheimer's Disease. What version of this person goes to Heaven.

Come to think of it, what version of me would go to heaven if I were a True Believer? My 18 year old's memories. Forty Year's old memories. My current 66 years?

And I really do think I would get somewhat bored after about 60 trillion years. The Halo would wear off, so to speak.

Norm

 

[stanfr]

I had a dream the other night in which I got pulled into heaven but it was full of cocktail parties and people playing card games. That was not my idea of Heaven. I was so confused I asked someone who works there if I was in Heaven or Hell, because to me it looked like hell. The only way to make it worse is if the other people were architects, and interior designers. The person in charge performed some research and found out they mixed up my Heaven for someone else’s, some old lady named Barbara. To add insult to injury, I wasn’t even supposed to be dead.

Yes, that sounds like “Heaven Can Wait”, but it was a fun dream so I stayed with it. The next day I started thinking about it and about the bizarre concept of heaven.

I don’t believe in god or heaven, but just for fun let’s say Heaven exists.

How do people spend their time there?

Time does not exist in heaven.

Do they interact with others?

Chemically? Politically? Sure.

If they do interact with others how do the interactions affect those folk’s version of heaven, or are the other people just props?

You keep talking about people, but I always thought heaven was populated by souls, no? I mean, even the stupidest theists I know don't go around talking about people having tea parties in heaven.

Do married couples reunite in heaven, even if one spouse doesn’t want to? Does the spouse who wants to be married end up with a clone spouse?

Again with the 'people' nonsense, and concepts like 'marriage' which only exist in our flesh-and-blood realm.

What if the couple wants to have children. Can they do so? Do the children grow and mature or do they stay children? Where do the souls for these created children come from? If the couple had children in real life I doubt their kids would want to stay children all their lives in Heaven. They’d want to grow up because all kids want to grow up.

Now you're just being silly.

If people are playing cards, like in my dream, who wins and who loses, or do they play for fun?

The winner gets to haunt someone from the ISF

If it’s for eternity what do people do to stay busy and not get bored? Do they go to sleep every night and forget what happened the previous day? Do they sleep at all? Do they eat? If they eat do they poop?

Now these are more interesting questions to me. Cause I can't imagine a heaven without microbrews, sushi, and chicken wings. So I say hell yeah they eat and sleep, but since time does not exist there is no need to poop cause nothing ever gets digested. No indigestion either...now that's heaven!

I realize they get to hang out with God but BFD, he’s a sadistic, egomaniacal, a-hole. Why would anyone want to hang out with that guy?

Well, you could always chose to hang out with Satan, or at least his homosexual lover.

I don't know, the whole thing just doesn't make sense to me.

Me neither, which is why I quit believing in this crap years ago. But it's a fun exercise. And one thing I would never do is get bored if I had an eternity. An eternity would allow me to at least catch up on 10% of the posts in the ISF religion section.

 

[tsig]

I had a dream the other night in which I got pulled into heaven but it was full of cocktail parties and people playing card games. That was not my idea of Heaven. I was so confused I asked someone who works there if I was in Heaven or Hell, because to me it looked like hell. The only way to make it worse is if the other people were architects, and interior designers. The person in charge performed some research and found out they mixed up my Heaven for someone else’s, some old lady named Barbara. To add insult to injury, I wasn’t even supposed to be dead.

Yes, that sounds like “Heaven Can Wait”, but it was a fun dream so I stayed with it. The next day I started thinking about it and about the bizarre concept of heaven.

I don’t believe in god or heaven, but just for fun let’s say Heaven exists. How do people spend their time there? Do they interact with others? If they do interact with others how do the interactions affect those folk’s version of heaven, or are the other people just props? Do married couples reunite in heaven, even if one spouse doesn’t want to? Does the spouse who wants to be married end up with a clone spouse? What if the couple wants to have children. Can they do so? Do the children grow and mature or do they stay children? Where do the souls for these created children come from? If the couple had children in real life I doubt their kids would want to stay children all their lives in Heaven. They’d want to grow up because all kids want to grow up. If people are playing cards, like in my dream, who wins and who loses, or do they play for fun?

If it’s for eternity what do people do to stay busy and not get bored? Do they go to sleep every night and forget what happened the previous day? Do they sleep at all? Do they eat? If they eat do they poop?

I realize they get to hang out with God but BFD, he’s a sadistic, egomaniacal, a-hole. Why would anyone want to hang out with that guy?

I don't know, the whole thing just doesn't make sense to me.

According to Catholics you spend the time staring at god, it's called the Beatific Vision.

The blessed see the Divine Essence by direct intuition, and, because of the absolute simplicity of God, they necessarily see all His perfections and all the persons of the Trinity. Moreover, since they see that God can create countless imitations of His Essence, the entire domain of possible creatures lies open to their view, though

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07170a.htm

 

[dejudge]

I had a dream the other night in which I got pulled into heaven but it was full of cocktail parties and people playing card games. That was not my idea of Heaven. I was so confused I asked someone who works there if I was in Heaven or Hell, because to me it looked like hell. The only way to make it worse is if the other people were architects, and interior designers. The person in charge performed some research and found out they mixed up my Heaven for someone else’s, some old lady named Barbara. To add insult to injury, I wasn’t even supposed to be dead.

Yes, that sounds like “Heaven Can Wait”, but it was a fun dream so I stayed with it. The next day I started thinking about it and about the bizarre concept of heaven.

I don’t believe in god or heaven, but just for fun let’s say Heaven exists. How do people spend their time there? Do they interact with others? If they do interact with others how do the interactions affect those folk’s version of heaven, or are the other people just props? Do married couples reunite in heaven, even if one spouse doesn’t want to? Does the spouse who wants to be married end up with a clone spouse? What if the couple wants to have children. Can they do so? Do the children grow and mature or do they stay children? Where do the souls for these created children come from? If the couple had children in real life I doubt their kids would want to stay children all their lives in Heaven. They’d want to grow up because all kids want to grow up. If people are playing cards, like in my dream, who wins and who loses, or do they play for fun?

If it’s for eternity what do people do to stay busy and not get bored? Do they go to sleep every night and forget what happened the previous day? Do they sleep at all? Do they eat? If they eat do they poop?

I realize they get to hang out with God but BFD, he’s a sadistic, egomaniacal, a-hole. Why would anyone want to hang out with that guy?

I don't know, the whole thing just doesn't make sense to me.

It will all make sense when you die or when Jesus comes back while you are alive.

The dead in Christ shall rise first.

Heaven will be a very great place.

You will get to see Adam and Eve if they are NOT in hell.

 

[GT/CS]

Time does not exist in heaven.

Then the concept of eternity doesn't make sense.

 

[HansMustermann]

Stanfr, short quips aren't really enough to solve those questions. Which, I suppose, is why guys like Augustine or Aquinas wrote whole books instead of just the chapter headings.

Time does not exist in heaven.

I'm ok with that, but then you have to explain how a universe (or pocket in this one or whatever) without a time axis works. Because it seems to me like if there is no time, then there is nothing happening, so there is no fundamental difference between that an it being game over when you die.

Chemically? Politically? Sure.

Even skipping over how such interactions could exist at all without time, or what would be the point of any political interaction if its results don't affect some change that happens in TIME, well, how does that happen?

You keep talking about people, but I always thought heaven was populated by souls, no? I mean, even the stupidest theists I know don't go around talking about people having tea parties in heaven.

But conversely, even the most abstract theist I've met will say that those souls have the consciousness of actual people. So the difference is at best lexical. Whether I have a human body, or I'm a brain in a jar powering Skynet, or just a program on a supercomputer that writes these messages, I'm still "me", and I'm still just as much "people". The fact that we're just exchanging messages over the internet, no bodily interactions or even line of sight involved, instead of sitting by the samovar and sipping tea as we talk, doesn't change the fact that it's "people" interacting. We could be two brains in a jar interacting like this, and nothing would be fundamentally different for the interaction.

But even if you want to call it some disembodied consciousness or whatever instead of "people", well, brings us to the same question: how does it work? Sure, they don't sit around a tea table, but then what do they DO? You mentioned political interactions. How do THOSE work?

Again with the 'people' nonsense, and concepts like 'marriage' which only exist in our flesh-and-blood realm.

Yet we're told that it's your consciousness that will be there to perceive it. With all the lessons learned and reference baggage from this flesh-and-blood realm.

In fact, apparently those are important too, since otherwise we could just skip the whole flesh-and-blood realm entirely. But you first need to learn to behave here, and be judged for it.

So how is that supposed to work? Will you suddenly forget that you really liked to hang around a certain girl, or that you hated the holier-than-thou priest? Will you suddenly have common topics to discuss with someone who was a slave in Nero's time and got eaten by a lion in the arena?

I mean, if you thought it's bad to hear the "quit complaining, you kids these days have it easy, back in my day we used to walk two miles to work through the snow" speech from grandpa, imagine what St Ignatius of Antioch would have to say about your problems at work or frictions with your heathen neighbours. Think YOU had it bad at the office? The guy wrote his letters while being carried by ship to his execution by very hostile heathens, together with a bunch of wild animals that might be eventually used to execute him. How's THAT for a hostile workplace?

Because before being a soul, he was "people", and that's the kind of environment HE learned.

So what kind of common topics might you have with someone whose consciousness recorded THAT frame of reference for judging things? How would you interact meaningfully in any political sense?

And if you just magically get some completely other way of thinking beamed into your head, so all that isn't a problem any more... then, as the great philosopher Daffy Duck once said, "was this trip really necessary?" Couldn't we just skip the learning a bunch of fully useless things on Earth first?

Now these are more interesting questions to me. Cause I can't imagine a heaven without microbrews, sushi, and chicken wings. So I say hell yeah they eat and sleep, but since time does not exist there is no need to poop cause nothing ever gets digested. No indigestion either...now that's heaven!

Well, that brings us back exactly to: then how does it work? And again, if nothing actually happens, because happening would involve a time axis, then what's the difference between that and it just being game over when you die?

 

[fromdownunder]

Heaven will be a very great place.

So, what are your plans for the first 100 Trillion Years, and what version of "you" do you think will go to Heaven? You did not exactly explain a whole lot about it.

"I don't really know", because you really don't, would be a good answer, and "I don't know" is a better answer than generalised waffle like the above..

Norm

 

[arthwollipot]

I was taught that heaven was the state of being in constant communion with God. The strong implication was that it was timeless, and though people would kind of retain their individuality, it was more like a collective of souls. Nothing happens there because nothing needs to happen. It's just constant love and joy.

Hell, of course, was the lack of that. Which obviously was the most horrible thing anyone could endure.

 

[Craig B]

I was taught that heaven was the state of being in constant communion with God. The strong implication was that it was timeless, and though people would kind of retain their individuality, it was more like a collective of souls. Nothing happens there because nothing needs to happen. It's just constant love and joy.

If it is "timeless", how can anything in it be "constant"?

 

[arthwollipot]

If it is "timeless", how can anything in it be "constant"?

Oh yeah, pick on the language in this theory.

 

[Porpoise of Life]

Well, aren't you all glad you're going to that other place then, if Heaven makes no sense?

 

[dejudge]

Heaven will be a great place.

If I go to heaven I would create a better universe or a better Adam and Eve.

There would be NO more serpents in my Garden of Eden.

 

[Belz...]

I don’t believe in god or heaven, but just for fun let’s say Heaven exists. How do people spend their time there? Do they interact with others?

According to Christianity they spend eternity singing praise to god and being blissful.

Yeah, I know. Boring as hell.

 

[dejudge]

Well, aren't you all glad you're going to that other place then, if Heaven makes no sense?

Heaven must be better than Hell. Far less smoke!!!

 

[Loss Leader]

I don't know, the whole thing just doesn't make sense to me.

This is the part of religion that you have a problem with? It's like the only thing they teach that isn't completely terrifying.

 

[tsig]

This is the part of religion that you have a problem with? It's like the only thing they teach that isn't completely terrifying.

Eternity is terrifying. At some point you would long for non existence.

 

[Bikewer]

Mark Twain had a nice take on Heaven....

As I recall from my Catholic youth, they were just warming up to that Beatific Vision thing and that it sounded dead boring.
Now, the Baptists were generally literalists and to judge from the huge number of bluegrass gospel songs, they really got into the many mansions and streets paved with gold and all that imagery....Stuff that would be appealing to poor white folks.
Also being reunited with one's departed family. Didn't anyone in the Baptist tradition come from rotten families that they hated?

Back as a Catholic kid, the church was still hanging on to concepts like Purgatory and Limbo. I had a vision of Limbo as a very odd place indeed, with millions of unbaptized babies and the occasional confused aboriginal tribesman who had lived a righteous if pagan life...

 

[Cainkane1]

I had a dream the other night in which I got pulled into heaven but it was full of cocktail parties and people playing card games. That was not my idea of Heaven. I was so confused I asked someone who works there if I was in Heaven or Hell, because to me it looked like hell. The only way to make it worse is if the other people were architects, and interior designers. The person in charge performed some research and found out they mixed up my Heaven for someone else’s, some old lady named Barbara. To add insult to injury, I wasn’t even supposed to be dead.

Yes, that sounds like “Heaven Can Wait”, but it was a fun dream so I stayed with it. The next day I started thinking about it and about the bizarre concept of heaven.

I don’t believe in god or heaven, but just for fun let’s say Heaven exists. How do people spend their time there? Do they interact with others? If they do interact with others how do the interactions affect those folk’s version of heaven, or are the other people just props? Do married couples reunite in heaven, even if one spouse doesn’t want to? Does the spouse who wants to be married end up with a clone spouse? What if the couple wants to have children. Can they do so? Do the children grow and mature or do they stay children? Where do the souls for these created children come from? If the couple had children in real life I doubt their kids would want to stay children all their lives in Heaven. They’d want to grow up because all kids want to grow up. If people are playing cards, like in my dream, who wins and who loses, or do they play for fun?

If it’s for eternity what do people do to stay busy and not get bored? Do they go to sleep every night and forget what happened the previous day? Do they sleep at all? Do they eat? If they eat do they poop?

I realize they get to hang out with God but BFD, he’s a sadistic, egomaniacal, a-hole. Why would anyone want to hang out with that guy?

I don't know, the whole thing just doesn't make sense to me.

The Jehovah Witness paradise on earth sounds better than the other Christian sects version of Heaven. They think that the earth will be restored and that life will go on as usual with less people, more and better food which they grow themselves and that humans ans animals will get along. You get married you can have sex complete with children but childbirth is no longer painful.

On occasion you get a visit from either or sometimes both god and Jesus and a slew of angels.

There are other perks. You can hug and pet a lion or a bear with no fear of attacik. There are no briars or thorns on the restored earth and you basically have a picnic for eternity as it never rains but the earth is watered from time to time by the magic of god.

You have to work but hey. Its fun work. Nobody gets sick or old or injured or whatever.

You have a ball forever.