RE: you can keep heaven
November 23, 2016 at 9:58 pm
(This post was last modified: November 23, 2016 at 9:59 pm by Tonus.)
(November 23, 2016 at 4:24 pm)Orochi Wrote: And setting even that aside who in there right mind would desire an after life the very concept is more nightmarish then any i have ever encountered. It doesn't matter the type of after life or what you would be doing in it the idea is awful.
Oh, I don't know. I can think of at least a few kinds of afterlife that I'd enjoy for at least a while. None of them involve wandering around on a cloud and praying to god all day. At least a dozen or so involve me with my pants around my ankles.
Nor can I say whether or not I could handle eternity. Maybe if I had a short enough memory and an exciting enough afterlife I could go on forever, enjoying crazy adventures and living the good life, oblivious to the why and how of it all. Eternal ignorance, eternal bliss. Or maybe eternity is the real hell-- realizing that you can't leave the party no matter how badly you want to. I definitely don't think that 60-100 years is enough, though.
I think that the concept of an afterlife in the traditional religions isn't fleshed out enough to make it seem desirable. Floating around forever and ever, stopping every few seconds to remind God that he's just the most awesome thing that ever existed? What IS heaven? What WILL people do there? What PURPOSE would they have? And do they find it attractive because the only other option is hell?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
