(September 15, 2019 at 5:07 pm)Darwinian Wrote: If there is a heaven and you make it there, what might you expect to be doing in a billion years and what relevance would your 80ish years of life on Earth have?

Getting ready for Brexit.

(September 16, 2019 at 1:21 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote:

(September 15, 2019 at 5:07 pm)Darwinian Wrote: If there is a heaven and you make it there, what might you expect to be doing in a billion years and what relevance would your 80ish years of life on Earth have?

Getting ready for Brexit.

Mabe a tangent, but a lot of residence requests here in Portugal has incresed 10 fold, mostly older folks looking for property in the interior. Algarve is more for the youngest. I've seen and talked to some people coming here. Mostly the climate, secondly, cheaper cost of living and third, brexit. And they say it's old baby boomers fault...

(September 16, 2019 at 7:57 am)Fake Messiah Wrote:

(September 15, 2019 at 5:22 pm)Belaqua Wrote:  Dante's Paradiso is a good example of the radically different type, and it's in keeping with the official theology of the Catholic church -- allowing for certain poetic differences. 

Talking about Dante and Catholics, Roger Ebert was a catholic when he was a kid and he had a conversation with a priest about Dante's ideas/ visions of afterlife and the priest dismissed Dante's ideas about afterlife as nonsense. Here's from Ebert's autobiography

Quote:I was already a little smartass, and asked my seminarian: "If hell is the way they describe it, how can the punishment for impurity be worse than the punishment for anything else?" The seminarian smiled condescendingly. "The notion of levels of hell comes from Dante," he said. "He was a great poet but an amateur theologian."

It's always best to learn about the great books through second hand childhood memories of movie critics. 

https://www.amazon.com/Metaphysics-Ameri...oks&sr=1-1

(September 16, 2019 at 5:12 pm)Belaqua Wrote: It's always best to learn about the great books through second hand childhood memories of movie critics. 

https://www.amazon.com/Metaphysics-Ameri...oks&sr=1-1

Then what is your answer to "how can the punishment for impurity be worse than the punishment for anything else?"

(September 16, 2019 at 6:35 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote:

(September 16, 2019 at 5:12 pm)Belaqua Wrote: It's always best to learn about the great books through second hand childhood memories of movie critics. 

https://www.amazon.com/Metaphysics-Ameri...oks&sr=1-1

Then what is your answer to "how can the punishment for impurity be worse than the punishment for anything else?"

I have no idea what that means, or how it relates to Dante.

In the Inferno, the worst punishment is for betraying the good people who are helping you. There is no section for "impurity."

(September 16, 2019 at 6:39 pm)Belaqua Wrote: . There is no section for "impurity."

There is a section because impurity in Catholicism means lust.

(September 16, 2019 at 6:56 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote:

(September 16, 2019 at 6:39 pm)Belaqua Wrote: . There is no section for "impurity."

There is a section because impurity in Catholicism means lust.

In the Inferno, the circle for the lustful is the highest, least bad level. Paolo and Francesca. 

In the Purgatorio, the purification of lust is the last stop before the Earthly Paradise, because to Dante lust is the least bad of sins. The lowest, worst sin is pride. Pride makes all other sins possible.

For Dante, sin is always a misdirection of love. Loving other people too much is far less evil than loving, say, money or fame, because people are made in the image of God and we are right to love them. 

Whoever said that the punishment for lust in Dante is the worst had never read the book.

(September 15, 2019 at 5:07 pm)Darwinian Wrote: If there is a heaven and you make it there, what might you expect to be doing in a billion years and what relevance would your 80ish years of life on Earth have?

One thing I know for sure -- we are, as presently constituted, creatures of time. Natural selection has not fitted us for eternal life. Hedonic tone alone would not allow humans to function in that context for any length of, for lack of a better word, time.

The analogy I usually deploy is that no matter how good a movie is -- how masterful the script, the direction, the acting, the music -- you don't want it to last for 12 hours, much less forever. At some point you would just want to pee and go to bed. So it would be with eternal life. At some point -- 200, 500, 5,000 years -- you would be indifferent to any more experiences because there would be nothing novel or interesting about it. You would not see the prospect of being introduced to someone you haven't met before as anything more than a trivial variation on a million other people you have met. You would not see the prospect of a new relationship as anything but a tiresome repetition of the same social dance you've engaged in countless other times.

I know that some people very much disagree with this, and imagine that we could never exhaust the appeal of new experiences. And I confess I'm not sure how long most people would take to get to the jaded place I describe above. But I see it as inevitable, given how human minds work.

So for us to live "forever", we would have to be magically changed into something that we are not. Which begs the question of in what way an idealized existence in heaven would be desirable or comforting to anticipate. We would not know ourselves, or our loved ones. We would be experiencing something other than the human condition. If heaven is supposed to be human existence without all the suffering, that in no way addresses how it would avoid the problem of boredom indefinitely. If heaven is radically different, then that in no way addresses our present human yearnings and wishes, it just takes those away in a sort of bait-and-switch that involves making you something you presently are not.

I submit that even the conventional Christian heaven is, in a way, "radically different". Somehow, people don't want to, and apparently can't, sin, so we are all compliant robots with no independent volition at all. This is terribly ironic, given the lame free will arguments used to try to construct theodicies. In THIS life, it's a pearl-clutching problem that we would be robots. In heaven, not so much.

In heaven, it's clear from the alleged statements of Jesus that "they are neither married, nor given in marriage" and right there is another really big difference, enough to give many Christians pause. What, I won't be married to my beloved spouse anymore? This is usually explained by the nature of relationships in heaven providing something better than marriage (or really, by implication, than sex) although this is never explained. There's another way in which the familiar human condition is vastly altered, to the extent that many people aren't sure they even want that for themselves.

Ultimately eternal life of the Christian sort is so incoherent a concept that when really examined, it falls apart as any sort of incentive or reward for righteous living.

(September 16, 2019 at 8:19 pm)mordant Wrote: Somehow, people don't want to, and apparently can't, sin, so we are all compliant robots with no independent volition at all.

[...]

Ultimately eternal life of the Christian sort is so incoherent a concept that when really examined, it falls apart as any sort of incentive or reward for righteous living.

What you describe here is a view some Christians, but not of others. There is no one view that can be called "the Christian sort." 

Dante's heaven is completely unlike what you describe.

(September 16, 2019 at 8:28 pm)Belaqua Wrote:

(September 16, 2019 at 8:19 pm)mordant Wrote: Somehow, people don't want to, and apparently can't, sin, so we are all compliant robots with no independent volition at all.

[...]

Ultimately eternal life of the Christian sort is so incoherent a concept that when really examined, it falls apart as any sort of incentive or reward for righteous living.

What you describe here is a view some Christians, but not of others. There is no one view that can be called "the Christian sort." 

Dante's heaven is completely unlike what you describe.

Given that typical notions of hell owe more to Dante and Milton than to the Bible, there's a lot of variation (and even more vagueness) in what individual Christians imagine hell to be. And you're right, there are different version of heaven, too, and heavily embellished from the fairly vague hand-waving descriptions actually present in scripture. People are naturally curious about what heaven will be like, and so the clergy and theologians are happy to provide details. Problem is they don't all agree.

My point however was that regardless of the details, heaven involves eternity, which is never-ending, and we are story-telling creatures of time who really, though we hate to admit it, need stories with beginnings, middles, and yes, ends. Whether heaven is like the life we know or not, it is ENDLESS. This is the fundamental problem. Either we'd lose our marbles eventually or we would have to be remade into something we wouldn't recognize.