Heaven would be good
December 10, 2015 at 6:27 pm
(This post was last modified: December 10, 2015 at 6:46 pm by Amine.)
I've noticed a lot of atheists say heaven would be boring. At its worst, it might be. If it entails sitting around on a cloud with a harp singing hymns for eternity, it would really be more of a hell. But that seems like the worst version of heaven anyone could talk about (and it comes off like sour grapes). What about the best?
At best, heaven would be good beyond everyone's wildest dreams. There are a myriad of ways it could play out, some of them explored in movies like What Dreams May Come and Vanilla Sky. What if we just stuck to the known and made some tweaks? Take this world, eliminate all poverty, violence, and disease (including aging). What's left? A place of near infinite room to explore and play. I doubt I'd ever get bored.
But there are further tweaks we can make, most importantly that of our own hedonic tone. Anyone reading this is probably in a relatively neutral mood, maybe slightly above or below. Things don't have to be that way. That happiness requires sadness to contrast it is folksy psychology, and wrong. Some people are clearly consistently happier or sadder than others. Those who have done heavy doses of a psychedelic or euphoriant drug may know the true heights of the brain's emotional capacity, and believe me, they make anything one has ever experienced while sober look like a 2-dimensional gray blob of dreariness. Life on this planet could be driven by gradients of intelligent bliss.
Seems like a good thing to remain open minded about. What's the point of trying to convince oneself heaven wouldn't be the greatest thing ever? We should dream like that. Not everything about religion is a bad idea, you know.
At best, heaven would be good beyond everyone's wildest dreams. There are a myriad of ways it could play out, some of them explored in movies like What Dreams May Come and Vanilla Sky. What if we just stuck to the known and made some tweaks? Take this world, eliminate all poverty, violence, and disease (including aging). What's left? A place of near infinite room to explore and play. I doubt I'd ever get bored.
But there are further tweaks we can make, most importantly that of our own hedonic tone. Anyone reading this is probably in a relatively neutral mood, maybe slightly above or below. Things don't have to be that way. That happiness requires sadness to contrast it is folksy psychology, and wrong. Some people are clearly consistently happier or sadder than others. Those who have done heavy doses of a psychedelic or euphoriant drug may know the true heights of the brain's emotional capacity, and believe me, they make anything one has ever experienced while sober look like a 2-dimensional gray blob of dreariness. Life on this planet could be driven by gradients of intelligent bliss.
Seems like a good thing to remain open minded about. What's the point of trying to convince oneself heaven wouldn't be the greatest thing ever? We should dream like that. Not everything about religion is a bad idea, you know.
