Heaven would be good

[Amine]

The only problem with that hypothesis is that your brain dies when your body does. Unless there's magicy-supernatural mumbo jumbo involved, there ain't a brain to do that to in Heaven. So it could only be magic. Magic mind control. How enticing.

Doesn't sound too bad. I'm a determinist already anyway so I already figure I'm a robot. If the experience is good, I feel like there's not much to complain about.

What is disgusting about it? The human experience is so much more than just blind, senseless happiness. It is through our sadness and our anger, through our rage and through our despair, through our grief and through our confusion that we can truly experience the universe in all its splendor, that we can truly consider the world, ponder it, connect with other humans, and make meaningful, lasting relationships. Those feelings, though unpleasant, are just as essential to our beings as happiness. A life where you have access to one emotion, and one emotion only, is depressing to me. It is the opposite of free will. You are being denied the right to the full capacity of feeling. Everything you experience is experienced narrowly, without any contemplation but a blissful one. That is not living. That is existing. Existing always with this mindless smile on your face.

You get to define what living is? I don't accept. Living is living. If I am alive it doesn't matter whether I am happy all the time, I am alive, so I am living. There's a difference between the truth and your opinion. I don't buy into the philosophy that a person should embrace all of life's experiences because they should experience the universe in "all its splendor" (which includes such things as parasites that swim up your dick), and nor do a lot of other people. To me, "living" (by which I really assume you mean living well) is simply being happy. I'm not here to prove anything or impress anyone. If negative experience serves no functional purpose, I am not even slightly sentimental about it and would kiss it goodbye without hesitating. And then I would live happily, and there would be no problem. It couldn't "depress me", because if it did that would mean I wasn't happy.

Also, happiness isn't just one emotion. There is a very wide spectrum of positive experiences to be had. Fun, laughter, joy, sensual bliss, curiosity, reverence, and many more. These experiences can even be shared with others. Why would we think a lack of suffering precludes the ability to have relationships with people? Suffering is, in my opinion, the worst part about relationships with other people. I like good times. I definitely don't get off on watching people suffer. If that winds up being what brings me closer to someone, I was a dick for taking them for granted in the first place.

Do my negative emotions cause me to suffer? Yes, at times they do. But the suffering, the struggles, the hardships, are what make me me. How empty and two-dimensional would I be as a person if I looked at everything with only happiness, all the time? I know, sometimes when bad shit hits, the idea of eternal only-bliss seems tempting, but too much of one thing is never a good thing. Without sadness, I wouldn't be filled with appreciation for the good I've lost. Without anger, I'd never learn to compromise and forgive. Without frustration, I would not feel motivation to change my ways. Without despair, I would never learn to pick myself up. This whirlwind of feelings - good and bad alike - make up the human condition. Strip yourself of all but happiness, and you are no longer yourself. It's fucking Matrix shit, like hooking us up to a computer where we are placed on one setting and never moved from it. You're not even human anymore. You're no better than a machine programmed to be happy all day every day.  

Well, we already are programmed machines. Unfortunately we are not programmed to be happy all day every day. Evolution couldn't have cared less how we felt about how it programmed us. Anyway, what I am seeing here I find unconvincing. People who are often in despair are precisely the ones who never pick themselves up. Depression is a stark reality. It doesn't improve you. It just ruins you. It keeps you stuck in a tiny shell, in your bed, with a total lack of motivation and zest for going out and doing things and improving. Happy people are the ones who go out and embrace new things and work on improving themselves, etc. Nor do I see a definite connection between anger and compromise and forgiveness.

Would you be empty and 2-d if you looked at everything with only happiness all the time? Seems like an impoverished view when you consider all the things other than... suffering... which a person can consist of. Why the pain-worship? There are so many things out there that inherently have nothing to do with pain. Seems to me more like something you might use as a badge of honor or a view you might take as a coping mechanism. As one guy put it, if humans got hit on the head with a bat every week, soon they would come up with reasons it was a good thing. It builds character! It's part of the full splendor of the universe! If they didn't get hit by the bat, how could they know the good times when they saw them?!

These are rationalizations. In an ideal world, we might as well admit, things would just be good. Suffering is suffering because it is bad. What is getting in the way here is not the principles themselves, those are extremely straightforward. It's parochialism. It's the failure to imagine things simply being different. We have a way of only seeing what we have come to know in our limited experience. To imagine things being otherwise seems alien and repugnant because it is unknown and out of the accustomed context (it's also very hard to fill in any details about such a radically different existence, making it seem monochromatic). But boil it down to principles and you get your answer. Being happy is, by definition, something people like. At the very least, if you have gotten used to the idea of death you should have little or no problem with this. In death you lose everything you value about being human too, because you're dead.

Two possibilities seem to exist with Heaven. Either you go in with the mind you have now, and you quickly grow sick of eternity and suffer because of it. Or you are stripped of all emotions but happiness and you live an empty, mindless existence for the rest of forever.

Both thoughts make me sick. I'd rather just die naturally, as nature intended. If you truly fear death so much that you are willing to resign yourself to an eternity of that, of surrendering your humanity and your personhood, then be my guest. But personally, I'd have to say fuck that.

Again, it seems to me like you're actually the one who fears death, logically speaking. There is no difference between being stripped of your emotions and living a mindless existence and death. Well, one difference: the fact that one involves spectacular bliss. I think if you got a taste you'd probably take a liking to it.

What does nature intend? That you die at about the age of 25. Of, like, an infection, or diarrhea, or something. We've left "what nature intends" behind a long, long time ago. You really wouldn't like what nature intends.