(July 21, 2017 at 10:41 am)bennyboy Wrote:(July 21, 2017 at 10:08 am)LadyForCamus Wrote: I wonder sometimes if any religious folk out there harbor a secret fear of their promised-land. Trying to imagine what the experience of being with god is like must be as futile an exercise as trying to imagine non-existence. They, themselves, often purport that god's greatness is too powerful for our mere mortal brains to comprehend, so I have to think there must be at least some degree of anxiety attached to the notion that when you die, you're leaving what you know, and are familiar with, and crossing into the unknowable.If there's something "out there," and it involves immortality, it's unlikely to involve our status in the well-meaning struggle of hairless monkeys. I cant imagine how sex would be reconciled-- you gonna show up in heaven and have Gramps at 20 years old, packing wood in his 1940's vogue golf pants? Is Tomb Raider-era Angelina Jolie going to be okay with me trying to rub baby oil on her 24/7?
Nah, you have to be 100% right on this. Whatever might be there, it's not what's here, and whoever that dude is, if it's human, it's not me. Soul or no soul, experience or no experience, bennyboy has to metamorphose into something radically different at best, or just disappear.
I think that sums up the problem with heaven all round for me; to the extent that its perfection is based on individual human wants, especially where those wants may be interpersonal, it's impossible to please everybody one hundred percent of the time. So heaven as a place... a perfect environment to live in... does not make sense to me as even a logically coherent concept, let alone a possibility.
Add to that the fact that most, if not all, human wants/needs come from a negative opposite state... the enjoyment of sleep is relative to tiredness, the enjoyment of food is relative to hunger etc... ie the pleasure of relief/satisfaction of a need is directly tied to, and cannot exist without, that unpleasant need in the first place, where in life the two are constantly alternating.
So to me, the most heaven could be, if it existed, was a pretty cool place most of the time, not a perfect place all of the time... basically earth with benefits... or some sort of happy but unchanging meditative state for eternity.
