When were the Gospels Written? The External and Internal Evidence.

[Angrboda]

Why should you care? I would have thought that would be obvious, because the Gospel can give you Eternal Happiness, which nothing else can. Thus, the question of whether it is the Gospel Truth or not is of the greatest importance. Tell me it is false all you wish if you want, yet don't tell me, whether it is true or not, it is not important - for that is manifestly not true. If the Gospel is false, it is a wicked deception; if the Gospel true, it is of the Greatest Importance, and can lead to the Highest Happiness, and that forever and ever.

God Bless,
Xavier.

But ‘happiness’ is a conditional state. One cannot be happy without knowledge of what it feels like to be unhappy. Thus, if you go to Heaven, you won’t be happy unless you have knowledge of your earthly unhappiness.

Consequently, in order to be maximally happy, you would have to be at least partly unhappy. The only way out is for God to make all the saved souls mindless, zoned-out zomboids.

Boru

Without the chance of failure, success is meaningless. Laozi taught that there is truth because there is falsity, ugliness because there is beauty, up because there is down. If he is correct, then there can be no happiness if there is no unhappiness. If that's true, then an eternity with only happiness is not possible. Even an eternity with very little unhappiness would not work as the less unhappiness, the less meaningful the happiness. I think that "happiness" itself is not what people value in life, but rather meaningfulness, so what the Christian god offers me is a trinket of so little value that Nishant's claim of it being important is false.

So, given that, Nishant, can you show that Laozi was wrong, that we can have happiness without unhappiness?

This raises an additional question, being that of Buddhist truths. According to Buddha, attaching to craving happiness creates suffering. The cure, supposedly, is to learn not to be affected by the ups and downs by not being attached to happiness. According to that theory, desiring eternal happiness actually makes you more unhappy and degrades your experience, rather than the reverse. Like Laozi, he seems to posit a world in which eternal bliss is not possible. What do you know that he doesn't, Nishant?