(June 2, 2015 at 11:34 am)wallym Wrote: If God's a giant douchebag, but heaven is super awesome, and hell sucks balls (in a bad way), I'd definitely bend a knee to get the nice eternity. Eternity seems like a long time to be standing on one's principles.This is a problem with the concept of Yahweh. He's ultra-powerful and utterly without anyone who can stop him from doing what he wants, and his desires and attitude (indeed, his whole personality) can change drastically. Perhaps with the exception of his willingness to fuck you up eight ways to Sunday, anyway.
Which means that if you make it to heaven, you might be quite surprised to hear the announcement that "the next million-years will be considered the 'opposites era' and everyone in heaven will switch places with everyone in hell." I wonder how many spirit beings will find that they remember the feeling of having their sphincters spasmodically clench quite vividly at that point? And remember, when you get back from your million-year torture session, you'd better run up to Yahweh and tell him how awesome and just and good and righteous he was for violating your soul like that, because his every action is good by definition. And you probably wouldn't want to upset him at that point in time. You'd just go back to your happy cloud, knowing that it might not be that long before he decides that the next 'opposites era' will last a billion years.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
