(April 7, 2019 at 9:03 am)joe90 Wrote: Just wondering, do Atheists like the idea of the afterlife? Do they wish that there was one? Or would they rather have eternal oblivion after death? This is not a troll question.
By far the best description of European concepts of heaven is in The Great Chain of Being, by A.O. Lovejoy.
Available here: http://library1.org/_ads/8048ECA10BDB2B1...BE5FFC02B6
This book is safe for atheist consumption, since it is a history of ideas, and doesn't try to persuade us of anything.
The author points out that there are two general pictures of heaven (or other ideal afterlife situations):
The first is that the ideal afterlife is pretty much a continuation of the present life, only better.
The other is that heaven would be fundamentally, ontologically different -- perhaps to the point of being indescribable. Everybody here knows, probably, that this is the version described by Dante and all the main theologians. So the idea of being bored in this kind of heaven is inconceivable.