(March 25, 2021 at 2:39 pm)Five Wrote: Can I choose to disobey God once I am in Heaven?
Isn't that the same as sin? Opposition to the will of God.
Is there sin in Heaven?
I don't believe that the idea of Heaven and Hell makes sense. Most notably regarding the problem of choice and identity.
If you no longer have the option to choose things that are wrong, to make mistakes, or to challenge/disobey God, are you even the same person?
There are a lot of different descriptions of heaven, so I don't think there's only one answer to your question. People disagree.
I can answer based on the view of heaven in Dante's Divine Comedy. It is nearly the same as the official version from Thomas Aquinas.
Heaven, for these people, is not included in time and space. There is no change there, so the idea of making mistakes there or disobeying orders doesn't make sense. This sounds terrible if we imagine eternity as infinite duration, never-ending time, but that's not what it is. Outside of time means there's no time there. No duration. It's difficult to imagine because we live in time.
Dante does analyze the notion of disobeying God, though, and how this is related to free will.
Most people here seem to imagine that God is a tyrant issuing decrees which we might be better to ignore. This is not Dante's view. For Dante, God is the form of the Good. Obeying God, then, is not following orders but simply doing what is good. This will be good for others, but also good for oneself. So if you do in every case what is best, then you are "obeying God."
You'll recognize this as completely Platonic. In this view, no one intentionally chooses the bad. If we choose to do bad, it's because we are mistaken about what's good. You might choose to commit a crime or do some kind of acting out, which society calls bad, because you think it will be good for yourself -- it will make you feel better or express your freedom or something. If in fact it's good, then you are not disobeying God -- there are times when society should be opposed or laws should be broken. If you're mistaken, and the thing you think is good for yourself is in fact bad, then God doesn't suffer from it. Only you do. So "disobeying God" mostly means hurting yourself.
This is dramatized by Dante at the end of the Purgatorio. The character Dante (who is a fictionalized version of the author) reaches the top of the mountain, and has all of his sins purged out of him. Because sin, in his view, is the set of mistaken aims which cause us to choose what is bad, when the sin is all gone then we only choose what is good.
Dante's guide, once all Dante's sin is purged, tells him that from now on he should do whatever he wants. Because without sin to distort his thinking, everything he chooses to do will be good. Which is what God wants. So that "obeying God," here, is not following tyrannical rules but just doing what you know to be best, once you are thinking well.
