It’s been a long day — classes and lots of grading. I was ready to sit back and switch off my brain and take it easy, and then Mr Deity dives into the tangled twisty logic of paradise, and suddenly I’ve got a brain-ache.
I don’t even like Disneyland, why would I want immortality of any kind, let alone one where I’m supposed to be happy for eternity? I think the only afterlife I’d like would be the kind where I get to storm the gates of heaven and end the whole tyrannical empire.
I think that a personal relationship with God would be about the last thing one would want, well, anywhere.
Immortality would be great, just so long as you could get frozen for, say, 100 years, if the time you woke up really sucks.
Glen Davidson
cue Ren and Stimpy
“Happy happy joy joy happy happy joy joy happy happy joy joy joy…”
I don’t have to imagine. There is no heaven, or hell for that matter. I am able to distinguish fact from biblical fiction.
There is no heaven, and nothing to imagine, which is a good thing. The christian heaven sounds almost exactly like North Korea. I’ve never understood why anyone would even want to imagine it in the first place.
Off topic: quick news flash (for what it’s worth):
The upcoming Reason Rally was part of a quick joke in one of Jay Leno’s monologue jokes tonight (more mention to come in upcoming monologues no doubt).
Hey folks,… it’s a long way to the top, but were getting copy!
(Excellent! A new Mr. Deity! Haven’t seen any in a while. :)
Careful, killing Jesus again might unlock another afterlife.
While I wouldn’t mind being able to live until I’m good and sick of it, actual immorality would be torture by another name.
I mean, you’re living forever, forever — oh, and in this scenario you have to worship at the feet of a fucking monster while you’re at it. And smile, dammit, this is the best you can ask for.
One of the bigger factors in my leaving the church and becoming an atheist was how our religious teachers and leaders always seemed to draw a blank whenever they were asked to describe what heaven would be like for the Good People. What happens to Bad People? They could fill a library with that. But heaven? Mitt Romney’s recent speech about how much he loves Michigan, where the trees are the right height (and apparently whatever else he can come up with off the top of his head) was less like a flailing panic of “FUCK! What do I say??!” than what my pastor would tell me. That was another thing, depending on who I asked, the answer would change drastically — ask my youth pastor and it sounded like a 24-7 3DG3Y amusement park, but ask my grandma and it sounded more like an eternity at the adult daycare center, and everywhere in-between.
Somehow, no one ever managed to come up with a sales pitch for The Greatest Reward Ever that didn’t sound completely idiotic, or that would hold up to scrutiny (RE: the free will and relatives-in-eternal-torture problems mentioned in the video, for one). And that’s because the idea of heaven doesn’t.
Glen:
QFT!
I don’t get it with theists. They say humanity is here to spread the glory of god. We’re supposed to revere and respect him. We’re supposed to honor and love him. We’re supposed to do his will. If all our time on Earth is taken up serving god’s will, why is it so glorious to die, go to heaven and serve god’s will for all eternity? That yahweh guy has to be the most insecure (or egocentric) fictional character ever.
@Outrage Zombie #8
That’d be because Guilt-Be-Gone is what’s being sold, in addictive short-lived doses, along with a Guilt supplement.
Heaven’s just a secretive club where people who feel guilty aren’t allowed in.
So it must be filled with confident happy people.
Of if Jesus sneaks you in the backdoor, you get to hang out with them, and some of that cheer’ll rub off on you.
Richard Wiseman has put up a poll which I think is an interest to this community:
http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/should-we-vote-for-the-state-religion/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RichardWisemansBlog+%28Richard+Wiseman%27s+Blog%29
IDK I might enjoy going to Valhalla :-D
Ive actually been thinking about how cool itd be to have immortality a lot recently (though more along the lines of how cool itd be to be a vampire lol) because then Id finally have time to listen to every song I might like, read every book, and watch every good movie, ect. So I guess if there is a heaven it might be having the time to do everything.
PZ is posing for a new trilogy: His Darker Materials…
I’m still waiting on an answer to the question of how God is going to stop this here heaven place from going pear-shaped just like all His previous efforts. I mean, for someone with all those omnis, he sure is useless at the old hands-on, micro-management thing. Free will, there’s His problem from the beginning right there. He never really thought that one out too well. But, hey, nobody’s perfect.
Shouldn’t Johnny be wearing swim trunks and a towel around his shoulders?
Curses, starskeptic beat me to the Philip Pullman reference.
If there is no choice but eternity, I’ll go with heaven, and I’d gladly pick not dying, over dying, any day.
I don’t know about you people, but I’d rather have the option of dealing with boredom if, or when, it came, than having no options.
There’s always more to read and learn than you have time for, I imagine ;)
Well, I’m not really impressed by any of those “gotcha” questions that John, aka “The Baptist”, was asking the LORD our God there.
John probably still has a chip on his shoulder because billions of Christians believe that Jesse was the messiah, and only a handful of Mandeans believe that John was.
Sour grapes much, Johnno?
Mikelaing @ 17
OK so after you’re done with the sum of human knowledge and our sun extinguishes itself and you find out there aren’t any other life forms in the universe. Then what?
Given god’s obsession with worship, what if there is no free time in heaven? What if eternity is just one long church service to the glory of the creator?
The cowardly childish idiotic heaven fantasy (which makes terrorism possible) is extremely important to Christians. To believe in a heaven they of course have to be gullible morons. Also, they have to believe people were magically created out of nothing to be completely separate from the rest of nature. Evolution kills this bullshit, therefore Christians must either completely deny evolution or they must stick Jeebus into it somewhere. Accepting evolution as pure science (without supernatural intervention) is out of the question for the cowards who need to believe in another life after dropping dead.
My point is for Christians to fully accept the evidence for evolution they must first throw out their death cult. Atheists who dishonestly say Christians can accept both evolution and Jeebus are doing it wrong. To improve scientific literacy in Idiot America, the idiots must first learn how to grow up. They have to throw out Christianity.
No, they just have to think human animals have a grafted-on ghostly escape pod called a soul (so they can get out of their corpse into happyland) that is conveniently ill-defined, suspiciously redundant, and so far undetected.
Evolution interferes with origin stories, not afterlife.
That depends on which Jeebus.
– Jesus the blood sacrifice to atone for Adam and Eve? *shrug*
– Jesus the magic hippie cult leader who rambled instructions regarding an afterlife (from a presumed reliable source) then got himself killed? Threatened by physics, medicine, etc, but not evolution.
Like you?
I am so happy to see more Mr. Deity! The whole series is just fantstic.
Yes, that’s all I had to say. I’m not feeling very deep today.
Anyone who wants to live for ever simply hasn’t thought very hard about infinity. What do you do after you’ve been around the universe counting every atom in it, to stave off the boredom? You’d be spending another eternity just wishing that you could die.
When the question comes up with a believer, I just ask them what age their parents and children will be in heaven. Naturally, their children will be stuck in childhood, and their parents will be older than them. Then I point out how selfish that is, and they invent all sorts of things to get around that conundrum. As I say, none of them have actually thought about it at all.
…you know, for all the time I’ve spent traumatized by hellfire and worse, I never really thought too closely about the impossibility and/or absurdity of heaven. All of these are really good points.
Now I do think about it, however, the concept of heaven is yet another stake in the heart of the Abrahamic God. It has to do with the free-will theodicies so lovingly favored by Plantinga and his ilk.
These basically go “God is omni-yaddayaddauadda and could have made a perfect paradise, but you whiny atheists forget, he gave us fweeeee willlll! And because he values fweeee willll over everything else, he has to let us suffer the consequences of fweeee willll, up to and including being thrown by him into the Hell he made for the sins he knew we’d commit before he made us or gave us fweeeee willll.”
Leaving aside the inherent sadism here, I’ve a question for people like this. Two actually. One: is there free will in heaven? And two, can one sin in heaven?
If yes to both, how does heaven differ from anywhere else, and can you be thrown out? Hey, it happened once! If there is free will but no sin, the free will theodicies fail because obviously God could make a place with one but not the other and already did. The third option (sin but no free will) isn’t coherent. And the fourth option, neither free will nor sin, raises the question of what’s so damn important about free will anyway.
These things really do not stand the test of critical thought, do they? :)
You’d love this:
http://www.dccomics.com/vertigo/graphic_novels/?gn=1653
What got me as a kid in church was when they said “Accept Jesus as your savior and have everlasting life.” And then said that if you did not accept Jesus then you would burn in hell for eternity. Wait, I thought, wouldn’t you have everlasting life in hell too?
That’s the thing, juice. In hell you have to play “The Game of Life” for eternity. No backgammon breaks or anything. And the person to your left is actually a demon who is annoyingly into the game and won’t stop talking about what they think is gonna happen next.
So it’s kind of like visiting my Dad’s brother in Edina when I was a kid.
Sadly, that’s what I think Christians mean, or the bible, by Heaven. Uninterrupted, infinite, worship and prostrating before god, because you love him so much you can ever express it deeply enough.
I would rather be dead than go to Christian, Jewish, or Islamic heaven … no wonder god is such a [very bad swear word], he must be so bored that he keeps seeing how much he can fuck people over and they still love him.
Heaven is the ultimate practical joke, now I get it!
It occurred to me recently that any heaven imaginable is ultimately indistinguishable from hell. Any god that wants you to live forever is a sadist.
Aack. That would be hell. Assuming you are talking about the Hasbro game of that name.
As a kid in the 60’s and 70’s that was one of the games we played together as a family. And had a blast.
Thinking I could capture some of that. I bought the game in the 90’s to play with my family.
It was truly amazing. Somewhere along the line, somebody at Hasbro went thru that game and painstakingly identified every element that actually make the game fun. And then eliminated just those elements.
Sad really…