14 virgins doesn’t appeal to me all that much. What will I do on the 8th day?
I think it might be interesting if we were involved in something creative. Remember Richard Dreyfus in that movie about pilot fire fighters. He got to go back and help his sweetheart move on. In the process he learned something more as well.
even leaving this life I’d say I have a lot of room for learning and growth. Perhaps after we complete the cycle we get to start again.
I liked the movie Defending Your Life. The point was overcoming fear. If you did you moved on to the next level. If not you got to go back and try again. I like your choice of words. With the choices we make in this life we are designing the circumstances of the next one. Do we have compassion, courage, honor? Do we see and act according to our connection to others or do we live selfish disconnected lives?
The book Stranger in a Strange Land presented a pretty good one.
Major spoiler:
Every religion is correct. You go to whatever afterlife you believe in. You can also visit other religion’s afterlifes if you wish. Tired of Valhalla? Go be one with with everything for a while, or go chill in the Elysian Fields. For an archaeologist this would be the true heaven. Go visit dead cultures and explorer their mythologies in person! How can it get more exciting than that?
Always, an inferior remake of Spencer Tracy’s A Guy Named Joe.
It was actually purgatory for both characters. They had to let go of their earthly attachments, from which they’d been removed without time to prepare, before moving to the next level of The Afterlife Game.
Me, I’ll pick The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Interesting. Never saw a guy named Joe but I love Spencer Tracy. I’ll check it out. I liked Always quite a bit. I mean Dreyfus, Holly Hunter, ?
I’ll check out Restaurant flick. I like the genre. Thanks for the tips.
Atheists can believe in the memory-wipe + reincarnation thing too. It depends on what you understand consciousness to be.
Hell is being the bleach boy!
Do you have any sources, especially on the Talmud? I just found the Socino Talmud online and I’d like to read what exactly is said.
All true, but still: when I die, I want Audrey Hepburn to welcome me to the other side. Nothing with Audrey Hepburn in it can be all bad.
No hot Valkyries for you mate!
You get to play war all day, party all night with the Goddess of Love. Beer ad libitum. And do it all over again next day without a hangover. What possible could be better?
Yeah, great. What if you’re a female?
Doesn’t sound like heaven to me, nor does having a bunch of houris, even if it is fair to both sexes and I get my share of male houris. No thanks.
I would prefer the Hindu one. Every lifetime is working toward the end goal of moksha, freedom from the shackles of this world, and a Oneness and Unity with all the universe and all life within.
'Cept I don’t entirely understand it, but that’s because I’m shackled to this body, of course.
What if this world is someone elses idea of heaven and we are just playing a part in the dramatic afterlife of some stranger?
That’s apparently a suppressed idea among the Mormons as well. Not only do you get to be a god of a world when you die (if you’re good, at least), but that’s how Earth got here. (Thank you, Adam! Mortal of another world, God of ours.)
I was reading up on all of this last night. It really strikes me how Mormons developed such a distinct cosmology from all the other religions, which is equally fascinating. But then they go around bending themselves backwards to fit with mainstream American and Christian beliefs. The Adam-God idea was advocated early in the Church, but after receiving understandable opposition from the outside (and from some LDS members), they threw it out. Today, some pretend it was never even advocated. (Fundamentalist Mormons are the ones who still hold to it.) Even on the issue of becoming god after death, the Wikipedia pages seem to have been scrubbed clean. I doubt whether many modern mormons are taught it quite the way it was put. It’s all sad in my opinion.