Somehow I miss that line-thank you.
On the other hand, if believers are allow to witness in this thread, it is no longer a collection of speculative ideas, but a debate.
Poster #1: “If I could design Heaven, it would be…”
Poster #2: “No, you are wrong! Heaven is really like…”
Poster #1: “How can I possibly be wrong about the way I would design my heaven?”
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
I’d like to see religious leaders exposed as frauds and held open to ridicule, and see religious followers say “Oh, now I get it. There doesn’t need to be a God at all, does there?”
My heaven would be to become part of a universal consciousness where I could choose to experience everything in the past present or future from all different perspectives.
I’d accept the following as a fine heaven, though there’s one somewhat problematic caveat from a personal perspective:
Heaven is a bunch of immortal people who want for nothing, sitting around writing stories for each other to read and conducting role-playing games for each other to play together. The games can be of any kind and entered or exited at will, with no compulsion; they exist merely for the fun of playing them. As with any other story or game, trials that take place in the stories or games exist to provide excitement and variety and challenge to an otherwise placid world - but they do not cause actual suffering for the player participating, even if their in-game avatar or the character in the story they’re reading suffer.
In this model, reality as we know it would of course be just another of these stories. One could have fun discussing the details of this but at the moment I’ll only mention one, the caveat I mentioned earlier:
The problem with this heaven is I don’t get to go to it! I can experience suffering, so I’m clearly an avatar or a story character, not a player or a reader. And avatars and story characters only exist in the context of their stories. Sure there might be a player outside controlling me, but I don’t have their mind and memories so they’re not me. Which means I will end when the game or story ends. Bummer.
I will have a light sabre.
There will be dinosaurs.
Some of my family will be there and all of my friends and pets.
There will be Cabo Wabo and really tasty buds.
I will have access to, and know how to fly, lots of world war II aircraft.
Orgies with the hottest porn stars.
I’ll be able to talk to all the historically famous people.
I will find out whether or not bigfoot is real.
Fast food won’t give me the shits.
All the sushi I can eat.
Free HBO.
Beach setting.
Daily concerts by Zeppelin, Marley, The Doors, etc…
Some sort of Holodeck.
Massages.
Long hot showers.
Beach house.
Oh, and I can fly (like superman - not in a plane)
I’m sure I’m forgetting things, but this covers the important stuff.
Almost forgot, bacon will be a critical component of my heaven. Maybe bacon trees everywhere so I can just reach out and grab a piece any time I want.
If there’s an atheist heaven
you know they’ve got a hell of a band
Why do you assume that athiesm and a belief in the possibility of life after death are not compatible?
Being an athiest myself, I’ve given a lot of thought to the subject, and I have to conclude that I just don’t know. I don’t believe there’s a God, but I believe there may be an infinite or near-infinite universe. Certainly the astronomical evidence we have suggests that the universe is either infinite or vastly bigger than the tiny part of it we can currently see.
If that’s the case, then there’s every possibility that my brain will show up again somewhere, which also contains the circuitry of the memories of this brain, just through sheer luck. After all, in an infinite universe, the improbable-yet-possible becomes certain. Would that make me ‘wake up’? Hell if I know. For all I know, every time I go to sleep I ‘die’, and when I wake up I just have the illusion of a continuous life because yesterday’s memories are still there when my new self wakes up.
What if the future holds a universe in which computing power continues to grow, until we have computing machines that are so much more powerful than a human brain that they can just randomly assemble the circuitry of entire brains, and create random memories? If this is iterated enough times, and the universe is infinite, then at some point my brain will be created again, and I might wake up.
Hell, the math shows that if the universe is infinite, there are already infinite earths out there, identical in every way to this one. Even if it’s not infinite, the probably of an identical ‘me’ being born is still greater than zero.
These are questions of physics and metaphysics - not questions of religion. As a skeptic and an athiest, I have to say that I have no evidence that I’ll ever perceive a thing again after this brain dies. But I can still contend with the possibility that I might.
To directly answer the OP, I guess my idea of ‘heaven’ would be a future in which some being or computer or random process recreates my brain, memories and all, and I ‘wake up’ again. Only this time in a future where there is technology to allow me to choose my own limits of consciousness and intellect and how long and on what terms I wish to continue living.
On the other hand, if this is what the future holds, then I’ll also have my brain created with bad memories, false memories, horrific pain impulses, or I’ll be a fleeting consciousness in a sea of false memories and strange mutations to who I am, from the barely changed to the unrecognizable. So it could also be my definition of hell.
Something similar to what we have, but time wouldn’t run out unless you wanted it to.
On the one hand, I would say that this the “new you” is a different person than the old you, so this isn’t rebirth, ressurection, or afterlife; this is cloning.
On the other hand, your clone would never know the difference (since it’d have “your” memories, or rather a copy thereof). So, er, yeah.
So if I drown tomorrow and all activity in my brain stops, but paramedics revive me twenty minutes later, am I now a clone? Or am I still me?
Now take it farther. I die tomorrow, and my brain is destroyed and I’m buried. Two billion years from now, some artificial intelligence reproduces an idential copy of my brain, and turns it on. I ‘wake up’. Am I a clone now?
I realize we’re treading into hoary old territory about the nature of existence, the ‘soul’ and what it means to be alive. As an athiest, I tend to look at these things mechanistically. There’s no soul, no mystical ‘essence’ of me that’s required for me to be reconstituted. There are just chemicals and electrical impulses. Reproduce those exactly, and I should ‘wake up’ again, right?
If you intuitively think there’s some kind of difference between temporary brain function cessation, and the destruction and re-creation of the web of neurons and chemicals that are my brain, you’ll have to explain it to me.
My version of heaven?
Sitting in the “Christian” section of the place where souls go waiting for reincarnation directing the foot traffic to the appropriate place (does this make sense?)
That’s a fine looking brain.
Yes, you are.
My atheist heaven? A universe where everything is possible and no one gets hurt, I suppose. You want it, you got it. You can try it all, twice. And once you’re sick of existence, and you’re really sure you don’t want to be extant any more, you can sign the waiver and just fade away.
Specifically you are treading into the hoary old territory about how we decide two things are the same thing. Me at 4 and me at 34 - same person? Different people? Clearly there are stark physical differences; there’s not even that strong a physical resemblance. (I didn’t have much of a beard back then.) But most people would concede that at least in some way, I’m the same person - I get to still use the same birth certificate, after all.
The thing that lets me claim a shared identity with me thirty years ago (or thirty seconds ago) is continuity of existence from moment to moment inbetween. Sure, I don’t have hardly any of the same cells now that I had back then, but if we take it in one second intervals, there’s been significant continuity of existence. Similarly I’m now in a completely different location than I was then, hundreds of miles away, but if you look at it second by second, there’s some pretty noticeable continuity of location. These significant continuities of various kinds allows me to claim that I’m the same person I was a second ago, or earlier.
If you die and are revived, there is significant continuity of your physical form and even your brain; all that’s changed is your brain state, which let’s face it is pretty fluid anyway, with all those electrons zipping around all the time. So, your revived body isn’t a clone. If you’re a revived digital copy, though, there is no continuity of any kind; you’re just similar to the original you - and the similarity is frankly pretty limited.
To illustrate the difference, consider this - what’s stopping the artificial intelligence from making that copy of you now? While you’re still alive? You could have a conversation with it. You could grow and develop in different ways from this point on. Would you be the same person?
ETA: Dangit you’re too fast, jinty!
I play this from time to time.
I can’t fathom non-existence. Can’t wrap my head around it, so I play with alternatives. Some say the near-death experiences are misfiring neurons in a dying brain, which doesn’t sound impossible. I think that, as you die, you might experience your last moments as an eternity, since you can’t, after all, experience non-existence. It won’t LAST an eternity of course, but subjectively, it may seem to.
That accepted as a premise, I sometimes think of what I’d like to spend eternity doing, should I ever be in a spot where I have time to prepare for the final moments and fix it in my mind. I figure that this would not be a good time for something overly complicated, so my current idea for this is remembering one or both of a couple particularly nice vacations I was on with my ex, when things were going well for me in most every aspect of my life and I felt on top of the world.
If there IS life-after-death, regardless of the involvement of a deity, I have some more involved ideas. Why not? Don’t cost nuthin’.
The more complicated ideas involve exploration of the earth, and the universe as a whole, with the ability to teleport AND move as fast as the speed of light, so that I can get where I need to be. I contemplate understanding EVERYTHING I wonder about now, and what I might discover and think about then. Seeing ppl who’ve died and I miss. Getting answers to questions about my life, like, “What if I’d done this instead of that?”, or “What’s the one point in my life that I could have changed something that would result in the best, or worst, outcome?” Basically, the means and time to know everything I would ever want to, to travel wherever I want to, and meet up with those I miss.
A recurring theme in this thread, is a desire to be omniscient. I wonder if this would actually be more of a curse than a gift. If you knew all the answers to all the questions, and there were no more secrets and mysteries, would that be a good thing? I would want to retain a sense of wonder (while I float in an endless sea of bacon).
Guy here. Anti theist.
My vision of heaven would be present day Earth. After all, you can’t appreciate the good without the bad. Some of the crazy, however, such as discrimination and illogical hatred of others, wouldn’t exist, which would also mean religion wouldn’t exist.
I understand that such a heaven would be an absolute hell for a good number of our conservative friends, but there you go.
yeah, that sounds like the life. Or after-life. Or whatever.
