I like this Mark Twain friend of yours!
Yes. But existing in a changed, non-boreable form goes against the premise stated in the OP, which requires that the people in Heaven retain their personalities. If you are allowed to change and develop in this hypothetical afterlife; how could you retain your personality, and why would you even want to?
I mean the popular depiction of heaven. As essentially a very bright outdoor church. May or may not be in the clouds.
Yes I know. I’m saying I disagree that premise is necessarily agreed by all, and that it’s necessarily a “bad” afterlife without that premise.
Not a believer but I understood that the eternal joy was supposed to result from asking in your God’s magnificent presence and love. Not trying to insult, but I always sorta equated it with a drug-induced bliss. Or I sorta respected folk who think there is some spiritual “essence” that somehow becomes part of the universe, and that mortals can’t really comprehend what that would be like. Sorta like the shapeshifters in DS9.
Is it common for adults to really think of heaven as their life on earth perfected? Will I see my dead dog? Will I have an eternal good hair day? What will my golf handicap be? Being a nonbeliever, I sorta thought that was trope nonbelievers enjoyed to make fun of peoples’ beliefs, rather than something a lot of folk actually believed.
Maybe there’s a distinction between how people think of, or imagine, heaven, and what they believe heaven will actually be like (which would include aspects that are so different from our present experience that they are difficult or impossible to imagine)?
For example, @Chronos’s point upthread about eternity may be correct, but it’s difficult if not impossible for me to imagine what it would be like to live in eternity rather than in time.
Bingo!
I find it pretty easy, myself. Change requires time. Action requires time. Thinking and doing require time. So if you were not experiencing time, then you aren’t experiencing anything at all, since the act of experiencing anything requires time. So if ‘eternity’ means ‘not experiencing time’, then it is functionally the same as being dead or nonexistent. And it certainly doesn’t describe anything the biblical god is experiencing, because he, you know, does things.
A more plausible way to describe the theorized God’s relationship to time is to be outside our time, such that he can rewind and fastforward it like a movie, or examine any part of it or all parts of it at will. The god would have his own time that it experiences to give it a medium in which to take actions (so to speak) but its relationship to us would be like our relationship to a book.
Such a model doesn’t bode well for the so-called ‘libertarian’ version of free will, but then, neither does reality in general.
That was my experience also. However there is some belief that we are all going to get bodily reincarnated some time in the future, which is why the prohibition on autopsies and tattoos. God apparently can’t sew us back together again. So that’s kind of an afterlife.
The evidence of this is that it was a big deal when some prophets got transported to heaven (where God is), which it wouldn’t be if everyone got there. Plus, on Yom Kippur you pray to live the next year, not to go to heaven.
I think C.S. Lewis wrote about this issue but off the top of my head I’d say people in Heaven can experience a range of emotions they’d find familiar (and the positive ones to a much greater degree) which would include the appropriate responses when consuming media of an emotional nature rather than watching and shrugging in a robotic like fashion. The idea is that you’re enhanced, not diminished. I meant no one would get depressed or intensely miserable/sad like so many people do on Earth (often for months and years at a time). There’s a huge difference between crying because of a sad film (or getting scared by a horror film) and crying because there’s some pathological condition at work, something unpleasant happened to you or you don’t have much if anything to be happy about.
If you’re not going for the mindless bliss route, it’s difficult to see how everyone can be happy all the time - and I still see no solution for the ennui problem. Yes, a lot of unhappiness can be resolved by correcting biochemical problems and eliminating scarcity, but an absence of unhappiness is not bliss…
You can’t get sadder, you can’t get happier, and there is no possibility of anything new and/or exciting happening. All wonderment is gone. The proverbial goldfish in a bowl would have it better-at least she would be excited every time the toy castle came into view.
Well, give or take if it’s the kind of heaven where you have happiness shoved into your mind with a backhoe and considerations like wonderment and ennui are a complete non-issue.
Some of the things I’ve heard about christianity suggest to me that their heaven works this way, actually. Specifically, that merely being in the presence of the deity will completely overwhelm and subjugate your mind, presuming it doesn’t just outright incinerate you. Heaven is being in the presence of god, hell is being apart from him. And of course the complete and total lack of description of anything happening in heaven at all to make it a better place than earth. Just that you can be with your dead relatives, and that you’re happy. Just because.
Yep, sounds like brainwashing to me. Not anything that I’d want to experience myself, mind you. Fortunately for me it’s all fictional and what’s actually awaiting us is oblivion. Sweet, sweet oblivion.
I have been told by religionists that if I go to heaven “All you will want to do is worship The Lord”.
Will somebody explain to me why this isn’t brainwashing?
It’s not brainwashing because you will want to do it. Your eyes will be opened to the Truth. You’ll have an epiphany and all will become clear to you. An A-Ha moment times infinity. Certainly this can be relatable even in a non-religious context.
Holy crap-You really don’t understand what brainwashing is, do you?
I don’t want to do it. Now what?
Are you serious (I’m honestly confused)? Because that sounds like one of the most monstrous tortures I can imagine. Annihilation will be bliss…
All day long you’ll say “It’s a Good Life, God.” Please don’t send me to the cornfield.
Are you taking what @Jay_Z wrote literally, at face value? Or are you showing the kind of suspicion that would probably be natural towards someone who uses such language?
If the actual truth really does become clear to you, how is that torture?