Not getting bogged down in detailed definitions of Heaven/Hell here - just go fast and loose with the definitions - how many people in the world do you think *ought *to go to each?
(Not about what any religion says about it, but just your own opinion/preference)
I’m sure there are plenty of people who would judge me unworthy of Heaven. I disagree. So why should I feel my judgement is any more correct than theirs?
Hell doesn’t really make a lot of sense as a permanent place (thanks Dante!), so as a sort of reformatory, I’d say that the vast majority of people end up in Hell or Purgatory, with very, very few
if any ending up in Heaven out of the gate.
That said, I think the corollary is that eventually EVERYONE ends up in Heaven, as they come to understand the nature of sin and separation from God as part of their stay in Hell.
I don’t think anyone “deserves” eternal anything, so if we all have to have an eternal existence it’s better for it to be a happy one.
That’s up to you: Heaven & Hell are metaphorical places rather than metaphysical ones, so people you like go to Heaven and people you dislike go to Hell.
Simple.
I chose not to answer because neither eternal mindless bliss nor eternal torment is merited by anybody.
Honestly, both sound horrific.
Good news, though - nobody will go to either! Annihilation for everybody!
Looking at the standard justifications for punishment: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation and incapacitation.
While many people on earth are deterred from evil based on the idea that they will go to hell, no one actually knows what actually happens to people, so whether we actually send people to hell or just let everyone into heaven has no deterrent effect.
As far as rehabilitation and incapacitation goes, they are based on the idea the idea of preventing that individual from performing bad acts either while he is under punishment or in the future. Since presumably heaven is eternal paradise where it is impossible to take actions that hurt others, these are irrelevant as well.
So all that leaves us with is retribution. I’ve nenver really been all that big on revenge, any net increase in suffering without some sort of positive payoff is bad in my opinion, even if the person has caused suffering to others. And even if I believed that punishment for its own sake was moral, no mater how bad a person is, personally experiencing all of the suffering they caused some 10 million times over seems overkill to me, much less an eternity, so there is a far greater evil to the person condemned to hell, than the moral hazard of letting such a person into heaven.
So if heaven and hell are your only two options everyone should go to heaven.
ETA: I am very curious about the person who voted all should go to hell, since the logical conclusion would have to be that that person themselves would prefer to go to hell, which is contrary to the basic definition of the distinction between heaven and hell.
All dogs go to Heaven, except maybe for one cocker spaniel of my acquaintance.
I don’t imagine myself to be in any kind of position to determine something like that.
It seems to me like most people are pretty okay, a small percentage of people are heroically good, and a small percentage of people are truly evil.
Being “pretty okay”, to me, doesn’t merit eternal punishment nor eternal bliss.
Heroic goodness may merit eternal bliss, and horrible evil may merit eternal punishment.
But since I didn’t put the universe together and I don’t run the afterlife, there’s no good answer to the poll.
I’m not answering the poll due to lack of information. Is it possible for someone to see the error of their ways when dead? In that case, no one should go to hell.
I’m in favor of the heaven and hell in Shaw’s “Man and Superman” which allows people to freely move between one and another.
Is there one heaven or several. In “Heavenly Discourse” a series of satirical sketches published after WW I, Robert Ingersoll the great freethinker is one of the members of the discussion group in heaven. When Bill Sunday the preacher died, God sent him to monkey heaven - until the monkeys protested at him being too noisy.
I’ll skip the semantics and various caveats and say it could probably be a 60/40 or 70/30 split on heaven/hell.
I’ll go with all [del]dogs[/del] people go to heaven. Judging what happens to you for all eternity by what you did for a few decades is–given the timescale–indistinguisable from judging what happens to you for all eternity by what you did during a sneeze. These few short decades are utterly insignificant at that scale. After a few trillion years in heaven, do you really not think that Anne Frank and Adolph Hitler could enjoy a laugh together about getting so worked up over that Holocaust thing?
If ever there was any evidence that this board is full of crazy lefties, I guess the “Free Heaven for Everyone” option having 60% of the vote is about as good of evidence as you would ever need.
Y’all is crazy and don’t understand the world, but I guess I’m glad that you’re all optimists at least.
For the record, if you somehow end up in charge, I have a clear preference for eternal bliss.
Conservatives would condemn liberals to Hell. Liberals would forgive conservatives and let them into Heaven.
And you feel the conservative system is better?
It’ll be ironic if God’s a conservative and he agrees with you. And the only people he lets into Heaven are those who were willing to show mercy. All the people who would have condemned somebody else to Hell, get sent there themselves.
Interesting qualifier, “mindless”. Where did you pick that up?
I’ve thought the same exact thing regarding the Calvinists I once associated with.
Calvinism is generous on damnation, even claiming that unreached tribes who had never heard of Jesus would be damned to hell on account of their lack of faith in the one they hadn’t heard of.
Would be quite ironic if there was some caveat necessary for salvation that Calvinists hadn’t heard of that damned them to hell.
Well, if it’s my heaven and my hell, then everyone should go to heaven. I don’t think even Hitler should go to my version of hell, not forever anyways. Humans can conceive of some pretty fucking horrible ideas of hell, and I imagine an immortal could come up with even worse, so my hell is basically “inconceivably bad”. The most horrible thing you’ve seen in a movie pales in comparison. Total Annihilation would be much preferable.
My hope is there is no hell. Could be wrong though.
I don’t know what heaven is like either, but I can’t imagine playing harps for eternity at God’s feet would be all that fun either, no matter how much euphoria is being pumped out.
I cannot presume to say even what proportion of people “ought to” get what afterlife.
I’m a leftie and a Christian universalist. I do think that we all go to heaven, but not due to our own actions, but rather the grace of God. I think that ultimately he wants the reconciliation of all people. I might be able to be convinced that there’s a temporary Hell/Purgatory for the Hitlers of the world, but I think that God’s forgiveness could even reach him. Are we deserving of going to Heaven? No, probably not a single one of us. Humans are selfish, nasty little creatures as a general rule, but I think God loves us enough to overlook our foibles. I think that that is ultimately the fulfillment of the law as embodied by Christ. We’re all far short of where we need to be and God loves us so much he is willing to suffer and die for us anyway.