I voted “Most should go to Heaven.” There are some very bad people out there, but if most people were evil and deserved to go to Hell, civilization would collapse within weeks.
That’s not necessarily true. Social organization reaps rewards even for the chronically selfish. That’s why penal colonies worked and why prisons after riots frequently form governments. (Not that all prisoners are inherently evil, but hopefully their median ‘evil-rating’ however one calculates that is higher than that for the general populace.) There are groups that I think most of us would say are inherently evil (say the Nazis) that are excellent at forming societies. Nazi society was extremely well-run, just well-run by a bunch of evil people.
Prisons work because there is a civil administrative structure and guards to enforce order. Otherwise, as a concentration of mostly-bad people, things get pretty ugly pretty fast. Post-riot prisoners do tend to form governments, of a sort, but they’re unsustainable (and unable, ultimately, to prevent their own collapse when the lawful state reasserts its authority).
Nazi society wasn’t “extremely well-run” - there was endemic corruption and wasteful, endless political intrigue as top officials vied for power, turf and Hitler’s favor. And the Nazis poured resources into killing Jews and other “undesirables” even when they would’ve been smarter to put those resources into the war effort.
ISTM that the question answers itself by definition. If I were God, I would do whatever God is doing now. Saying “I know better than God” seems like resisting the hypothetical.
Regards,
Shodan
Our spiritual selves, such as they exist as discreet things apart from God at all, are vastly “more” than we can conceive in our meat shells. To navigate the material Earth, we have bodies created/adapted to sense only a smidgen of the available stimuli in our environments. We have brains which are equipped to manage slightly less than what our senses detect. Any conscious thought we have is limited to the physical capabilities of a 3 pound lump of lard and nerves. As has been mentioned, there are conditions we might consider hellish which defy even the most adventuresome imagination. Similarly, there are blissful possibilities that satisfy elements of our being that remain unrepresented by the flesh–it is impossible, given our physical bodies, to even conceive the best and worst eternity has to offer. When the spirit is freed of the meat, I believe we may have a choice to return to and rejoin the consciousness which spawned us and animated some meat for a few years, or we can drift throughout existence on our own for as long as we find it satisfying, or until we have come to comprehend some of the more troublesome events of our time in the meat box. Perhaps the wandering is good, and the memories we have of life are not troublesome, and we just do what we do. Perhaps after a time we long for a more complete existence and return “home” to take our place in the mind of God. Perhaps not. All I am certain of is that we are not at the mercy of a supernatural being. We ARE supernatural beings, temporarily holed up in bodies for reasons we (as living critters) can’t begin to understand.
Alternatively, we are just meatbricks who think we are conscious and it all snuffs out when the meat breaks down. But that’s no fun, and it makes the whole discussion a waste of time.
The OP is explicitly asking us our opinion - what we think should be happening, independent of anything some god or other would do.
Ceding the decision to the christian god is fighting the hypothetical. 
Being a meatbrick can be plenty fun. You just have to find the right hobbies.
The whole discussion is still kind of a waste of time, though. Unless the discussion itself is fun! Which in my opinion, it is.
I assume we like to do the bodies / living critters thing for entertainment, since being supernatural creatures with eternity on our hands is otherwise gonna get rather boring.
Cosmological models like that would seem to exclude the possibility of either heaven or hell existing. That would seem to instead presume that there’s nobody judging us and sending us places at all.
I call Earth “The Arena”. Probably a concept I picked up somewhere else but don’t know where. My wife and kids think I’m nuts because sometimes I feel like I actually believe it.
Well, yes & no. I’m operating off a model wherein “God” (which is shorthand for something) imparts a fragment of its own consciousness, “spirit”, into some meat. The meat lives for a while, while the spirit learns how to function within the considerable limits of the meat, and then the spirit is freed. Now, such an experience is bound to have an effect on the spirit. If the spirit feels negatively about the experience, it wouldn’t feel right returning to God and so lives apart from It for as long as it takes to come to terms with what it just went through. It’s lonely, but feels unworthy of return. It’s in a more mental torment hell/purgatory. The judgment is from within, as is whatever necessary atonement that can return the will to return. Atonement might look like understanding that whatever happened as meat does not define and limit the true value of the spirit which never was and never will be anything less than a piece of God’s mind. This allows for an ever-forgiving & loving God, a purgatory or hell, and a heaven in spiritual reunification with God. And shit.
At the risk (and by “risk” I mean “cold hard certainty”) of veering wildly off-topic, I don’t think the notion of a “fragment of consciousness” is coherent. You can make copies, but consciousnesses are either complete and completely functional, or they’re not. And merging/subsuming one consciousness into another is an inherently destructive process - if two become one, one of the two has ceased, even if its knowledge and experience has been learned by the other.
You could construct a similiar cosmological model where “God” is a collective of separate individuals rather than an individual that’s literally scatterbrained, and where persons who wake up after being Hitler are too embarrassed to come home to the collective until everyone else has forgotten their misdeeds. (This could take a while in Adolf’s case.)
The problem with such a model (and your model) is that it explicitly presumes that even if “God” is “ever-forgiving & loving”, the parts of God that go a-wandering don’t agree with that description, because they hide from it in shame. And really, wouldn’t they know?
(Well, that and I’m still not really seeing any “heaven” in play here. If being part of God is so great, why are people leaving?)
I don’t know about that, I like Inigo Montoya’s formulation. I mean, a tinny little transistor radio from the 1970s can pick up a broadcast signal of a high fidelity recording of the London Symphony Orchestra playing Rimsky-Korsakov with Leopold Stokowski at the podium. It’s the same music and yet there’s considerably less of it. It’s attenuated.
Perhaps even the rocks and stones, not to mention the stars, pick up on the same signal that our sapient minds do, albeit at a decibel level we can’t take notice of. Perhaps the entire universe is God having fun doing and being stuff. Being Creation. Digging on it.
It certainly sheds a different light on the long dramas of human suffering and the struggle to push forward to a better and kinder situation. No more “how can God be so cruel as to let folks suffer” etc. No culprits per se either. Just us God-fragments playing at the game of gradually becoming as we are capable of becoming. Considerably longer ago than 2000 years ago, whoever-the-fuck it was who wrote Psalms 82 was onto it. It’s been sensed and intuitived for a long long time.
I have no idea whether Hell is or should be a permanent dwelling place. I only know that on a daily basis, I take satisfaction in imagining a very cartoonish version of Heaven with the gates, St. Peter, and a trap door under the very feet of Mitch McConnell. The look on his face as he falls to a Very Hot Place gives me a fleeting sense of justice.
Human condition is terrible. If there was a heaven and a hell, everybody should go to heaven. Yes, even Hitler. Anyway, why would you care once you’re guaranteed an eternity of bliss? No human wrongdoing, necessarily limited, could justify an unlimited suffering. If hell existed, and there were people there, it would be the most colossal injustice conceivable.
[continuing total hijack]
Where does the sapience reside? Awareness lives somewhere. I am aware, you are aware, my desk fan is probably not aware (but if it is aware it probably wants to murder us all). The thing that actually houses the awareness is the actual entity. If God is conscious, and I’m conscious, then our consciousnesses are separate - He’s aware of him, I’m aware of me. Our consciousness can’t merge because if we do there will only be him aware of him and nothing distinctly aware of me, which really means my consciousness ceased and God’s continuted.
Unless you’re positing that none of us are consciousat all, in defiance of the evidence of personal experience. (Which I don’t think you are.) If we didn’t have distinct consciousness then obviously our consciousness won’t be destroyed when we’re absorbed.
For me to comprehend a scenario where people don’t have consciousnesses, I’m picturing people playing D&D. Thag the Facekicker has no personal consciousness, because he’s merely a role being played by Joe Realdude. Thag doesn’t realize that he has no consciousness because Joe says he doesn’t. Thag experiences the world of diagrams and minifigures as a full-fleshed reality because Joe says he does.
The analogy breaks down completely when you notice that people actually have self-awareness distinct to themselves while Thag distinctly doesn’t, but we’ll ignore that part because it’s inconvenient.
If you map the God model you propose (as I understand it) to the DnD model, you end up with everyone being an NPC - they all act like separate people, but in fact there’s one mind puppeting them all. If everybody is an NPC, then the world as we know it is actually God playing with dollies by himself.
In my opinion that’s the only model under which you have God’s mind actually controlling every human’s body. But if we’re all just dolls that God’s playing with, then we can’t feel shame or a need to take a timeout to reconfigure ourselves so we can plug back in, because there’s nothing to plug back in - we’re not real and it was God the whole time. So I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about.
I think you’re talking about taking a mind and chopping bits off, which suddenly are whole minds themselves, and which somehow are not destroyed when they carry their life’s worth of data back God, upload it into God’s brain, and then cease to exist as separate entities. Which in my opinion is conceptually impossible - a consciousness is not like pudding, where its function doesn’t care how much of it you slop around. An awareness is a process, and you can’t merge processess - the closest you get is one process gives all its data to the other and ceases.
[gratuitous hijack further aggravated]
This is just a paradigm I wove together over the course of a few decades. I ain’t preaching anything as gospel, but for brevity’s sake I’ll use that kind of language. First, you need to ditch the idea that consciousness is a singular entity. Instead, it exists as a mosaic of experiences. I’ll get back to that.
Sapience resides completely within the physical body just as scientists will tell you. The bit o God in us is purely an observer/recorder. I think God got bored with knowing everything all the time, and wanted to see how things look through different filters: smaller awareness = angels & other beings involved in creation that have direct communication with God, and who have similar capabilities; and restricted awareness = animals, for instance, who act upon only partial knowledge of things–rabbits, birds, sharks, slugs, people all have different capabilities and relationships with each other and will perceive the same event differently based on their specifics. Through the course of a lifetime, a critter will record its experiences and develop its own character. That recording returns, eventually, to the mind of God and He gains that experience. Eventually, because the mind fragment that was only recording during the life of the animal becomes self-aware upon its release when the animal dies. The result is basically a ball of ideas and memories, all of which are based on a first person perspective. The recording believes IT was the being it previously inhabited, and it can have some opinions about itself. Enter the Heaven & Hell dilemma.
Just for kicks, I imagined God creating his angels as a sort of construction/janitorial staff just to keep the universe interesting. Given they are essentially bluetoothed appendages, they are a lot like God with respect to personality. So when God starts taking up experiences from the restricted awareness creations, gaining their perspectives, He starts to change. And since life is hard on the living, His outlook becomes somewhat bitter. The longer it goes on, the less he is like his angels, who’s minds have remained separate from His. Lucifer gets alarmed at the changes he sees and sets out to end the crazy experiment. Which brings me to a conundrum. Satan wants God to be nice, the way He used to be so he undertakes his own scheme to save God from himself. Noble enough, but God undertook the project precisely because He wanted perspective/knowledge. Lucifer, as a minion, is out of line. But Lucifer as a custodian of creation can’t let the creator continue on His current path because that would subject creation to essentially a diseased creator. And like all psychotics, God doesn’t see a problem at all with how he is, because how he is is a product of his experiences and perceptions.
I had to choose the last option because I found it to be sufficiently well established.
By contrast, the words of the Gospel According to Byrne, Book 3 Chapter 8, by way of Harrison, haunt me,
Heaven
Heaven is a place
A place where nothing
Nothing ever happens
Yeah, fuck that noise.
[Hijacking like a mofo]
The consciousness is a singular entity. This is fact - in fact it’s a reasonable definition of “singular entity” in models like this one where minds aren’t chained to physical matter.
Thing is, though, that’s not really a problem for your model.
You have three (or four) classes of entity:
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Us. We’re physical and mortal, and our minds are based in our biochemistry. When we die our minds, consciousnesses, and functional existences end. (Annihilation for all! Yay!)
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God. He’s eternal, and bored.
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The recorders. There are two models for these - they could precede all humans and be sent to ‘pair up’ with a human at the human’s birth, or they could be created anew with each person. These things exist nonphysically but exactly copy the functionality and behavior of the human brain they’re chained to, like an active MRI. When the brain stops functioning they stop emulating the human meat machine and ‘wake up’ - becoming aware of the non-physical environment they always existed in but never previously noticed because previously their inputs were emulated replications of their human’s inputs.
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Angels. I guess they’re god’s failed experiment into how to entertain himself before he came up with the humanity sitcom - if you don’t have friends, make them. In any case they don’t seem to impact the model anyway. (?)
In any case, once the human dies and the recorder recognizes itself as a separate entity, the next inevitable step would be for the recorder to completely discard the personality of the human it was tied to. This is inevitable because otherwise there’s no particular reason to think the human will feel guilty about its evil deeds. Since your model relies on this, all trace of the previous human’s identity must go - reducing the human to just a tidy little box of memories, stored on betamax. Once this is done the recorder realizes what a horrible person it was tied to, shudders in horror, and then goes and takes a lengthy and very hot shower. How lengthy and how hot would depend on how nasty the human is it’s trying to forget. Regardless, when it feels like itself again, it picks up its box of tapes and carries it back to god for God to watch with a bag of popcorn, or however he’s incorporating the things into himself.
After that, there are a few different options as to what happens to the recorder. It could be sent back to be attached to another different random human, repeating its job as a recorder over and over again presumably indefinitely (or as long as there are conscious things to attach to, anyway). Or if new recorders are spawned with each new life the leftover ones could sit around watching TV with God, or perhaps just hanging out in the kitchen because the stuff on the tube evokes too many painful memories. Back the shower… Or perhaps they cease to exist once they’ve finished their job of carrying back the memories. Whichever, right?
I assume this doesn’t perfectly match your personal cosmology, but it does show how your model doesn’t require consciousnesses to do things they can’t.
I reject that as a definitive source because the logic is flawed - the logic employed shows that most or all people will go to Hell, but isn’t quite sufficient to prove that all souls will go to hell. If there’s some sect out there that actually has right the right of it then they might escape the fiery fate.
That said, the person who wrote that is definitely going to hell. All those punctuation errors! Unforgivable!
There will be no noise to fuck - and that’s the problem!
Hell gets all the good bands, and all the fun people.
It’s a really important question. Here’s the joker in the proverbial deck: it may lie in the interactive process and merely be reflected in the local meat or matrix or whatever. I mean, there sort of has to be the equivalent of an antenna-receiver but it’s probably pretty passive, with the actual sentience being emergent from the interactions.