Hi SD,
Has there ever been discussion or published philosophy on the following subject? I would be curious what other theologians or religious authorities have to say about this particular topic.
I would imagine that the concept of paradise or heaven changes based on people’s environment and culture, throughout history. Have people written about how the idea of heaven might change as technology changes?
What I’m trying to say is this: my idea of going to heaven or paradise after I die would involve me seeing and experiencing things/people I know and exist in the world today, with the technology, language, and culture I lived through. If I saw my grandfather in heaven, I’d expect him to speak English and reference things I know from my own experience. But someone from, say, the Roman Empire, would have a different “version” of heaven, based on THEIR experience, language, technology, culture, etc. Someone from the Aztec Empire would have a different concept of paradise from either of us. And so on.
I’m curious as to people’s opinion on the topic, but primarily I want to know if there have been any attempts to reconcile what exactly heaven is, and if there is an implicit understanding that the meaning of it changes based on who’s asking and what heaven is to them? Have people written about what would happen if they ended up in a heaven presumably populated by people with a different concept of heaven?
What if I get to heaven and find out that heaven is actually only as technologically advanced as Greeks were in the time of the Iliad?
These are all hypotheticals. My real question is if anyone has tried to make a case that paradise can exist for different people in different ways at the same time.
I hope what I’m asking makes sense to somebody!
Heaven is an ambiguous invention by humans designed to promote civilized behavior with the desirable promise of cheating death. It’s a pretty good shtick.
The kicker here is that those Greeks didn’t have a concept of a paradisaical heaven for generally good people. Only real heroes (or the offspring of the gods) went to the Elysian Fields. Everyone else spent eternity wandering in the glooms of the Asphodel Meadows (well, unless they were unlucky enough to earn a place in Tartarus)
[Moderating]
A pre-emptive reminder, here, that this is Factual Questions. “What has been written about this?” is a factual question. “Who’s right?” is not.
Ancient religions (including early Christianity) blended with each other very readily, in a process called syncretism.
If a Hellenistic empire, for example, conquered my village and discovered that we worshiped Cecil as a vengeful and powerful patriarchal deity, they were likely to shrug and say, “ah ha, you are clearly worshiping Zeus by a different name, welcome to the family.”
So the answer to at least part of your question is that early cultures were as likely as not to assume that different religions were just variations on the same theme. If we both worship different sun gods, which there is patently and obviously only one of, it’s sensible to assume we worship the same guy or gal. Presumably (and I presume because I have no ready cites), they felt similarly about the afterlife.
There really aren’t consistent counterparts to heaven outside of the Abrahamic traditions. For a more universal comparison, perhaps the term, “afterlife” is better. Also, the differences I think the OP is curious about are materialistic products like technology that many would argue don’t exist in the spiritual realm. That’s the kind of thing you would find in the Ancient Egyptian afterlife (Where “you can’t take it with you” is rejected) but I’m not sure that equates in any way to a biblical Heaven other than it comes after death.
The earliest example of pre-Abrahamic heaven and hell that I’m aware of would be the dualism introduced by Zoroastrianism. The universe is a conflict between good and evil; Ahura Mazda (good/truth/order) and Angra Mainyu (evil/destruction/chaos) are in constant conflict. In the end Good triumphs, Angra Mainyu is defeated, and good souls in the afterlife get to spend eternity with Ahura Mazda. I’m not sure how much detail is actually given about what heaven, or for that matter hell, are supposed to be like.
There are many different paths / frameworks for living in Hinduism. One of the major paths believes that the soul (consciousness left after death) does not feel pleasure or pain. Per the Bhagwad Gita “A soul cannot be shredded by a sword, nor can it be burnt by fire…” Essentially the sensations of pain and pleasure are a result of the physical existence and physical senses, which the soul does not posses.
Since a soul cannot experience pleasure or pain, Heaven or Hell cannot exist.
In some paths in Hinduism (and in Buddhism), the belief is that there is no Individual soul; and it renders the concept of heaven/hell moot.
The idea of an afterlife is pretty common. But the idea of a specific really nice place for an afterlife is more nuanced. As @Cardigan notes above, Zoroastrianism introduced the heaven hell duality into Judaism during the Babylonian exile. The division between heaven and hell is not so common otherwise. Hades was for all the dead. It wasn’t Hell, it was just where you went after death.
Moreover there is a huge body of revisionist stuff that isn’t really part of any canonical religious view. Dante’s Inferno seems to be taken by quite a range of fundamentalists as a literal truth. Then you get characters such as Enoch and Metatron and a whole new mess of weirdness. More angels and daemons than you can catalogue and what seems more like a bad acid trip than any sane idea of a simple heaven.
Egyptian theology gave us the seven heavens. Hearts were weighed against a feather and you got in or not.
The multiple layers of heavens seem to be a very pervasive set of ideas that has influenced lots of nearby religions and mysticism. There is a whole morass of taxonomies of different levels of heavens, and deities resident within that seeps into lots of religions.
A common thread is that these heavens are not a way of extending the earthly nature of life of anyone, but rather are where the soul joins into some extraordinary spiritual realm that is beyond mortal understanding. A few explicitly involve the expunging of identity and some form of merging into the divine presence. Mundane questions such as who you meet or what language is spoken just don’t apply. Indeed, that particular idea of heaven seems to be a very modern, and not very serious, idea. More the platform for jokes than religious belief.
Valhalla seems to be the best bet. Quick ride with a buxom Valkyrie, and off to eternal feasting and drinking. I’ll sign up for that one. You don’t need much in common with you fellow imbibers to enjoy that heaven.
I’m not an expert in Norse studies, but the Nordic concept of an afterlife wasn’t completely dissimilar to that of the Greeks. Warriors who died holding a weapon (regardless of how they died) went to Valhalla. The rank-and-file went to Hel. There, they continued to “live,” but it wasn’t torture. There’s also Niflheim, the land of mist and shadow; no one wanted to be banished to that region.
There is not consistency within those religions as well. Heck, there isn’t constancy within Judaism for that matter.