Wanted to make this about a fantastic Stephen King short story, but realized I’d ruin great literature for new comers just by making a thread topic to discuss it so I found an alternative.
The film Groundhog Day doesn’t have that problem.
Human conscience cannot handle large numbers. We simply cannot fathom them on a deep personal level and it shapes each of our would views for the worse. This is illustrated beautifully with the lottery or scratch offs.
But on to Groundhog Day. It was never mentioned how long Phil was struck there, but lets say a couple of years. How long before he wanted to end it? This film is not proof the human conscience cannot handle eternity in any form, but rather I’d say that is exactly what it argues. The movie had a happy ending only because Phil got out. Had he stayed in an eternity it would have been a Black Mirror episode no matter how good he got at piano.
Which means, the Heaven Christians talk about is really a place that mortal man can never get to and enjoy. All the blow jobs and rainbows god can throw at the Righteous can not change the gibbering baboon the human brain will turn into if it exists anywhere for too long.
I’ve heard the director speculated that he was probably stuck in the loop for about 10 years.
I don’t believe in Heaven (or hell, for that matter). Once we’re dead we cease to exist, I believe.
But if it was to exist, yes, there’s no way it would be like the old cliche of being pretty much like yourself mentally, only with wings and a harp to strum while you lounge on a fluffy cloud. The entire nature of existence is change. We are always working to make some sort of change happen-- a job, a promotion, more money, sex, a mate, children, finishing a novel, etc. etc. Or to prevent bad changes from happening. Like repairing your roof before the rain ruins your house. The absolute perfection of a Heaven would be by its very definition the absence of change. A normal human mind would indeed go insane in those conditions.
The only way a ‘Heaven’ in any form could exist is if the human mind is somehow elevated into some sort of higher consciousness that would essentially make us very different than the sloppy, needy humans we currently are.
Well Phil never met God, so it wasn’t actually heaven he was in. More like purgatory. And did he ever actually die? I can’t really recall that point of the movie where he ended up in his endless loop.
But I think that your premise is incorrect, he wasn’t in heaven, even if he thought he was.
A good discussion of this issue is found in the last season of The Good Place. If you’re interested in such topics, I recommend watching that whole series, from the beginning. There’s a lot of set-up to get to the payoff, but the payoff is worth it.
The director, Harold Ramis, was also Jewish, though largely non-religious, so the Christian conception of a “Heaven” was probably pretty darned far from his mind
In the film, he’s stuck in the same day. Anything he does is undone when he goes to sleep.
While that’s a version of an endless existence, it’s not equivalent to the mythical “Heaven”. While we don’t really have any detailed information on what Heaven is supposed to be like, a daily reset isn’t part of the equation, that I’m aware of.
Presuming that you can accomplish things in Heaven, that those accomplishments persist, and that the world can and does change, you end up in a very different situation.
That might still become a sort of Hell, if it’s unending. But maybe not.
Well, the question of how long Phil was stuck in the loop has nothing to do with Heaven, so I don’t know how the fact that Ramis was Jewish has anything to do with that. It’s the OP who is comparing Groundhog Day with Heaven, to make a point that an eternity of the same thing every day would drive one insane.
So what is a day in eternity? Is it the feeling of a moment, like when you are in an embrace with the one you love? On the other hand, is it an endless agony of reliving your life’s mistakes or a painful death? Neither of which defines heaven in my book.
I always thought that heaven and eternity in the Christian sense was being in the presence of God and a feeling of awe in knowing God’s wisdom and purpose. Comprehending things that a single human mind could never comprehend while in this earthly existence. None of which Groundhogs Day deals with.
That quote fragment of mine was me responding to @Great_Antibob , who was conflating an offhand comment I made about Groundhog Day with Heaven. When I said “an eternity of the same thing every day” I was referring more to Phil’s experience in the time loop, which was indeed segmented into discrete days, but days which repeated on a seeming eternal loop.
Yes, in a Heaven, the concept of ‘a day’ would be essentially meaningless.
The human mind cannot handle existing in eternity no matter how nice anyone makes it. If a being made this ok with his sky magic they wouldn’t really be human anymore.
It’s pretty clear that Christian scripture says the latter: humans are changed to be more like God, freed from all the limitations of mortality, including a limited and finite mindset.
I can absolutely imagine a desert tribe coming up with a story about a flood and when asked how all the other animals survived someone comes up with the boat idea. Earth’s menagerie would never fit on a boat and a stone age person living in the tropics would know that.
Existence, for any meaning, needs to end. You thought Garfield hated Monday’s, imagine a singularity.
It’s not clear that applies to souls in the Christian mythology. You’ve made the assumption that your conciousness exists in heaven the same way it exists on earth. Remove that and your argument falls apart.