It’s certainly possible for an atheist to believe in life after death but not God Rare at this particular time, but not impossible. Also possible for someone to believe in God but not an afterlife.
Eh… my personal belief is that our actual corporal existence is irrational. The rational thing would be for there to be nothing. Yet here we are. So my next most rational belief is that time and matter are infinite. We may not be able to reach them, but somewhere there are infinite duplicates of all of us living this exact same life. And in this particular universe, eventually this exact universal scenario will repeat and you’ll live it all over again. Try to act surprised.
I think you’re missing the point (possibly because the Presbyterian minister, and/or @Spice_Weasel’s account of what the minister said, is non-purposefully misleading).
I understood it to mean that something like “The Jaunt” is what you get when you try to fit an eternal (or at least very long) existence of the soul into an otherwise atheistic worldview—not that an atheistic worldview already includes the idea of an eternal soul.
As a point, and meaning no offense, that seems idiotic. Why would anyone try to fit post-death existence of the soul into an otherwise atheistic worldview? There is no more reason to believe in an eternal soul than there is to believe in God.
Or perhaps the point I missed was that whole narrative really was just about that story. In which case, sorry and never mind.
Groundhogs Day maybe tries to demonstrate a hell that consists only of living the same day over and over. I don’t know if it succeeded. If I wake up in the same state every morning no matter what I’ve done the night before, if nothing I do results in permanent harm to anyone, then I’ll get as drunk and stoned as I can every day and never clearly remember any of it. I could also engage in sober activities if I wanted to. By the time I’ve spent quality time with a the thousandth person in the repeating zone I’ll have forgotten everything about the first one. So neither heaven nor hell, and actually a rather tolerable existence.
Imagine for a moment that you’re an immortal on Earth, and for the purposes of this thought experiment no jiggery-pokery is necessary for you to evade the suspicion of mortals; you don’t need to keep changing your identity - it’s irrelevant for this.
If you decide to visit all of the coffee shops, cafes and bistros in the world, there’s no way you can ever see them all - some will close down before you get to them on your list; other new ones will open up at a rate you can’t keep up with.
If you decide to visit every beach, forest, river and lake in the world, by the time you have finished, natural forces will have rendered most of them quite different from how they were on your first visit - you could go around again and you would still be seeing new things.
If you decide to listen to every piece of music, you literally can’t keep up with that even if you start now and ignore all the music that has already been made; it’s being made at a rate much greater than 1 minute per minute.
And that’s just the world; an incredibly teeny-tiny part of the whole universe, which may be infinite.
I honestly wonder if the people who argue eternity will be boring might already be bored with mortal life. There is so much to do.
Of course, given infinite time, eventually, sequences have to repeat; circumstances conspire to create the exact same coffee shop in the exact same place in the same town, all over again, but then, forgetting things might not even be a flaw in the human mind - it might just as easily be a feature. If you live forever, and some memories drift away, then maybe every few thousand years, you get to rewatch Firefly all over again as if it’s the first time you’ve seen it.
I think the “so much to do” mindset is actually the problem people will run into. The people that would thrive as immortals are the ones that develop the ability to, paraphrasing Pascal, “sit in a room alone and do nothing.” Novelty tends to be based on a response to minutiae that over time wears down to sameness (“seen one, seen them all”). It’s a protracted search for the glasses you’re already wearing.
I think it depends on whether you feel like you really need novelty for the sake of novelty itself. Between the ‘must find constant novelty’ and ‘sit doing nothing’, there is also: just be busy doing stuff that is pleasant; there is plenty of it.
Look at the flowers - yes you’ve seen flowers like this before, but why is that boring? Seeing the bluebells again in spring is like meeting a friend that has been away just a little too long.
I don’t think the Rev was suggesting atheists have any reason to figure out what happens to eternal souls. They don’t believe in eternal souls and have no need to rationalize souls’ futures.
But those whose frame of reference and beliefs are atheistic, when they consider what to them is the fiction of an eternal soul, use this frame of reference alone. There’s no transformation to factor in, no communion with God, no need to have faith in some inscrutable, euphoric state outside of time. Just a human consciousness forced to endure an unendurable eternity. It’s all nonsensical to the non-believing tribe. I think that’s basically what the OP posits.
Not saying the Rev is convincing, but I think it might be what he meant.
The film is reasonably trying to point out that living one’s life in a pointless rut (and so many people do!) is bad, all the more so if one’s daily routine involves getting drunk and stoned or otherwise harming oneself or others.
Yes, that is closer to what he meant. Full disclosure: I am an atheist, this minister is a good friend of mine and we talk theology a lot because it’s something we both find interesting for different reasons. He’s also a big science fiction/movie/anime geek so he is familiar with The Jaunt.
I did my best to reflect the gist of his response but I didn’t totally understand it because it didn’t make sense. (Because religion doesn’t make sense.) But the part about the Jaunt does make sense to me. What he’s saying, I think, is that the Jaunt is the only concept of eternity that makes sense to atheists, because there is no God in our world, but the idea of eternity doesn’t scare him because God is present in his world. In other words, the meaningless eternity of the Jaunt is not possible in a Christian worldview.
You guys do not really understand infinity. You are not comprehending the sheer scale of your ‘tolerable existence’ and making the same mistake illiterate sheep herders made in the Bronze Age when they came up with these stories.
Think what infinity MEANS. Imagine the best meal you ever ate. Now eat it breakfast, lunch, dinner. Now eat it all week every week. Every year. Every decade. Every Eon.
And you are still not even beginning to get started.
Amateur theologian here but fwiw I’ll expound on my limited understanding of what Christianity claims about Heaven and eternal life.
The New Testament (I’m not conversant enough to discuss Judaic concepts of Sheol, etc.) actually talks about two rather separate things: First there is “The Kingdom of Heaven”, that is the abode of God and his angels. This isn’t a physical reality as we understand it, it’s more of an Empyrean - Wikipedia or transdimensional realm. It is in contrast to the world or universe of physical creation- “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool”. The Bible is unclear and indeed somewhat contradictory over whether blessed souls are to found in this realm with God. Some passages suggest it is so, others seem to imply that the souls of the saved exist only in potentia; e.g. “asleep in Jesus”. In either case it can be argued that this is an eternal realm transcending human concepts of time and space.
Then there is the World to come - Wikipedia , mentioned in different places but most fully expounded upon in Revelation. According to this after the final death and obliteration of our current universe, a new one will be created that unlike our current one will be unfallen and will admit of the direct presence of God. Tolkien more or less based his ideas for his work’s eschatology on this. So this is where the question of perpetual life for an infinite amount of time comes in. Revelation implies that in this world to come God takes an immediate hands-on approach to making sure everything goes right; it speaks of God working to “wipe away every tear from their eyes” which interestingly implies that the potential for bad things happening still exists, just that they’re prevented or immediately mended.
I think that such a perpetual life couldn’t be an eternal stasis (or that such a condition would indeed be closer to Hell than Heaven). My best guess and I’m grasping at straws here is that it would involve perpetual renewal. The big difference would be that in this realm death would not be a finality but in a closed cycle with resurrection. Perhaps like reincarnation only without losing one’s identify, we would undergo phoenix-like cycles of rebirth (or maybe Time Lord regeneration). The Bible speaks of the resurrection of Christ as having “swallowed up” death; an expert in Biblical Greek would have to chime in but perhaps “subsumed” or even “co-opted” would be close to what the text is trying to say; a tamed death.
If he means that hell is (eternal or not) separation from God, it may be clear what he means, but not necessarily convincing to an atheist. The part about The Jaunt seems less helpful than a Groundhog Day reference, because, while Stephen King deliberately avoids any explicit explanations, it is clear something weird happens in there (especially to your disembodied soul, so, again, nothing meaningful to a strict physicalist).
My read of the Jaunt is that the weird thing is your consciousness experiences eternity (or something close to eternity.) It’s a complete hypothetical; King himself described the science as “wonky.”
So there’s no disembodied soul, I don’t think, just your brain, in a sensory deprivation chamber, forever.
None of what he said was convincing to me. I don’t think he was using The Jaunt as an allegory for hell. He did have to squeeze in that bit about what hell might be like, but even then it was convoluted. Being separate from God but unable to escape the presence of God. Sounds existentially horrifying but doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.
So, who is running the coffee shops in heaven? Are there books there? If you are a perfect soul, what can you learn? What is off limits for being sinful? If heaven is unchanging, what is new?
I haven’t been bored in 71 years, but heaven sounds totally boring to me. Unless I can write, and read, and, yes, get blow jobs. Include me out, I’ll take nonexistence any day.
Maybe heaven isn’t jam packed because souls request discorporation out of boredom.
Also, the OP seems to be using “conscience” when they mean “consciousness”.
Your consciousness is what makes you aware that you have drunk all the beer that you were supposed to share with other people. Your conscience is what makes you feel bad about it.
