You have, in effect, hit the nail directly on the head.
Heaven is Heaven no matter who you are.It;‘s a destination that one size fits all.
So do I have to leave all I know and love behind me to enter eternal bliss for myself? Wouldnt that be rather selfish and (going by the good ol’ sunday school standards) isnt selfish bad?
I was wondering if I was sitting up in heaven and I knew my father,son,mother,whatever was burning in the pits of hell I would be th so many emotions that Heaven would, for lack of a better term, suck.
Guilt,self-loathing, pain, sorrow,greif in a place built only for joy.
Perhaps everyone has their own personal afterlife and they get the one that they deserve according to the rules generated by whichever Deity ends up being the correct one.
In your Heaven, Dad is there with you (or not depending on how much you liked Dad.) In Dad’s Hell, you’re nowhere to be found (or not depending…)
So either one(or both) of us is being deceived, or there are an infinite number of afterlifes-in millions of them dad is burning in Hell, and in millions of them I’m burning in Hell. Why does this not bring me comfort?
Speaking of such… Would you get like a room or something to hang out in? Do you walk around with them following around you like… Well, like a crowd of 72 lithe and sinewy things following you around.
What happens to ME time?
Like I previously mentioned… putting the whole yes or no theology question aside. There is 1 God and 1 Heaven. I guess I would conceded that there could be levels of Hell. No alternate Universes, no dimension X or even if there is they all come together into the one Heaven.
Hmm that would mean that all the alternate selves would combine to make 1 you. This one you would have a myriad of conflicting emotions and ideals. That would explain the need for a brain drain hence, nothing left but joy and love.
However,
You would at least have thought that the all-mighty would have made some sort of a reference or allusion to this.
Of course we can spell it, especially when you wrote it right there
but an oxymoron doesn’t apply here.
Logic is not a standard or a law
Logic is just applying A+B must equal C
You can apply logic to anything from the laws of gravity
to the number of rocks composing of The Thing’s left arm
to do cat’s and dog’s speak the same language.
Just because we are talking of something involving a religious nature does not automatically exclude logic from the equation.
As usual, commonplace theology is a random assortment of half-remembered Sunday School Lessons and half-understood ideas randomly tossed in from having picked things up “here and there.” It’s actually rather funny.
It seems that most atheists, and probably most faithful, seem to vaguely think of heaven as some beautiful place, which you go to and then, well, sit around. Which is not really theologically accurate for most anyone. If you want to get some more about it, go and seriously ask some preists about it. It’s a lot more than “the love of God fills you.” That’s not incorrect, but it’s a just a wee bit more complicated. All the simple things are.
Likewise, people tend to think of perfect bliss as being with their friends and family. But we must remember that first and foremost, they make their own choices. We do not know how many will attain heaven, but it is not supposed to be a small number. So have faith and pray.
The actual proximity of heaven and hell is not really described. (Our knowledge of heaven would not fill a thimble and our knowledge of hell less.) However, the parable of Lazarus and Abraham suggests that on some level contact may be made between the two worlds. Lazarus thought that Abraham could help, but Abraham responds that he could not - that there was a gulf between the worlds of good and evil and it was simply not possible to cross them.
This may be taken literally; there is a physical (or whatever) barrier or gap so that the wicekd cannot mess with the good. It may be taken metaphorically in various ways. For example, it may mean that the evil cannot even be touched by goodness, that Abraham cannot do anything good for Lazarus because he has divorced himslef from all good things.
Sure, sure, you’ll do various things to kill time or whatnot, varying upon which belief system you’re operating under. That’s irrelevent to the question of how the saved percieve and think about the damned.
I think of perfect bliss being concurrent with a total absence of thought, but obviously, YMMV.
And, according to Revelation 14:1-4, it seems that only 144000 male virgins will get into heaven. That’s males only. Virgins only. And only one thousand gross of them. But who’s counting, right?
And you are likely to get as many different answers as preists you ask. I certainly know I did when I asked this question of several of them when I was a kid.
After all, they have as much real knowledge of heaven as you do.
Trying to get something sensible out of Revelations is like riding a whirl-a-whel through a sewer : you wind up nauseous and very confused.
True but not true. Frankly, a lot of theological ideas are no less complex than nuclear phsyics. Some are much more complex than nuclear physics. So frankly, they’re not going to try and explain it to children, and mots of the teachers probably couldn’t comprehend it. I can read it, but understand little. Less than I would like anyway. But a god priest can certainly talk your through a lot of what people have though and why. And not a single great theologian would just say you’re “filled with love.” And they will exaplin why and how it’s much different from that.
I think this is a poor comparison, because the complexity in theology is invented by humans. They argue about what color hair god has but don’t even know if it exists.
It’s exactly the same, really. I can’t prove that nuclear physics exists in any falsifiable way; everything I know about it is from others, and those others are relying on the work of still others. Though they can experiment, only their human reason can actually tell them anything useful about it. I can theoretically do some incredibly hard calculations without being able to apply them in any concrete fashion. For me, it’s like arguing about whether the answer is 10978465.19087324857 or 129875.1934857987345 without having any clue what either answer would mean anyhow, or if the entire theory is valid.
For an example of difficulty, look at the predestination versus free will debate. It makes my head hurt, and I would not want to have to intellectually wrestle John Calvin in a steel-cage theology match. I think he’s wrong, of course. I just can’t even conceive of how casually he can toss off his theology.
I’d really like to make sure this is what you said before I
heap scorn and derision on this utterly meaningless pile of garbage,
point out that what you know about nuclear physics doesn’t actually matter to nuclear physicists,
try to assert that this is just a pitiful attempt at Projection from religion to science.
Who cares what you understand or don’t understand? Just because you think something is as difficult as nuclear physics doesn’t mean everyone else does. If you don’t understand something, then go study it, rather than just throwing your hands up and calling it ‘unfalsifiable’.
