This question is directed towards dopers with religious knowledge. If one does get past the pearly gates, what can he/she expect?
I’m fairly sure it varies according to each religion and I am not looking for an “absolute” answer. Just a physical description of the afterlife with YOUR deity. What happens long-term/short-term, knowledge-wise, reunion with family and/or pets, chronological age, disabilities, sex, food, beer, etc.
They DO have beer in Heaven, don’t they?
Respectfully,
BTD
I suppose heaven is a perfect state of existence by definition; if it doesn’t have beer, sex, food, pets, then it must have things that are better (by everyone’s estimation).
Somebody recently told me that in heaven, we will immediately know the answer to every question we could ask; I told them that this sounds more like hell to me; The pursuit of inquiry discovery and achievement is (IMHO)the essence of existence; I don’t want it all handed to me on a plate. YMMV (I suspect, however that if anyone did want it all on a plate, that could also be possible).
Mark Twain’s “Letters from Earth” contains a scathing indictment of the usual notions of heaven; notionally a set of letters back to the angels Michael and Gabriel from Satan, describing what the earth, and more particularly the human race, is actually like, the “Letters” contain some of Twain’s darkest (and funniest, and truest) observations on the nature of humanity and religion. “Letter II” deals with Satan’s astonishment at the disparity between the things humans value and enjoy on earth and the usual ideas of what heaven is like. For example:
Even though Heaven is a gated community, that doesn’t mean it’s run by republicans.
One of my high school teachers told us that he’d heard that in Heaven, you had the Perfect Joy of Seeing God. To him, this brought up an image of all the departed souls seated in a huge stadium, looking at God seated on a throne in the center. Heaven seen as the Eternal Super Bowl Halftime Show.
Sounds like Hell to me.
There’s no shortage of poetic images of the afterlife. Look up the last third of Dante’s Divine Comedy, or Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Shaw’s Man and Superman, or C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. Or Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (or, better yet, rent the film The Adventures of Mark Twain and see this little-known Twain story done in Claymation). Or rent Brainstorm or What Dreams May Come or any of a gazillion other movies.
I’m a Presbyterian, but I kind of have my own beliefs that mostly coincide with the church, but not entirely. I personally think that everyone’s heaven is different. For instance, while you’ll be able to interact with other people in heaven, the surroundings might be different, since everyone would have their own vision of what paradise would be like. Kind of your own personal heaven.
Jman
chocolate, as far as the eye can see.
I suspect that Heaven is literally unimaginable. We just don’t have any frame of reference for understanding what it’s like. The traditional images like harps and clouds and streets of gold are not literal descriptions, but a sort of poetic attempt to give us a feeling for things that can’t really be described.
On the other hand, vanilla’s theory has a lot to be said for it, too.
There is an important figure in the history of the Baha’i Faith, Abdul-Baha. He is not considered by us to be Divine, but to have been as close to being a perfect Baha’i as a non-devine person can be. He wrote a book called “Some Answered Questions” (he was really, really smart, and very eloquent as well). In this book, he says that the reason none of the Divine Messengers have told us exactly what Heaven is like is that if we knew, we’d all be in too much of a hurry to get there!! He also said that the next world is as different from this one as this one is from the world we knew in the womb.
Food for thought. . .
If heaven existed, it would be very much like Lake Tahoe in early January, the day after a 6 foot dump of fresh snow. That perfect snow, not too light that it blows around, but just heavy enough to pack into the perfect mogul. You know the kind. It sqeaks when you compress it. You would find yourself standing at the top of the Face (thats why its called “Heavenly Valley” afterall) with a perfect view of the lake and a cloudless sky, the warm sun shining on your face.
You only live once, so don’t forget to experiance a little heaven on Earth while you have the chance. Once your dead, the window of opportunity is closed forever.
Jesus was in a coma.
gatopescado, I certainly hope that if you’re right about Heaven, I’m also endowed upon death with a knowledge of how to ski :0
If heaven existed, it would be very much like Lake Tahoe in early January, the day after a 6 foot dump of fresh snow. That perfect snow, not too light that it blows around, but just heavy enough to pack into the perfect mogul. You know the kind. It sqeaks when you compress it. You would find yourself standing at the top of the Face (thats why its called “Heavenly Valley” afterall) with a perfect view of the lake and a cloudless sky, the warm sun shining on your face.
You only live once, so don’t forget to experiance a little heaven on Earth while you have the chance. Once your dead, the window of opportunity is closed forever.
Jesus was in a coma.
The point is, do these things before you’re dead. Nobody skis after they die. Nobody does anything once they die, cause they are dead! I’ll be happy to teach you to ski while your still alive.
sorry for the double post! (crazy computer!)
“The Skiing Corpses” What a great name for a punk band!
I’m not Baha’i, but I would have to agree with norinew that heaven is as different from our lives now as an adult life is from an embryo’s. I don’t know the specifics, of course, since I haven’t been there yet, but heaven will be all the things we most value here, but expressed in a way far more wonderful than our wildest dreams: love, acceptance, freedom, hope, adventure, purpose, truth (the fight against ignorance will finally be won, I would guess!). The way things are in heaven is the way we know they should be here on earth–no one will be homeless or in pain or sick or unhappy anymore. The “seeing God” thing won’t even be boring: it’ll be more like finally meeting a friend that you’ve known for years over the Internet–you know them and love them already, but now you will get to actually see them and spend time with them without the barriers that were in place before.
I always thought of heaven as being a non-physical place, since it’s where your soul and spirit go and God’s a spirit, but I still like the idea of fields of chocolate! Preferably mint-flavoured! 
I think Mark Twain’s criticisms of people’s imaginations of what heaven is like may be valid, but that doesn’t mean that heaven is, in fact, as stupid or boring as it’s sometimes made out to be.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------If heaven existed, it would be very much like Lake Tahoe in early January
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I agree. The condo is reserved for Dec. 16-23rd. Cant’ wait.
As far as heaven, since we only see physical objects with our human minds, e.g. as matter is reduced to energy when observed outside our human senses, in heaven there can’t be physical objects since we won’t have a human body. It is probably like dreaming where we are conscious but aren’t bound by the laws of being human, like time and space. I have this feeling it will be all too familiar (we’ve experienced this before many times?) so I wouldn’t worry about it. It would all be too weird otherwise.
In my view it would be excruciatingly boring.
Mortality gives life urgency.
It has to happen here, now; like, today!
Everlasting life removes all urgency from existence.
Multiply 6158276928746921873629187436 times 987621987369213876398721 years. That does not represent even a fraction of everlasting time, not even one percent.
A movie that dealt with this concept (and the movie is widely ridiculed too btw) was Zardoz. One group of characters in the movie had achieved immortality, but they hated it. The primary goal they sought in the movie was death.
Funny, that was my goal, too, and I was just watching the movie.
Heaven is a world in which the past 24 hours never happened. At least for me.
Recently I attended a funeral where the preacher adamantly declared that heaven is “not a gaseous nebulous place”, but a physical place that is 1500 miles wide, 1500 miles long and 1500 miles high. He said that the streets were paved with gold, the walls were encrusted with precious jewels, and the gates were made of pearl. Sort of like Graceland, I think.
My own opinion is that being in Heaven is like the ecstatic feeling I sometimes get making music, where I am myself but also an integral part of something much bigger that is perfect and beautiful, where I am a perfectly tuned string vibrating in harmony with everyone else.
Heaven and God, if they exist, are outside of Time and Space. This is, of course, pretty much impossible for us 3-D time-bound creatures to imagine.