Inspired by the other thread in this forum.
For the purposes of this thread just take it as a fact that when we die we go to our reward or punishment (personally I don’t believe any sort of loving god could punish a finite being eternally no matter what sins they may have committed in their earthly life), what do you imagine this new state of existence would be like, what would you want it to be like?
Personally I would think of it as a state of existence where you are limited only by what you can imagine into existence, if you wanted to experience what its like to live life as the other gender or in another type of world entirely (ie: the Star Trek universe if thats what you’re interested in, personally I’m not, it’d be The Culture for me) then you could will that into being and temporarily wipe you’re current knowledge then integrate it back into your ‘higher’ existence when you’ve finished that life.
The problem with that concept is however if you willed an earthlike world into existence to experience physical life again what about the other apparently sentient beings that are created to provide the full experience for you? Do they only appear to be sentient and self-willed but aren’t really, doesn’t that open a whole other set of questions?
Perhaps the answer to that is that you could issue an ‘open-invite’ to any other ‘higher’ level people who wish to share your created universe with you. Following on from that idea would be the idea of self-fulfilling heavens and hells, your higher self naturally migrates and wishes to share experiences with people like yourself, so if you are normally kind, considerate and ‘good’ you end of sharing eternity with people of like mind, if you’re selfish, self-centered, cruel and ‘evil’ you end up spending eternity with people like you.
And if people don’t think anyone would want to live like that I give you a quote that I saved from another forum because I found it explained quite a few things for me:
“Hell I believe is a place where we can all give in to our darkest desires. We woudn’t have to worry about morals or laws or any of that garbage, we’d just run around doing whatever the hell we want. It would be complete anarchy put into practice, and I think I’d love every minute of it. It would be filled with the music of Ozzy and Slayer, and fundies would get beaten and killed on a regular basis. I want to go to hell, it’s way more fun than being in heaven strumming a damn harp and looking at angels that I can’t fuck.”
So some people at least would want that.
And on one last note if I was omnipotent and had to design some method for punishing ‘evil’ people I would have it work like this. The individual is forced to live the life of the person they have wronged, so if they have murdered someone they ‘replay’ the life of the murdered person…and for someone like Hitler that would be a lot of people. If we lay every death in the Second World War at his feet that’s approximately 60’000’000 people, given an average lifespan of 25 years, thats 1’500’000’000 years of punishment. A long long time but still only the first instant of eternity.