The idea of a fluffy white heaven where everyone sits around with god and plays the harp was actually one of the key reasons I became an atheist, as a teenager. Sounded pretty boring to me. When we got a class assignment in 10th grade to artistically depict our personal version of heaven or hell (after watching bits and pieces of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey), I came up with a Dante’s Inferno-esque 8-layer hell that included telemarketers, book-burners, and people with mullets. Damn, that was a good assignment.
I’m a Sam Clemmons fan, and when I think of Heaven, I think of all the sex we will be enjoying.
It is good - indeed, it is the best possible state for a human being (or human soul) to be in - by definition; just like God is good, and all powerful, by definition, and invisible pink unicorns are invisible (and pink) by definition.
The stories about clouds and harps, or, come to that, hot and cold running beautiful virgins, are just metaphors, as any even semi-intelligent religious person will tell you. Heaven, they believe, is good in unimaginable ways, by definition.
That’s not true at all; God as usually described is evil, not good. A monster. “God is evil” is not a contradiction in terms, and people saying so doesn’t make it true any more than claiming “America is always right” makes it true.
And plenty of people describe heaven is ways more specific than “the best possible state for a human to be in”, some of which are mentioned in this thread.
It depends on the sect of Christianity you’re talking about. Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, and Gnostics all have different style of God. Some of these do seem to have and “evil” view of God, like Baptists and Catholics to a certain extent. Methodists emphasize the good aspects of the God of the Bible.
Anyway on heaven, iirc the Gnostics didn’t necessarily say heaven was reached in the afterlife. They saw it as something Christ reached during his life. I’m not an expert on Gnosticism but it appeals to me more than other sects because it can be reconciled with a trust in science.
That’s why it trumps Islamic paradise.
The way I generally use is ‘God is good’, so if the scripture describes a good God that is probably true, if the scriptures show God is evil then your interpretation of it is wrong, as scriptures can not be broken - God has to be always good.
But people do follow the wrathful commonly understood God in scriptures.
Don’t know abot Heaven, but Hell varies (by sect):
-the Baptist Hell is where you are forced to drink and dance
-the Catholic Hell is a place of heat and suffering
-the Episcopalian Hell is where they serve the wrong kind of wine at dinner
What, reverse psychology hell?
"Oh no! What new torment will the Devil inflict upon me! Not the leather clad nymphomaniacs! Anything but that! "
“I think he’s buying it.”
Beats me. I think Alien Heaven is more interesting:
(adaptation of Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven from Will Vinton’s Adventures of Mark Twain. Twain is responsible for the thoughts and the disdain for traditional Christian Heaven (which disdain showed up in other works of his, too, like Letters from the Earth), but Vinton is responsible for the visuals and the modern allusions)
But it still can’t beat Secular Heaven.
There must be lots of husbands in heaven whose dearly beloved wives ended up in eternal torment in hell, and vice versa, and parents and kids similarly bifurcated, and lifelong friends split up forever, and so on. Yet there’s no mention that the occupants of heaven on their comfy clouds suffer even the slightest pang of anguish over the situation. Damn right there’s no empathy!
From what I’ve heard of it, I’d want no part. First, there’s the no beer thing. Second, none of my friends would be there. Pfft.
Yeah, here’s a relevant passage. I share Twain’s disdain for that particular version of Heaven, but I don’t believe for a moment that that’s what Heaven is really like.
Not too long ago in another thread, someone linked to a nifty Cracked article: 5 Things You Won’t Believe Aren’t In the Bible. Heaven—that is, the traditional image, where all the dead people sit around all day on clouds, with wings growing out of their backs, playing harps—isn’t one of the “things,” but it might as well be.
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The idea of a fluffy white heaven where everyone sits around with god and plays the harp was actually one of the key reasons I became an atheist, as a teenager. Sounded pretty boring to me.
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“Sitting around playing the harp sounds boring, therefore God doesn’t exist”? I don’t think I understand the logic.
Well, at least there’s one bestseller to be read. And you get a good view of the weather from up there, so there’s that to discuss.
It was the movie Ghost for me (I guess I was 23 when I first saw it, though I’d been leaning agnostic/atheist for some time), when the black demon-creatures pulled the soul of the recently-killed bad guy off to some screaming fate… Hell, I guess, though the movie was deliberately vague on it and Heaven, showing the latter as just a window of bright light. I felt kinda sorry for the demons - their job for eternity is to just to keep tormenting that guy? That sucks - it not only violates labour codes, but the laws of thermodynamics!
After that, the blatant silliness and illogic that permeates religion in general meant I could never be a believer.
That was the only vision of heaven that my very-religious extended relatives had described to me, up to that point in my life. I figured any heaven that boring wouldn’t be paradise, thus creating an oxymoron that caused me to further examine my (lack of) faith. It was the catalyst, not the sole syllogism.
You think those demons violate the laws of thermodynamics, go talk to Maxwell’s Demon.
I always wondered if his demon was silver.
As I understand it, historically gloating over the torments of the damned was considered one of the pleasures of heaven. There’s a strong streak of sadism in Christianity for all its babbling about “love”.
What, you’ve never heard “I don’t want to believe in a God like that” as a religious argument before? The fact is, religion is a wish fulfillment fantasy for most people, so anything that doesn’t fulfill the fantasies of the believer is going to be considered implausible, unbelievable - or as evidence against the religion.
But what if standing in the presence of God is like the best beer ever?
Sorry, the heaven link is R-rated, according to the work blocker.