# Would it bother you if evil people made it into heaven? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [August 17, 2019, 12:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775 "2019-08-17T00:54:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2019, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/61 "2019-08-22T13:39:02Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Require away-You can keep, and enjoy, your Heaven…although if it as you describe you won’t have much choice in the matter. > Although it interests me slightly to know if you consider convincing me not to capitulate as a loss, or a win. I don’t think of my interactions with you in a win-lose context. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2019, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/62 "2019-08-22T16:53:46Z")
> [@Atomic\_Alex](#): > > That said as long as they learn to play nice with others and hopefully at least have some remorse for their actions I would have no issue sharing paradise with people who did evil actions in this life. After all if the afterlife is real its literally not my place to judge. Thought it was worth mentioning, your desire for them to feel remorse apparently cannot be fulfilled. If you are feeling remorse you are unhappy, by definition. So if heaven is a place you’re supposed to be happy in, then you can’t be feeling remorse there. Wishing for somebody else to feel remorse is also rather unheaven-like; besides being uncharitable, it also means you will be less happy when you learn they feel no remorse. What are the thought police going to think of that? In any case, the only non-vengeful reason to want somebody to feel remorse is that in real life remorse serves a very useful purpose: by making a person feel unhappy when they think of the bad things they’ve done in the past it makes them feel less inclined to do those bad things again later, because that would mean more unhappy memories. If the heaven in question has some mechanism to, for example, prevent a person from encasing you in supernatural concrete and dropping you into a supernatural ocean, then you don’t need remorse to constrain their behavior; the mechanism will handle it. (Of course the heaven described in the OP apparently _doesn’t_ have such a mechanism; the dude will be sent to the corner after the fact, but the deed is apparently not prevented in advance so you’ll still be happily enjoying your permanent imprisonment.) > [@Scumpup](#): > > What emotions outside the same limited set everyone has do you believe you have now? Who was saying that we needed extra emotions? I thought he was just saying that he wasn’t interested in an emotional lobotomy. > [@Czarcasm](#): > > You can’t have happiness without unhappiness to rise from. You can’t have joy without overcoming sorrow. You strive to do better because of regret of not having done good enough in the first place. It is the ups and downs of life, the variety, that makes this life worth living as far as I’m concerned. On the other hand I disagree with this as well. I think that a _very_ nice level of baseline contentment can be achieved without ever being miserable at all. I mean, sure, people are constantly saying that there’s no sandwich as tasty as the one you eat right after being held without food for a week in an underground rape dungeon, but I’m quite satisfied with the normal level of non-rape-dungeon-starvation that I normally enjoy my sandwiches with. I guess what I’m saying is that while you can cause spikes of _extra_ happiness by torturing yourself first (which is the entire point of spicy food), the baseline level of contentment that can be achieved even _without_ first being shot in the belly can _also_ be classified as “happiness”. ---
**Author:** ![Corry\_El](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ecae2f/32.png) [@Corry\_El](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Corry_El)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2019, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/63 "2019-08-22T18:25:18Z")
This ‘highly diverse’ forum seems actually high % non/anti-Christians mainly of Christian/Western background originally, a smaller % of Christians, and not that much else among the huge number of people who are ‘else’ in the world. As Christian you can’t judge the essential good/bad of other people in the eyes of God. You accept that God’s wisdom is infinite and know human wisdom is very limited: there’s no rational basis to second guess God’s decisions wrt to other people (or you, but in this case other people), assuming you believe that. Whereas what non/anti-religious people hypothetically think about supposed secular but really Christian or Abrahamic concepts like the popular Western conception of heaven, is a pretty useless exercise IMO generally. The additional element in some other major religions is either a) they consider afterlife as completely beyond human comprehension so don’t dwell on it and/or b) there’s a transformation from the ‘you’ in this life (to another creature, the self disappears, etc). Even Christianity in the original has some element of the latter, as where Jesus was asked among seven brothers who married the same woman (six of them marrying brother’s widow) which was her true husband in heaven. The answer was basically ‘you won’t think that way anymore’. So even the true Christian concept is arguably different from comedy series about somebody in heaven type of portrayal. It’s not really the same you, after you are enlightened in ways you just can’t achieve as mortal human. That’s not actually 100% different from say Confucian tradition which doesn’t emphasize the mechanics of afterlife, you venerate ancestors without a literal mechanical view of how/where/if they still exist, because there’s no way to understand it. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2019, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/64 "2019-08-22T18:39:02Z")
> [@Corry\_El](#): > > As Christian you can’t judge the essential good/bad of other people in the eyes of God. You accept that God’s wisdom is infinite and know human wisdom is very limited: there’s no rational basis to second guess God’s decisions wrt to other people (or you, but in this case other people), assuming you believe that. > > Whereas what non/anti-religious people hypothetically think about supposed secular but really Christian or Abrahamic concepts like the popular Western conception of heaven, is a pretty useless exercise IMO generally. :dubious: You’re not going to find a lot of atheists who think heaven is a secular concept; it’s quite clearly a part of christian mythology. (Other mythologies have afterlives, but they’re different afterlives than the one in christian mythology. And actually there are a good number of mutually exclusive christian conceptions of heaven too, because christianity is nowhere _near_ as monolithic as you appear to think it is.) As for whether it’s a waste of time, the primary reason we pesky atheists ponder stuff like christian mythology is to ponder how well the concepts actually work when you apply critical thought to them. Real things always withstand critical analysis due to being real, but stuff like heaven tends to implode in interesting ways when the harsh light of cognition is shined on it, and examining the implosions can be entertaining and educational. ---
**Author:** ![Inigo\_Montoya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inigo_montoya/32/124_2.png) [@Inigo\_Montoya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inigo_Montoya)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2019, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/65 "2019-08-22T20:40:32Z")
> [@Corry\_El](#): > > The additional element in some other major religions is either a) they consider afterlife as completely beyond human comprehension so don’t dwell on it and/or b) there’s a transformation from the ‘you’ in this life (to another creature, the self disappears, etc). Even Christianity in the original has some element of the latter, as where Jesus was asked among seven brothers who married the same woman (six of them marrying brother’s widow) which was her true husband in heaven. The answer was basically ‘you won’t think that way anymore’. Long time ago I had an afterlife dream featuring my (now) ex and me returning to our forever house after what seemed like a very long and exhausting vacation. It was clear we’d left there together, and now we were returning from life. There were rooms in Our House that only I would enter, and she had her set as well. I got the sense the ‘rooms’ were actually lives, or fragments of lives, we could revisit whenever we wanted. I get on much better with The Missus than I did with The Ex, and I’ve had some trouble reconciling that with this dream (has she no rooms in the house?). Curiously, this quoted bit helps with that. Now I am far less reluctant to die. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2019, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/66 "2019-08-22T21:28:05Z")
Most atheists don’t have, much less shine, a “hard light of cognition.” They no more chose not to believe than believers chose to believe. A lot of what I hear from my fellow atheists sounds a lot like arrested adolescents who still like to feel edgey and how their parents can’t boss them. In a thread with a topic like this? Fight the hypothetical. Instead of answering the question, or just going to another thread, carp about mind control. ---
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2019, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/67 "2019-08-22T21:46:38Z")
> [@Scumpup](#): > > Most atheists don’t have, much less shine, a “hard light of cognition.” They no more chose not to believe than believers chose to believe. A lot of what I hear from my fellow atheists sounds a lot like arrested adolescents who still like to feel edgey and how their parents can’t boss them. In a thread with a topic like this? Fight the hypothetical. Instead of answering the question, or just going to another thread, carp about mind control. Most atheists _who bother to ponder christian mythology_, is what I said. And of course we didn’t choose what to believe; we processed input, analyzed it with our brains, and the beliefs sprang from that just like with anybody else (though it seems that the more analytical the analysis the more likely that atheism is the result). As for “edgey” things like pondering the terms of the hypothetical, pondering the terms of the hypothetical has a direct bearing on discussing the hypothetical. How heaven works matters - in heaven are we _capable_ of being bothered by who’s standing next to us? Are they _capable_ of calling us racist slurs? Are we _capable_ of feeling bad about such slurs? These questions are directly material to the discussion. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2019, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/68 "2019-08-22T23:08:58Z")
> [@begbert2](#): > > Most atheists _who bother to ponder christian mythology_, is what I said. And of course we didn’t choose what to believe; we processed input, analyzed it with our brains, and the beliefs sprang from that just like with anybody else (though it seems that the more analytical the analysis the more likely that atheism is the result). > > As for “edgey” things like pondering the terms of the hypothetical, pondering the terms of the hypothetical has a direct bearing on discussing the hypothetical. How heaven works matters - in heaven are we _capable_ of being bothered by who’s standing next to us? Are they _capable_ of calling us racist slurs? Are we _capable_ of feeling bad about such slurs? These questions are directly material to the discussion. Ah…“pondering.” That sums up everything you have to say on the topic in a single word. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [August 22, 2019, 11:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/69 "2019-08-22T23:35:07Z")
> [@Scumpup](#): > > Most atheists don’t have, much less shine, a “hard light of cognition.” They no more chose not to believe than believers chose to believe. Well, it’s true at least that many atheists (including myself; but I don’t know whether it’s “most”, and I doubt you really do either) didn’t arrive at atheist beliefs rationally. (In my own case, I discovered that the worldview that had always made intuitive sense to me for as long as I could remember was called “atheism” long before I reached adulthood and adult levels of rational cognition.) On the other hand, many atheists report having arrived at their atheism by a process of rational analysis based on scientifically factual inputs, the same way they’d assess any other hypothesis about the nature of the universe. In any case, atheists, whether or not they arrived at their own beliefs rationally, are often better positioned than theists to recognize logical flaws in theistic beliefs. It’s always easier to spot the weak points in belief structures that you don’t happen to share. > [@Scumpup](#): > > Ah…“pondering.” That sums up everything you have to say on the topic in a single word. 😕 No, it obviously doesn’t. If I hadn’t read the thread and somebody merely told me that **begbert2** had been “pondering” its topic, that would be pretty much entirely useless as an informative “summing up” of what he actually said. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/70 "2019-08-23T00:30:07Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > 😕 No, it obviously doesn’t. If I hadn’t read the thread and somebody merely told me that **begbert2** had been “pondering” its topic, that would be pretty much entirely useless as an informative “summing up” of what he actually said. Yes, it does. You really should watch an episode or two of “Pinky and The Brain.” It would clarify for you the difference between those who think and those who ponder. ---
**Author:** ![ThisSpaceForRent](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thisspaceforrent/32/345_2.png) [@ThisSpaceForRent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThisSpaceForRent)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 1:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/71 "2019-08-23T01:44:47Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > No, because I’m smart enough to realize that I’m not necessarily going to benefit from a stricter admissions policy. i only got into the second post in this thread… Miller…Cheers, you win! ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/72 "2019-08-23T01:56:42Z")
> [@Scumpup](#): > > Yes, it does. You really should watch an episode or two of “Pinky and The Brain.” It would clarify for you the difference between those who think and those who ponder. :rolleyes: That “difference” isn’t generally recognized in dictionaries, which use “to think about” or “to think about carefully” and similar variants to express the meaning of “to ponder”. If you believe that some gag from a children’s cartoon show should take precedence over the dictionary definitions of “think” and “ponder”, fine, knock yourself out, but don’t expect that other people will necessarily recognize or agree with your preferred use of the terms. ---
**Author:** ![ThisSpaceForRent](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thisspaceforrent/32/345_2.png) [@ThisSpaceForRent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThisSpaceForRent)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/73 "2019-08-23T01:58:17Z")
theists make me chuckle…loudly! LOL ymmv ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/74 "2019-08-23T02:32:18Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > :rolleyes: That “difference” isn’t generally recognized in dictionaries, which use “to think about” or “to think about carefully” and similar variants to express the meaning of “to ponder”. If you believe that some gag from a children’s cartoon show should take precedence over the dictionary definitions of “think” and “ponder”, fine, knock yourself out, but don’t expect that other people will necessarily recognize or agree with your preferred use of the terms. No, I think that one or two or so Dopers are just rather too full of themselves. YMMV and probably does. Ponder that. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [August 23, 2019, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/75 "2019-08-23T04:08:31Z")
> [@Scumpup](#): > > Ponder that. Speaking of which, if you’re so disdainful about “pondering” for reasons that are apparently significant to you and your cartoon-character friends, why are you [participating in a thread that directs you to “ponder” right in the thread title](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=880817)? Why aren’t you scolding **those** posters about how worthless the act of “pondering” makes their contributions? (Answer: Because you didn’t have an intelligent response to **begbert2** ’s remarks, so all you could come up with was trying to dismiss them with a kids’-show crack about _hur hur, “pondering” is stupid_.) ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2019, 12:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/76 "2019-08-24T00:19:14Z")
I would like nothing more than t have a smart lazer beam in space that would seek out all evil humans and send them directly to heaven immediately. ---
**Author:** ![Atomic\_Alex](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atomic_alex/32/175_2.png) [@Atomic\_Alex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atomic_Alex)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2019, 12:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/77 "2019-08-24T00:48:39Z")
Wow this got kind of heated… I was thinking of this today and had a sort of tangentially related idea which is connected to the ‘simulation problem’. Basically if you want to have a completely accurate simulation of sentient beings behaviour then they have to be actually sentient. Perhaps a godlike being wants to simulate human society, as such it has to leave open the possibility of bad things happening and evil people doing evil things, what if ‘heaven’ is a recompense for this, “Sorry about that guys, there wasn’t really any other way to do it, please have paradise as thanks and an apology”. In addition the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks had the best depiction of a materialist paradise I’ve come across, and even there while perfectly free to live indefinitely its citizens tend to have themselves euthanised after three or four centuries of life (among other options, such as having themselves held in suspended animation until more interesting times come along). Even entire civilisations have their lifespans, ultimately ‘subliming’ away out of physical reality entirely into another state of existence which is mysterious, ineffable and not really describable. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Razncain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/9d8465/32.png) [@Razncain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Razncain)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2019, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/78 "2019-08-24T01:32:54Z")
I’d be upset if it turned out Jehovah was the real McCoy. I’d have to be a drone and completely rewired to think such a Being was good and just. IOW’s, it wouldn’t be me. If it turned out to be some other god, that god would also have some explaining to do. The very little about Heaven the Bible says of it, doesn’t interest me in the least, it really doesn’t. It’s almost silent about it, but Christians seem to think they want to go there. > [@Hermitian](#): > > James 2:10 > For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. Does any believer know what the law is? Seems to vary widely on what they think it is. ---
**Author:** ![Nametag](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nametag/32/406_2.png) [@Nametag](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nametag)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2019, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/79 "2019-08-25T17:18:30Z")
Since the existence of a heaven would mean that the vicious psychotic motherfucker in the Bible is real, and only his most devoted sycophants would get in, I’d expect only evil people to make it into heaven. If I died and heaven turned out to be a thing, I’d be quite surprised, and dismayed to find myself there. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2019, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775/80 "2019-08-25T18:28:41Z")
> [@Scumpup](#): > > That is one of the more bullshit assertions, ever. I’ll require some expansion beyond your good say-so on it…and expansion, in this context, means more than your tired-ass idea of Socratic method. You’ve never encountered that idea before, that things are only recognizable or distinct in the presence of their opposite? It’s a pretty common concept in Christian theology, particularly when it comes to the “problem of evil:” evil is necessary because without evil, good is meaningless. I’m not sure how much I buy into it myself, but I’m surprised someone as passionate about religious discussion as yourself would be unfamiliar with the argument. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-it-bother-you-if-evil-people-made-it-into-heaven/838775.md?page=5)