Would it bother you if evil people made it into heaven?

[Scumpup]

@Miller

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.

I’m very familiar with the argument and never have bought it. Not least of which reason is that just as light and dark aren’t opposites (the latter is the absence of the former) happiness and unhappiness aren’t necessarily opposites. Plus, it’s just such a fatuous assertion that I wanted to see if he’d step up and defend it once he’d made it.

[Biffster]

@Nametag

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.

And forever too, all because of some stupid naive decision you’d made back in your earthly life.

[begbert2]

@Atomic_Alex

Wow this got kind of heated…

It appears that I’m too smug for Scumpup to be able to tolerate my presence. Or something.

@Atomic_Alex

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”.

When you start talking about gods and the supernatural and such the difference between reality and a simulation tends to get kind of blurred. The premise is that somebody created a world that operates separately from his own, with its own rules, and which he’s got the ability to examine freely from the outside and possibly tweak the behavior of at will. Time in the created world may or may not run at the same speed as the creator’s world, and they may be able to jump back and forth, scanning forward to see the ‘future’ if they like. And the creator creates a bunch of intelligences, independent agents, which operate within the created world while being subject to its rules and unable to see or interact with the world outside, other than when things outside reach in and alter the reality.

So far there isn’t a heck of a lot distinguishing between theology and video game creation.

Of course your typical video game character can’t ‘make the leap’ out to the real world, so people like to imagine they’re PCs rather than NPCs - despite the fact that real PCs are continuously aware of their continuing status in the real world.

The interesting thing to note is that in the simulation model, it’s easy to draw a moral line between the treatment of PCs and NPCs. So it’s bad to be mean to anybody with a player character (aka soul), but soulless people, like those dirty Wisconsinites, can be abused without concern. Similarly if you needed to give Jeffrey Dahmer a heaven all his own, creating a simulation containing genuinely sentient aware beings for him to torture could, in theory, be a-okay.

(If it isn’t, I’m going to be in a lot of trouble for how I played The Sims back in the day.)

@Atomic_Alex

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.

Haven’t read them, but the ‘boredom factor’ is always a sort of pressing question when one talks about eternal heavens.