Yeah, this is what I’ve heard, just basking in the glory of God.
Televisions series, books, movies all have different takes. In Lucifer, it’s this beautiful city where you get to meet your loved ones again. In The Good Place, you hang around and do whatever you want until you’re so bored from being able to do anything that you annihilate yourself.
Pick your poison, I guess. The whole concept of still being “me” after existing for a literal eternity is bizarre to me, and I don’t even understand what newborns would be doing there – just sitting and drooling? They don’t even have a sense of self yet.
So in the Hindu religion* we kind of follow the concept of Moksha, in which we will be freed from the eternal birth and rebirth cycle and be in some kind of transcendant state. I highly doubt I will be fighting great battles.
But no one has ever really been able to define well enough for me what that transcendant state is. As others have implied sitting around contemplating Brahman and the center of the universe seems pretty boring, do I not get to play Animal Crossing anymore?
*There are as many stripes of Hinduism as Hindus. I don’t know if everyone believes in a concept of Moksha. I still consider myself nominally Hindu though I am atheist. YMMV.
There’s just too much difference of opinion for a meaningful overall answer here, given that the “official” word appears to be limited. Like, to address a couple of questions above with pop culture, What Dreams May Come implies that you wouldn’t even think of wanting simulated violence in heaven. Gaiman’s Death once took a newborn, and the newborn’s soul asked her, in perfectly adult language, if that really was all the time they got alive. This isn’t even getting into the “would a living mortal consider this “paradise” question.
Said bags of water are a part of a sentient being. Pixels and video game characters aren’t sentient and have no moral value anymore than a stick figure drawing does.
Yes, this.
I don’t think the concept of being conscious in exactly the way you are now, with a mortal set of knowledge and emotions really makes sense in the context of a supposed perfect and eternal reality.
Of course the factual answer is that heaven was never clearly defined, so it’s inherently a WAG. It’s easy to say that in heaven you won’t feel hunger or pain, and you’ll get to meet grandma again. It gets much harder to define anything beyond that.
(NB I’m an atheist, so I’m not speaking of my personal beliefs)
But I don’t think partaking in an activity that is combat-related and “violence for violence’s sake” is necessarily (or even usually) the same thing. A lot of what the OP is describing is essentially laser tag.
Wouldn’t simulated violence of any kind defeat the purpose which is HEAVEN? Heaven, or the heavens, is a common religious cosmological or transcendent supernatural place where beings such as deities, angels, souls, saints, or venerated ancestors are said to originate, be enthroned, or reside -Wikepedia. If we go to a religious perspective, It is a place regarded in various [religions] as good after death
Me: Okay, I’ve got an idea for a new RPG.
God: Yes, I know.
Me: How -
God Omniscient, remember.
Me: Oh yeah.
God: Do you want me to make it for you?
Me: What, in reality?
God: Yea. You know, omnipotent and all that.
Me: Yeah, that’d be great! Er - it’s a bit violent.
God: I know, I know. Never mind, I can fill it with p-zombies and the violence won’t matter.
Me: Is that possible? - Oh yeah. Omnipotent.
God: Quite.
Me: And the p-zombies won’t suffer when I kill them?
God: Oh, they’ll suffer, horribly. But they’re not real, so don’t worry about it.
Me: Sounds a bit -
God: Unethical? I’ve created an infinite array of universes full of real suffering. This is nothing.
Me: Um… ok.
God: It’s a pretty difficult game. You don’t stand much chance of winning.
Me: No? What chance do I have?
God: There are fourteen million six hundred and five iterations of this game.
Me: Oh. How many do I win?
God: One.
Me: Er… I don’t think I’ll bother.
God: That’s what you usually say. You are so predictable.
People enjoy violent games because they satisfy some sort of emotional need (releasing pent up agression, stimulating adrenal response, fighting boredom). But if we’re in heaven why bother with the middleman, why not just eliminate the emotional needs that the violence is satisfying, and just put the residents in a state of existential euphoria.
I’ve never done drugs, but based on description I’ve heard the first hit of heroine you try is amazing and then you spend the rest of your addiction trying to reclaim that high. Well perhaps Heaven is just like that first hit, but even better and it never diminishes. So that basically the people in heaven spend all their time drugged out of their gourds from mainlining pure uncut god, but its all okay because its not like they have anything else they should be doing,.
My personal theory is that “Heaven” is kinda like Earth except you don’t have to mow the lawn or change light bulbs. To the degree that I have plans for such a highly hypothetical place, it involves having fun with various female Star Trek actresses (in their prime, of course). Oh, and Anne Francis.
Since the topic is whether simulated violence would be granted in heaven, discussing women we’d like to have “fun” with is not on topic. Let’s stick to the framed discussion.
This is an important distinction — because of the way we use our languages we associate together the terms violence, aggression and hate as being interrelated. But there can be activities that involve what I will term “forceful action” without it having to map to wrongful deeds and thoughts. Think a gridiron football game where everyone plays by the rules.
Of course part of the deal is the nature of the sanctified state of the souls in afterlife (if they retain individuality). Are you transformed into a you who is perfected and purified and neither need nor want any further external excitement or satisfaction, or do you become an entity that will now and then take a day off from being one with holy perfection to spend it woohooing as you surf the expanding blast of a supernova, or time travel to hear the first singing of the great epic of each of a billion cultures.
I suppose under the usual Western understanding of “Heaven” the people whose enjoyment of “forceful action” entertainment is wholly or partly informed by their own anger/hate issues or as a proxy for making that aggressive hate real, will have to purge or be purged of those emotions before ascending to the next plane. Those who OTOH enjoyed such with a pure heart, would not need that purging (on that specific grounds)
This is why the Valhalla comparisons are a bit inaccurate. I’m not a Norse expert but as far as I know Valhalla is nothing but fighting and recovering from fighting. What I’m describing in the OP is a place where simulated violence is just one of innumerable activities and hobbies you can do for eternity and whether that would be philosophically consistent with a perfect afterlife free of evil.
Is it not the actual action that determines where you end up? Otherwise wouldn’t it be “in for a penny, in for a pound” it terms of just acting out any horrible thought one has?
There’s temperance and then there’s gluttony. Satisfying a desire to partake in violence would be equally immoral in a heavenly simulation as it would be on real people. That’s the thing about Christian virtue ethics, it’s a virtue ethics. Gridiron football isn’t inherently virtuous and deadly combat isn’t inherently sinful. There are right reasons and there are wrong reasons, according to the natural order of things.
The question is whether it is natural to identify violence with eutrapelia, and therefore the virtue of temperance. Adopting Christian virtue ethics for the sake of argument, my opinion is a strong no. The natural state of man, it seems to me, is to find violence unpleasant and discomforting. Is not man endowed with the quality of empathy? To take pleasure in violence itself is, in my opinion, naturally disordered; therefore, I would not expect a soul who has achieved perfect salvation to desire violence, and I would not expect Heaven to satisfy such desires.
Quite to the contrary, I would expect such desires to be cured in purgatory.