Heaven on Earth

[vhawk01]

Rarely do I spend much time contemplating Heaven, but I had occasion to do so today. A few things confused me, and seemed like obvious contradictions, at least to my naive perspective on the topic. I'm wondering if anyone can set me straight.

How can Heaven be any better than life on Earth? I'm constantly told that you cannot have joy without sorrow, happiness without sadness and good without evil. I am also told of the primacy and sacredness of free will. So, I know that the most important determinants of my joy and happiness are that I am free to choose unhappiness and that I suffer at times, in order to better enjoy my pleasure. But I'm also told tha God cannot tolerate sin, and that Heaven is being with God. So, my question is, is there suffering in Heaven? Can I choose to do wrong?

I assume the answers to these are no, I cannot suffer, and no, I cannot choose to do wrong or sin. This follows from the idea that being with God means being without sin. But I am curious, how do these ideas impact my free will? If I cannot suffer and I cannot choose to sin, obviously I do not have free will. Is that just not a big deal up in Heaven? And if that is the case, why is it so cherished here on Earth? I am often told that the reason Adam HAD to be tempted was because creating a world free from sin would have created a human race of automatons. So....how is Heaven different? Why was the Earth ever created in the first place?

[Subfallen]

I hope you provoke some ambitious responses. Should be interesting. In the meantime, since I have no thoughts of my own, I quote Darrow, "It is amazing what confidence people feel that the Being who made this life which is a failure would do any better with another. Most people instinctively feel that God couldn't do worse; and yet we are constantly told how much worse he can do and probably will do for most of the people of the earth."

[godBoy]

As I understand it - You will be a different person in Heaven, your spirit is the same and you have your memories from earth. But you would have no desire to sin.

is there suffering in Heaven? Can I choose to do wrong?
no. - But your experience of earth would make Heaven all the sweeter.

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
As I understand it - You will be a different person in Heaven, your spirit is the same and you have your memories from earth. But you would have no desire to sin.

is there suffering in Heaven? Can I choose to do wrong?
no. - But your experience of earth would make Heaven all the sweeter.

[/ QUOTE ]

So, how will I not be a mindless automaton? If this is the optimal solution, why isn't Earth like this?

[FortunaMaximus]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
As I understand it - You will be a different person in Heaven, your spirit is the same and you have your memories from earth. But you would have no desire to sin.

is there suffering in Heaven? Can I choose to do wrong?
no. - But your experience of earth would make Heaven all the sweeter.

[/ QUOTE ]

So, how will I not be a mindless automaton? If this is the optimal solution, why isn't Earth like this?

[/ QUOTE ]

How do you know that it isn't?

[roblin]

seems i will be some very diffrent person in heaven so i guess my personality etc dies. so i really dont se the diffrence of dying if heaven exists or not.

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
seems i will be some very diffrent person in heaven so i guess my personality etc dies. so i really dont se the diffrence of dying if heaven exists or not.

[/ QUOTE ]

A possible drawback that the 'your body won't go, only your consciousness and you will have no desire to sin' crowd might be ignoring or at least not considering. If I don't have a desire to sin, I am definitely not myself...thats about 80% of what I do!

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
As I understand it - You will be a different person in Heaven, your spirit is the same and you have your memories from earth. But you would have no desire to sin.

is there suffering in Heaven? Can I choose to do wrong?
no. - But your experience of earth would make Heaven all the sweeter.

[/ QUOTE ]

So, how will I not be a mindless automaton? If this is the optimal solution, why isn't Earth like this?

[/ QUOTE ]

How do you know that it isn't?

[/ QUOTE ]

That was the point of the thread title: I think it is.

[Ben K]

Hold it, I'm stuck. Alright, maybe not stop exactly what you're doing but please help me out.

You can do no wrong and experience no suffering in heaven. However, each action sits on a relative scale, as previously mentioned, so that heaven seems that much sweeter because you remember life on Earth for comparison.

BUT - surely, once in heaven, there are two logical scenarios:

1. You become god or dull. Follow me, I think this works out, I may be wrong. Action A is sweeter than action B. This means in heaven you can't do B because you would be suffering relative to how you'd feel if you did A instead and you can't suffer. So assign a distribtution to the sweetness of heavenly actions and you must move along over time in heaven because you can't suffer as just explained. There are 2 choices for an ending (or??), either the distribution reaches a maximum, in which case you'd be doing the same thing over and over and be dull OR the distribution fails to converge and runs to infinity which would be perfect sweetness which is by definition being god.

2. You have no memory in heaven so can choose various options and each just gets compared to life on Earth thus allowing you to take action B because you don't remember option A was sweeter and therefore suffer.

Perhaps the idea that suffering is relative is flawed. How could we identify an absolute scale of suffering? Perhaps the distribution is asymtotic to some maximum that humans can experience and there are lots of heavenly actions where the marginal suffering is small enough to be ignored but, really, that breaches the no suffering rule.

[Matt R.]

Big disclaimer: this is my opinion on the matter, no more, and I certainly don't claim absolute knowledge about this (just to get those replies out of the way).

I personally believe that, if there is a heaven, as commonly described in some/most Christian religions, that there exists suffering in heaven. Of course we are then no longer talking about the "common" view of heaven I suppose. So basically, when I say heaven I am referring to an afterlife in the presence of God, or in the kingdom of God if you prefer. So at its base it is like the Christian view, with a twist on one of the details.

Basically, I view "heaven" as consciousness without the physical. Thus, you can suffer if you choose to experience suffering -- by distancing yourself from God, by interacting with someone/something that causes suffering, etc. However, the fundamental difference between the suffering in heaven vs. on Earth is the lack of the physical. In our lives, if we are suffering via our sensory perception, we cannot remove it. If we're hungry and can't acquire food, we can't stop it by simply choosing to stop it. If we bang our head on something and it hurts, we can't stop the impulses being trasmitted to our brain and thus to our sensory perception. However, in heaven we lack the physical limitations, and we can therefore choose to end the displeasure by removing the harmful interaction (whatever that may be).

I hope that is at least somewhat clear. If not, suffice it to say that I think there is suffering in heaven, but the difference from Earth is that there is never *inevitable* suffering. In other words, we can always choose to have it stop. It can therefore be accurately described as a place of "eternal happiness" (I have no problem with this description... I just don't think it can fully encompass what heaven would actually be like).

I actually prefer the Buddhist view of nirvana to that of heaven (if this gives any more insight as to my position). I think that heaven (and/or nirvana) is fundamentally unknowable or indescribable, so the only use in attaching words to these concepts is to make them more accessible and understandable to those that wish to communicate ideas about an afterlife. But, in actuality they can never be described fully. We can only use metaphor and describe the concept in terms of what we "know" -- our physical world.

I was looking for a good quote that I remember reading attributed to the Buddha, but I couldn't find the exact one. However, I found another one that I like:

"Now you will ask: But what is Nirvana?
..The only reasonable reply is that it can never be answered completely and satisfactorily in words, because human language is too poor to express the real nature of the Absolute Truth or Ultimate Reality which is Nirvana. Language is created and used by masses of human beings to express things and ideas experienced by their sense organs and their mind. A supramundane experience like that of the Absolute Truth is not of such a category.
Words are symbols representing things and ideas known to us; and these symbols do not and cannot convey the true nature of even ordinary things. Language is considered deceptive and misleading in the matter of understanding of the Truth. So the Lankavatara-sutra says that ignorant people get stuck in words like an elephant in the mud. Nevertheless, we cannot do without language. (p35)"

I don't know where this quote is from exactly... just found it off a website. But it sums up my view very well (no, I'm not a Buddhist, lol. I just like a lot of their ideas). I also realize the Christian view of heaven is different than the Buddhist idea of Nirvana -- but I think both of them are fundamentally indescribable (hence my use of the quote).