Heaven on Earth - Page 2

wtfsvi · #11 03-29-2007, 12:59 PM

You remember life on earth. Thus you have suffered, and therefore you can experience the joy of heaven. And I don't think your body goes to heaven, so there isn't that much left for you to sin with. I can't come up with a good reason to committ sin for a being that is pure conscience, anyway.

edit: Except for envying the living. But if heaven is so great, there should be no reason for that either.

vhawk01 · #12 03-29-2007, 01:11 PM

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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.

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

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How do you know that it isn't?

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

vhawk01 · #13 03-29-2007, 01:13 PM

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You remember life on earth. Thus you have suffered, and therefore you can experience the joy of heaven. And I don't think your body goes to heaven, so there isn't that much left for you to sin with. I can't come up with a good reason to committ sin for a being that is pure conscience, anyway.

edit: Except for envying the living. But if heaven is so great, there should be no reason for that either.

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Right, but I am constantly assured by theists (mostly Christians) that free will is an essential component to happiness. You guys keep dodging around this issue. If I am a bodiless consciousness, and I have no desire to sin, how am I free to choose? And if this end-around on free will satisfies you, then how do you justify suffering and sin and our Fall on Earth? Why weren't we made without the desire to sin? Remember, God is infinitely benevolent.

vhawk01 · #14 03-29-2007, 01:14 PM

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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.

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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!

DonkBluffer · #15 03-29-2007, 01:17 PM

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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).

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nirvana != afterlife

AFAIK nirvana is just losing all ignorance/wrong knowledge/delusion, and to simply be.
Suffering is not caused by the outside world, but by 'ignorance'. You could live your life free of suffering by removing all wrong knowledge. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Ben K · #16 03-29-2007, 01:30 PM

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.

wtfsvi · #17 03-29-2007, 02:19 PM

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If I am a bodiless consciousness, and I have no desire to sin, how am I free to choose?

[/ QUOTE ] The same way you can have free will now without having the ability nor desire to spot a floating tea spoon 5000 feet right above your head, fly up there, scrape your brains out with it and feed them to the flying zebra you meet up there.

PairTheBoard · #18 03-29-2007, 03:16 PM

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If I am a bodiless consciousness, and I have no desire to sin, how am I free to choose?

[/ QUOTE ] The same way you can have free will now without having the ability nor desire to spot a floating tea spoon 5000 feet right above your head, fly up there, scrape your brains out with it and feed them to the flying zebra you meet up there.

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I was dubious about your assertion until you got to the zebra part. An orangutang maybe. But a zebra? Nope. No desire to do that.

PairTheBoard

vhawk01 · #19 03-29-2007, 04:54 PM

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If I am a bodiless consciousness, and I have no desire to sin, how am I free to choose?

[/ QUOTE ] The same way you can have free will now without having the ability nor desire to spot a floating tea spoon 5000 feet right above your head, fly up there, scrape your brains out with it and feed them to the flying zebra you meet up there.

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This is my understanding of free will. It is not the Christian explanation, at least not as I understand it, because this would most certainly NOT mandate suffering on Earth, and thus suffering would be precluded by an omnibenevolent God. So, if I am not free to choose wrong action or choose action which results in suffering, I may still be free in some sense, but not in the Christian sense. The necessity of the story of Adam highlights this, I think.

stormstarter28 · #20 03-30-2007, 11:16 AM

I'm shocked no one has brought this up yet: Lucifer lived in heaven and chose to sin by defying God. So, obviously sinning in heaven is possible. I think many Christians would say that you have the free will to defy God, but that once you have seen God face to face and experienced his kingdom, you would have no desire to sin against him (which would probably get you thrown out of heaven). Think about it: if you're in heaven, and it is as amazing as Christians believe, and you've experienced God's love to the extent Christians believe you will, then why would you want to turn your back on it and get thrown into hell?