Heaven and/or hell would be boring.
I don't give a damn whether I go to heaven or hell. They'd both get equally boring, in the end. I mean, you'd get used to 6 billion years of paradise, or 6 billion years of torture. Someone prove me wrong here.
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ok, you get 6 billion years of nothing, why fluff it up? thats what religious people are for.
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um... what if i believe in reincarnation?
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And can you imagine how crowded?!
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Where did the 6 billion number come from? Isn't it usually eternity in most faiths?
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It might be "boring" from an outside perspective, but the presumption would be that you would only have feelings of bliss or torment. Boredom wouldn't even be an applicable emotion.
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I agree with the OP, and I used to be an "insider" evangelical who was all sold out for Jesus and going to heaven. And along the way towards my current state of agnosticism, I realized that yes, heaven and hell sound as boring as... well, hell, to me. :)
Maybe there's a reason that life is finite, maybe not, but I'll take it as it is. I'll be quite happy if the Buddhist belief in reincarnation does hold true, though of course I'll never be conscious of the fact. That's okay. |
Have you ever had that kind of orgasm where it just keeps going and going and it feels so great?
At some point, you're like god damn.. OKAY, I get it.. can I go back to normal touch sensitivity and emotional response? In short, the pleasure gets old. Wouldn't heaven, too, if all you could feel was pleasure? Damned if I don't like the shitty things in life, they give me things to argue about, fight for, and most importantly feel human. |
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Second, if we could only feel bliss, would we be in paradise? If we lost the capability to feel anything other than bliss, we wouldn't be free, in a sense. And that wouldn't be paradise, but just a different version of hell. |
I think some of the views here are really uncreative and one-dimensional perspectives of what the afterlife (betweenlife) may or may not be like. Personally, I believe in reincarnation, so I feel I'm not really looking at 6 billion years of boredom.
I prefer to think of it as a place where all is possible, God is love, and my heart is full. The betweenlife is meant to give us a rest between lives here, where we may or may not be happy, where darkness is a prominent feature. If I think of it as a feeling, I think of it as being how I feel when I think about people I love and who love me in return. As for only feeling one feeling--that's not possible. If we're looking at the afterlife from a Christian perspective, we know that humans have free will, and there's no evidence that stops with death. Free will includes being able to feel however you want to. |
They can only be boring iff we follow them through the same concept that we have of time. It's fucking eternity, and somehow we feel capable of applying our humanistic linear sense of time?
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mark twain covered this in letters from the earth better than i possible could.
i think the text is all here: http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/twainlfe.htm enjoy. |
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Is that my idea of happiness? No. Do I believe in an afterlife in the sense that we're all chillin' out at the pearly gates? Of course not. My personal belief is somewhat of a take on reincarnation in the collective unconscious sense, and rebirth in the more physical sense perhaps best exemplified by the old alchemical viewpoints. |
This is why I don't buy into the whole heaven and hell thing. What kind of system exists with this brief madness we call life, followed by an eternity of heaven or hell.
It just doesn't make sense. I prefer to think that in death there is nothingness. We cease to exist. |
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That was a very good read. I hadn't read it all until now, thanks for the link. Below are my three favorite quotes(in no particular order and pretty much having nothing to do with the discussion at hand, words in brackets are mine): Quote:
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I've always reckoned that it's a fairly blunt system of reward/punishment.
That is to say - it seems crude in comparison to most human systems of law and justice. |
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Rational arguments aside, wouldn't nothingness be even more boring?
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My claim (which Charlatan put more succinctly), is that if one's soul/consciousness dies along with the physical body, and does not go anywhere (heaven, hell, or otherwise), then that would be the "nothingness" that was spoken of. Nothingness = no consciousness, no more soul, nothing. Just a dead body. Does that make more sense? |
Yep, it makes sense. I was just pointing out that it doesn't really compare to the original claim - nothingness isn't any more or less boring. It's just nothing.
Anyways, I can't believe we are even having a discussion on this - the OP was a little silly to begin with. |
I recommend that everyone here read Stanley Elkin's The Living End, if you haven't already. It had slipped my mind in my first post. It's an irreverant look at a possible afterlife, and one of my favorite books.
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Eternity would make anyone go insane, I don't care what it is. Then again, the people who really believe they're going to an afterlife might not have much to lose. :lol:
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itīs been touched on but not explicitly talked about. the assumption is that you go to heaven/hell exactly as you are. that doesnīt work. what happens if you lose the ability to become bored. there are plenty of examples of things that just endlessly repeat (i work with disabled people atm and to one of them a routine established over 32 years is paramount. this routine also involves hours of sitting and doing nothing.) what if you lost the capacity to become bored of endless bliss or torment. from my perspective that would make heaven truly heaven and hell truly hell and also if we went to either place as we were wouldnīt that mean we take the bad bits of us to heaven thus making it imperfect and in hell it wouldnīt take long for people to figure out that they can form teams. hell, what have they got to lose?
ps better establish that iīm non-religious at this point.... |
I think we can quantify boringness in this way. The lowest level of boredom is doing something you enjoy, but you`re starting to decide what to do next.
The most extreme form of boredom is where you`re in hell for eternity, an you`ve been tortured from the day you died (if you believe the catholic school version of hell), and you`re no longer tormented by the pain, but tormented by the inability to feel anything else whatsoever, and one day, you find a gun on the infernal ground, and you just keep screaming, pulling the trigger, trying to kill yourself with fruitless results, and you just keep pulling the trigger, over, an over, and over, until the demons make the call that your newfound state of madness is a torture that even they have not begun to imagine, and place a velvet rope around you, so the free citizens of hell can gaze in awe at the sheer lunacy of the human psyche. I give you the AK scale. From playing Call of Duty 4 for two hours, to watching a Will Ferrell film, respectively. |
you people who think hell is a fairy tale don't get it.
1) If they find life on Mars, that's TWO planets, in the only solar system we know, that have life, that means life is probably SUPER ABUNDANT AND NOT RARE. 2) from what we know about life forms, they are ruthless, NOT MORAL, enjoy inflicting pain and scaring their enemies, and we should not assume alien life forms would be any different. In fact, we should assume the more highly evolved they are, the more ruthless and criminally insane they are, and they probably have evolved to the point where they feed off negative emotions, like fear and terror. Several episodes of STar Trek explored these possibilities, you may laugh at STar Trek but as far as raw philosophy goes, as to the nature and origins of alien life, there is no greater treatise on the subject that Star Trek episodes. The one thing Star Trek doesn't explore as much as you would think, is the very common possibility that aliens would simply view humans as a good food source. How much feeling do you have for your food? How much empathy? concern? little to none, more like none. And when we look at how sick and depraved humans are, how can we know for sure, that God's depravity and evil isn't actually INFINITE? How can we be sure, that since, God didn't give us any choice in being created, he doesn't give us any choice in self-annihilation? Killing yourself is no way out, your consciousness is still contained with the reality that God has created, he keeps it going for the purpose of torturing you, because he/she/it gets off on it, just like all humans, created in his image, get off on dominating and being feared, etc, etc. |
I don't know, but for me the idea of "heaven" never including a bit of "being bored." Seems like an oxymoron to me. Maybe you'd get bored in hell, but I'm thinking that'd be part of the "punishment".
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