fruglemonkey

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.

Shauk

ok, you get 6 billion years of nothing, why fluff it up? thats what religious people are for.

MiSo

um... what if i believe in reincarnation?

__________________
- this space for rent -

girldetective

And can you imagine how crowded?!

__________________
As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons...be cheerful; strive for happiness - Desiderata

Willravel

Where did the 6 billion number come from? Isn't it usually eternity in most faiths?

Bear Cub

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.

abaya

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.

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

Jinn

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.

__________________
"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel

fruglemonkey

First of all, if we could only have bliss or torment, we would not be able to call it bliss or torment. We can only experience one, if we have experienced the other (ie you can only feel heartbroken if you loved something, in the first place)

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.

snowy

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.

__________________
If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Hain

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?

roachboy

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.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Bear Cub

We would be able to call it bliss or torment, in comparison to what we interpret these emotions/feelings as now. We can distinguish when we are happy and when we are not, so Heaven as its always been referred to me, can basically isolate and lock us into those feelings which we now interpret to be bliss/torment.


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.

Charlatan

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.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

albania

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):

Nimetic

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.

thespian86

Will, I think you'd agree that at year 6 billion you are certainly well due for a mid-eternity crisis, you might take a moment to re-evaluate your eternal damnation or unbridled bliss, and come to the conclusion that you need a change. I think that is obviously the point he is trying to make. Yeesh.

__________________
EX: Whats new?
ME: I officially love coffee more then you now.
EX: uh...
ME: So, not much.

Borgs

Rational arguments aside, wouldn't nothingness be even more boring?

abaya

That assumes having a consciousness that would be aware of "nothingness" and "boredom," which is not what we're talking about. I see it as life simply ceasing to exist... no more consciousness, nothing. Just becoming a pile of decaying organic matter.

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

Hain

Last time I immersed myself in nothingness I saw cool colors.

__________________

////\\// IRONSKY.NET \\//\\\\

Borgs

To be honest I'm pretty confused as to what we are talking about. Are we comparing levels of boringness? Can it even be quantified? Doesn't your statement make the original claim completely irrelevant, since boringness doesn't even exist in that scenario?

abaya

Wait... what? Now I'm confused. The original claim is that IF one believes in heaven/hell, as in one's soul/consciousness going to one of these places in the afterlife, then we would still possess some level of awareness that might see our surroundings as "boring" after a while.

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?

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

Borgs

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.

snowy

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.

__________________
If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

n0nsensical

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.

__________________
"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded." --Abraham Lincoln

lotsofmagnets

it´s been touched on but not explicitly talked about. the assumption is that you go to heaven/hell exactly as you are. that doesn´t 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 wouldn´t that mean we take the bad bits of us to heaven thus making it imperfect and in hell it wouldn´t take long for people to figure out that they can form teams. hell, what have they got to lose?

ps better establish that i´m non-religious at this point....

__________________
mother nature made the aeroplane, and the submarine sandwich, with the steady hands and dead eye of a remarkable sculptor.
she shed her mountain turning training wheels, for the convenience of the moving sidewalk, that delivers the magnetic monkey children through the mouth of impossible calendar clock, into the devil's manhole cauldron.
physics of a bicycle, isn't it remarkable?

AKR

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.

MirrorsrorriM

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.

dd3953

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".

__________________
[Technically, I'm not possible, I'm made of exceptions. ]

abaya

Seriously. I find it interesting that a major assumption of several religions is that people DO want to live forever, in the first place. I mean, I wouldn't mind a couple hundred extra years of life, but FOREVER?!? Just shoot me in the head after a while!! The idea of living forever, AS MYSELF, stuck with this same body and personality FOREVER, is effing claustrophobic. I like myself pretty well and all that, but I don't know if I would really want to be the same person forever. Which is why I'm a fan of reincarnation, if there's any afterlife at all... that would be the most interesting one (if only we had the ability to be a little more aware of what our previous lives were spent as--now that would be cool).

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran