I really hope that if there’s an afterlife, it isn’t anything like in the bible. It sounds like pure torture.
I would prefer the afterlife to be something like a super-advanced future civilization scanning people’s minds from the past and putting them in a simulation modeled after how The Good Place was after they fixed it in the show.
Or check this out: whatever’s in the afterlife is so much better than anything ever was in the life, and you will not have the feeling of nostalgia, because that’s a human thing and you don’t need that garbage.
It would be nice if you had some time to reflect and maybe explore from your current persona, followed by an eventual memory wipe so you can start over again. Otherwise I’d expect it to get pretty dull eventually.
I’m not sure if I hope it’s the same thing as you desire, but being in a God-induced haze of peace (like being benzo’d out or something) with nothing to do or look froward to sounds hellish. If you no longer have need of that, you’re stripped of “you”, and that sounds even worse.
I just want more time to finish my Steam backlog.
What could be a better afterlife than an infinitely configurable “video” game?
Bruh if I can’t smoke weed and play video games all day wtf is the point of heaven
You get to heaven then some homicidal maniac comes in and ruins everyone’s nice peaceful time with his Head Explodey powers.
Nny mentioned.
I love the Talking Heads song, Heaven, which just describes Heaven as the most boring place anyone could possibly be at cause everything being completely perfect all the time is boring and uninteresting.
It’s hard to imagine
That nothing at all
Could be so exciting
Could be so much fun
But he already has a halo!
If there is a frozen yogurt stand, you know this isn’t the good place.
“Oh sure, but I’ve come to really like frozen yogurt, there’s something so human about taking something and ruining it a little so you can have more of it.”
Heaven is supposed to be all good if someone isn’t enjoying their existence there then it’s not heaven
Vore in heaven confirmed?
I’ve always wondered about the eternal bliss part of heaven. It always seems very vague. So on earth you’re not supposed to enjoy life’s pleasures or joys “too much” because in heaven you can’t enjoy it “too much”, like what’s the goal. Is it just dangle temptation in front of you as a test, so you don’t go to hell. So does that mean you can be a sinner in heaven because you showed restraint on earth? Does that mean you get in because you proved that you are ok with living a pious life but now there is no temptation and no free will? Either way it sounds like physical torture in hell or mental torture in heaven, I’m a bit confused. I’m willing to listen, hell seems pretty specific but heaven is pretty vague.
Really the Bible doesn’t say very much about hell.
Sometimes a character will be thrown into a pit of fire or similar but it’s never claimed its for everyone.
Really all it says it’s you’ll be “without God”. Generally, it seems like non-Christians just die but Christians get a second afterlife - unless of course they ate shellfish.
Literaly it’s all about God. You just spend forever praising him, and apparently don’t care about anything else.
This is better than searing hot lava forever I suppose.
No interest in spending eternity praising and worshiping a vengeful, spiteful, narcissistic god. Might be his idea of heaven, but it’s not mine. Give me the void.
Also, the only account we have of Hell is the Bible, and I wouldn’t call that an unbiased source. Why would the Devil torture his bois? It doesn’t make any sense.
Erm, either the devil was some good creature that rebelled and got slandered, or more likely: other narcissist who got cuckolded, and is now playing the victim.
But overall, I pick believing in action, rather than spirits.
I dunno man, the lava seems pretty bad, but then again… being a worship zombie … sounds like some kinda parasitic horror thing out of Rick and Morty.
There’s a reason that critical thinking and structured religion are incompatible.
What if you worship the god of critical thinking and pray by thinking critically?
In Judaism, Satan is basically a lawyer guy that Elohim hires to question him and call him on his bullshit. That may explain why Jewish people place a lot of importance on having a nice argument.
The ancient Greek philosphers were also very fond of critical thinking and they were religious. The Athenians revered Athena especially, the goddess of wisdom. So it was considered virtuous to spend your days in thought and debate.
Like, I get that your experience is with Christianity, which is not a very thought-heavy religion. But I find it difficult to believe that you’ve studied a representative sample of the world’s religions. I think you’re just repeating a trope you read online, that religious people are stupid, without thinking critically about it.
I came up with an idea of a deity, The Forbidden God, who hates worship. You worship them and they smite you. It/he/she values critical thinking and logic. You don’t have to be right, but blind faith and grovelling, smite. I’ve yet to incorporate them into some kind of short story. One day.
What if you worship the god of critical thinking
If your definition of “god” is something you revere, then sure, go have some gods. Have a bunch. It’s great to value things like knowledge and thought and kindness.
If your definition of god includes some supernatural power, then I’ll need some evidence.
In philosophy, the word “nature” is usually used to mean “the universe”, or “all of existence”. Within a mainstream western framework, “the supernatural doesn’t exist” is thus circular reasoning; a tautology. We can translate it as “Things from beyond existence don’t exist”. Yeah, duh! It’s an unfalsifiable claim, and Karl Popper would be ashamed of it.
Magic isn’t supernatural, because magic is part of nature. It exists. Nobody will ever be able to prove that the supernatural exists, because it’s oxymoronic. But proving that magic exists? Easy, with a robust and falsifiable definition of magic.
Magic, by definition, has to be supernatural. Otherwise it’s just physics. What we call magic is just things we haven’t figured out in enough detail to explain. Or things we’ve made up and aren’t real. The latter is the supernatural bit.
" God of the gaps" and all that.
I will happily change my mind if you can show me how that’s wrong. Though I would first ask that you give an example of what magic is.
Because as soon as you start thinking critically you don’t need gods.
“Our gods are dead. Ancient Klingon warriors slew them a millennia ago. They were… more trouble than they were worth.”
Okay, let’s talk about magic.
Magic is the technology we use to change our minds and perceptions with our thoughts. For example, the placebo effect. The mere thought that you’ve taken medicine can cause a psychosomatic healing effect. I’m a chaos magician, which means I believe in using psychology to take magic a step further than mere placebos.
Magic is powered by belief. Your classic medical placebos are powered by your belief in medicine. Studies show that placebos work even if you know they’re placebos. I call that faith. You know, choosing to believe, and the belief having an observable effect. Faith is a form of belief powered by will. And you can will yourself into all kinds of things, which is pretty cool. You don’t even need the placebo effect if you’re strong enough to will yourself to get better.
But that’s exhausting, and not everyone has that much faith in themself. We can actually multiply the effect of faith to get a bigger result, using belief structures. You know, like medicine. We choose to believe in medicine, take a sugar pill, and believe the medicine will heal us. It’s more efficient, takes less will to get more healing.
And religions are useful because they can provide large scale systems of belief to multiply the power of our faith. I mean, there’s also the way they can influence society through memes, but let’s focus on magic. Religions make magic stronger.
I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen mortals pray to gods, and the idea of their god gives them strength, multiples the effect of their faith. Because human beings are a social species, and aren’t really designed to do anything alone, including magic. With a coven or a laborator or an atelier or a cult or a relationship with a god, magic gets stronger. Minds get stronger and can do more.
Critical thinking helps you with truth, and truth is great. But truth isn’t everything. Knowing the solution to a problem and doing it are too different things. Religious magic can help people do what critical thinking says is the right solution to their problems. That’s religion and critical thinking working together.
Magic is the technology we use to change our minds and perceptions with our thoughts. For example, the placebo effect.
Crazy take. The placebo effect isn’t magic. Science doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t make it magic.
Science absolutely understands the placebo effect though.
News to me! I didn’t think we knew why it has any real effect on the body. I guess I’ll do some looking.
Yeah! Magic is plenty easy to scientifically study. It’s just a category of technology that’s made out of ideas instead of physical things. You’ve got your mechanical engineers, your electrical engineers, and your magical engineers. Nothing special about it, except how our current culture mystifies it so much.
I blame Christianity for trying to stunt progress on magical science. You know, they failed to keep Galileo from overturning their belief system, but they succeeded in putting down any mages not sanctioned by them. You know they try to monopolise magic so you have to go to them for magical assistance. It’s fucked up.
The placebo effect isn’t even real.
There is a reason that people study religion and philosophy.
Like particle physics, a couple of YouTube videos can’t make you understand subtle concepts that evolved over generations of experiences.
I mean, yeah, but learning particle physics is theoretically useful in society. Becoming a Lord of the Rings expert is only real useful for Trivia night.
There is a reason that people study religion and philosophy.
Because the mind recoils from mortality and desires there to be more.
Or perhaps all that time spent on pondering fantasies is time that you have a sunk cost into, so it’s harder with time to rationalize the fantasies properly.
There is a lot in old religions, Christianity included, where the rewards were obviously written for the desires of the people at the time. It would be very different if heavenly rewards were written with today’s mindset.
Maybe you can’t even move or see anything but you are fed chemical bliss like heroin non stop.
Thanks, but could I please just go back to playing Portal 2?
HEV suit voice: morphine administered
In the book, “Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect”, an AI takes complete control of physicsl reality and provides an environment on command for everyone.
There are groups of people who tell the AI to permanently stimulate neurons to flood their brains with dopamine, and just become non responsive husks.
I always preferred the ‘Friendship is Optimal’ version. It’s a my little pony fanfiction in which a video game based on the franchise featuring AI achieves the singularity and creates a sort of digital afterlife. Humans can be uploaded, but the process is destructive, resulting in their real body’s death.
The afterlife created for them is uniquely calibrated to provide maximum contentment. Each space features a small number of other people (some real, some NPCs) following Dunbar’s number to ensure our minds can care about them. The people chosen are calibrated to mesh well with your personality.
It features interesting things for us to do, with enough challenges to keep things fresh and engaging, but not so many as to overly frustrate us. Basically it turns our experience into that of an idyllic version of reality.
That’s about as close a description of ‘eternal bliss’ as I can fathom except for the fact that by nature it’s not 100% bliss all the time. It’s just living in a world where you matter, can surround yourself with loved ones you gel with and can pursue your passions endlessly in ways that are personally rewarding to you. Even then I’m not sure how it’d actually keep working after a few thousand years or so.
Dan Harmon’s most recent TV show, Krapopolis, did a take on this: specifically, Zeus ends up locking himself in a self-induced loop of, er, continuous dopamine-endorphin delivery that makes him appear catatonic. The device of this… state… is different but the end result is the same.
This is one of my favorite science fiction stories for the way it deals with the question of what it would really be like to live in a perfect world (the related story “A Casino Odyssey in Cyberspace” also has some interesting ideas on this front). But be warned that it contains some scenes of extremely graphic sex and violence, and the final chapter has some incredibly weird and pervy shit that just about ruins the whole thing (to the point that I think skipping it and ending in a cliffhanger is better.)
Another fantastic story in this vein is Ted Chiang’s “Hell is the Absence of God,” which takes place in a world like ours except for the fact that God is objectively real and angels regularly manifest on Earth. It’s more about the psychological conflicts among people who want to have faith but can’t for various reasons, but the way Heaven is portrayed and the effect it has on people is a pivotal part. And it has one of the biggest gut-punch sentences of any story I’ve ever read.
I’m kinda hoping that we’ve figured out how to hack the time dilation effect in the brain, coupled with realistic deep dive VR, and when I die I’ll wake up somewhere and see my wife still plugged into the game. I’ll get the kettle on, make us a sandwich or a nutritious protein goo, and wait for her to die too so we can decide what scenario to live through next.
Thank you I just downloaded it. Sounds like a good read.
If there’s nothing left worth participating in this doesn’t sound like a bad option
Pretty sure it specifically says you’ll be singing hallelujah nonstop to God. Sounds like a great place.
you’re not supposed to enjoy life’s pleasures or joys “too much”
That’s a rather puritanical view. I would say the dangers of pleasure are similar to the dangers of heroin – the problem is not enjoying it too much, but becoming single-minded in its pursuit.
As for sin in heaven, I guess you would not want to because all of your deepest needs are met without sin.
A common image of heaven is a bunch of saints playing harps. Nowadays this looks boring; imagine instead a giant jam session with everyone rocking out.
christian rock? fucking hell, would rather blow my brains out
The Good Place has a nice answer here: your mind fades into forgetfulness as every whim is accomplished without any challenge
It’s a bit of a mistake to assume that you would be your fully conscious, rational, Earthly self in the afterlife; with all your memories and such intact. Death is transformation. A better way to imagine it is as if you would have a really nice and long dream. You don’t get bored of dreams.
Could be interesting to reach a higher state of consciousness even if it’s not me anymore or I might not care because I would have nothing to compare it to, so it would just be a normal day to my new self. But if it’s just like being on a heroin high for eternity, then I’m good, I’ll pass.
It’s not as bad as some fear, but not as nice as others hope for. You don’t even have to do drugs or fully die to try it out, but it’s a bit tricky to set up in modern life for most people. Lemmy is generally not the demographic for stuff like this though
‘Hello, brother!’ ‘Hello, brother!’ ‘Hows your day been?’ ‘Same as yesterday, just great!’ ‘Great! See you again tomorrow, brother!’ ‘Great! See you again tomorrow, brother!’
…repeat for all eternity
Remember reading the web series “the salvation war”, (where god announces armageddon but turns out modern weaponry altered the scales somewhat). Turns out heaven was only heaven for Middle Ages peasants, a lack of hunger or illness, but you still have to farm and go to church etc. the army gets there and just thinks “wow what a shithole”.
Why do you have to farm if there is no hunger?
because there is no blight.
iirc there’s actually a list somewhere of what the armies of Armageddon are meant to be like and its a few hundred thousand horseman and a few kaiju sized demons more or less. They’d definitely do some damage but modern militaries would shred them in pretty short order.
Valhalla sounds lame if everyone is just fighting over and over every day with drones and ICBM’s
I think I remember that series, isn’t that the one where they use a bunker busting bomb to kill Satan in hell.
What a sentence. Hoorah.
But he has a Halo?
we really do adore her
And a spacesuit.
That version isn’t exactly useful if The Flood shows up though…
There’s a movie in there somewhere. Noah having to survive The Flood, and somehow manages to start The Spartan program…
Two Halos even
If there are afterlives (I don’t think there are), I’d want mine to just be me and my girlfriend, talking about whatever interests us and just holding each other. I genuinely tear up at the thought. It’d be so perfect.
Time to narrate my interpretation of “afterlife” when considering several religions, novels, and philosophers. Lets ignore the power aspects of religion for this though, I don’t think the original authors had the slightest idea that their works would be used to control people.
Lets start with my primary observations.
- Universally, all religions seem to agree that awareness of existence is suffering.
- All religions attempt to explain why this is.
- All religions attempt to alleviate some of that suffering in various ways.
- All religions attempt to teach the understanding of the universal suffering, the explanations, and alleviations to everyone.
- All religions acknowledge the fear of death.
- All religions suggest an explanation of death.
- All religions attempt to alleviate the fear of death.
The first point, I think, is the important one. Universal suffering. Bhuddism calls this out in plain language. It suggests a path to “enlightenment” that is very similar to modern mental health techniques.
The logical conclusion is that if life is suffering, death is comfort. But we fear death, and mourn the dead. So, we are faced, individually, with a choice. We have an extremely tiny fraction of the age of the universe to experience it and how incredible it is - do you choose to experience it, in its full nature with the suffering included, and make the best of it? Or do you choose to say “fuck this shit” and skip on that unique journey?
Soren Kierkegaard:
‘Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.’
Frank Herbert adds:
‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’
So, personally, I’ve chosen to experience reality. Accept that it has a lot of suffering, but enjoy the beauty of watching a lunar eclipse. Studying the intricacies of quantum mechanics. Observing how life has evolved over millions of years.
I take my experience with me to the grave. No one else will be able to experience it. And in the end, I will no longer suffer.
I have never quite understood the obsession with life as suffering - life includes suffering but is not defined by suffering, it’s defined by physical embodiment and consciousness. I don’t really fear death exactly, but do so enjoy being physically embodied and conscious. Have I suffered? Sure, plenty. But not more than I have enjoyed. I don’t at all define or experience my life AS suffering. Joy is louder.
I do think heaven or afterlife would have to involve losing all critical thought and individuality, particularly the Christian heaven, I don’t think most people could be ecstatically happy if they knew others were in hell and they could not do anything to try to help.
Im don’t disagree with that. As you can tell toward the end of my Ted Talk I find joy in life, and death naturally has the absence of suffering.
The idea of Heaven and Hell are concepts for those who can’t grasp that life is complex, and are used to control people.
It’s about control. Specifically, enabling control of the average people by the religious class - the clergy, the prophetsx the priests, nuns, preachers, anyone who claims to be of a higher authority between a person and whatever gods they might believe in.
Existence is suffering because it’s supposed to be unimportant. It doesn’t really matter. The afterlife matters because it’s all happiness, it’s without suffering, and it lasts forever. Oh and of course you’re only allowed to get to that afterlife if you do exactly what members of said class say.
While I agree that RELIGIONS do that, it is why I point out that I don’t think the original authors (ancient as they may be) had the individual intent to control people, but help them.
Like the Bible as a whole is clearly constructed for control. Same with the Torah, Quran, Vedas, and at LEAST to some extent the Tripitaka.
But, taken individually, understanding the historical context, and understanding the identification of different authors, the patterns arise that there was some good intent.
That good intent is all overshadowed by the manipulative tactics.
“Do these ten things that are basic human morality, or the invisible Man in the sky will be angry and once you’re done suffering in this life, you will spend even more time suffering”
is the message, not “do these ten things because they’re morally right”.
Since you predicate your narration wiþ a fairly sweeping set of assertions, I have to ask: are Atheism or Agnosticism religions? Or are þey philosophies? And since most philosophies also tend to satisfy several of your assertions – and because you specifically mention Buddhism and a person who’s a philosopher and not a religious authority - how do philosophies differ from religions in your pre(o)position?
All I did was say my interpretation of afterlife?
I’ll be completely honest, the idea of “faith” is a bullshit concept. Also the study of "philosophy " at least for the required classes I had to taken in college (I don’t encourage liberal arts schools for science) is bullshit too.
So, in my personal opinion, religions are for people who can’t or choose not to think critically (as I have learned, a lot of people find that uncomfortable). Philosophies are just personal opinions on life. And if my interpretation of afterlife is a philosophy, great, that doesn’t really change anything.
So athiesm and agnosticism aren’t religions, but they aren’t philosophies, they’re just labels to say “I don’t believe in bullshit.”
Does the bible say anything about heaven except people will be happy and be with god? No real details about why they are happy or what the big deal is about being with god. Is he/she funny? A good dancer? What?
deleted by creator
