I don't want no eternal bliss...

[Oneironaut]

So I've been thinking about this whole heaven concept, and I've come to the conclusion that if it existed, I would not want to be there. Heaven is supposed to be a place where everybody is constantly feeling one emotion: happiness. Everybody I know and love would be stuck in emotional monotony. Happiness would become so commonplace that we would fail to appreciate how good it feels to be happy.

I like earth because we feel a variety of emotions. It is only because we suffer sometimes that we can truly appreciate how good pleasure feels. I love the people I love because they have deep and complex personalities, and I love getting to know those personalities. Our emotional lives are not simple, and things I value like love and morality and philosophy rest on how we deal with the various emotions that we feel. If we are stuck in a state of monotonous pleasure, we cannot have that same emotional depth, and I feel this would take a lot of meaning out of our lives.

The people whom I love know I love them because I am there for them when they suffer. It is true that we also sometimes experience moments of ecstasy together and relish in the fact that we are doing so, but it would not be the same if we did not have this emotional interdependence in times of pain. Without occasional times of pain, my relationships with other people would not be as deep and meaningful.

Heaven is not my kind of place. I do not want a god to inject a superdrug into my mind that forever blocks out most of the emotions I am capable of feeling, and does the same to all my friends and family. I want emotional variety and emotional depth. I want moral dilemmas. I want to lean on people when I suffer and I want people to lean on me when they suffer. I want to feel angry or sad when bad things happen to good people. I do not want to remain in a state of indifferent bliss when there is injustice in the universe.

The problem with heaven becomes even worse if we assume that there is also a hell. If some of the people I care about deeply end up in hell, and I know they are suffering for all eternity because they made a finite number of mistakes, I would consider myself a heartless bastard if that didn't produce some kind of negative emotion in me.

[smoke it]

but, thinking about always being happy would make you sad, sadness wouldnt be allowed in heaven, so you wouldnt think about this. hence eternal bliss.

[Oneironaut]

If God takes over our minds to block out all negative thoughts, that would alter our personalities to the point where we aren't even the same people anymore. I don't want to be in a heaven with a bunch of mindless robots that aren't the people I've grown to love and care for. I want their full personalities to be there, their full mental capacities. I do not want to see our potential thoughts and potential emotions limited by a cosmic dictator who wants to restrict what we are capable of thinking or feeling. I do not want it to be a thought crime to feel sad about the suffering that other people in the universe are feeling.

[PureEvil760]

Heaven does exist yes..though it is an illusion much like the illusion of ego. Experienced astral projectors may choose to travel to heaven because it exists on the astral plane and consists of the idea of heaven formed from a muxture of beliefs from every human. Basically, there is no such thing as heaven but some with strong beliefs end up stuck there for awhile anyway.

[afghooey]

Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the kingdom of heaven is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom of heaven is within you and it is outside you."

I think the idea of heaven has been severely misinterpreted by a lot of people. Personally, I don't think it's about a state of forced eternal bliss up in some cloudy paradise. In my opinion, heaven isn't somewhere you go when you die. It's somewhere you must create for yourself while you're here on earth.

[Pipe Dreams]

I still wanna be able to get fucked up off crown, hustle weed and stolen car radios, smoke weed, and get pussy. If I cant do that in heaven, then I have a damn good headstart on going to hell. :D

[Stoner Shadow Wolf]

I still wanna be able to get fucked up off crown, hustle weed and stolen car radios, smoke weed, and get pussy. If I cant do that in heaven, then I have a damn good headstart on going to hell. :D


THAT'S THE THINKING! :thumbsup:

[Duke Street Kings]

I think it is impossible to have any kind of worthwhile opinion on heaven, because the things we think we'll gain or lose by going there, only make sense in the context of human existence - our needs as humans, what we need and don't need as humans.

"Is there sex in heaven?" Well, what if when you leave your body behind, you no longer want or desire sex, or what if the communion of souls makes sex seem like nothing in comparison?

Heaven is always described in anthropocentric terms; since we can only understand what it to exist in a corporeal form, I think the only opinions we can have are *as human beings on the planet right now*. I like beer, for instance, and I'd probably say, "I don't want to go to heaven if there's no beer."

But if I have no taste buds, no gullet, and am in a state of constant intoxication by being in the presence of God, who knows if I'd miss it?

It may well be that our bodies are, if you look at the Jewish/Christian bible, the root of all sin - sin of the flesh. All temptation proceeds through the senses - maybe. And maybe when we don't have a body, we don't experience temptation anymore. Our mind and conscience conspires to feed the flesh.

Just what was Adam and Eve's sin, anyway? If you take it literally as "eating a fruit" or metaphorically as some kind of sexual act, in either form, it seems like a sin of the flesh. And in heaven, flesh is, if you consider heaven in the context of what most people say it is, irrelevant.

All of this being said, I'm an agnostic and don't seriously consider heaven or God except to say that I am not hostile to whatever the truth is. If there is a God, I certainly hope he understands why I doubt his existence - there are a lot of good reasons to, and I really hope e doesn't hold it against me. He gave me a rational mind, and faith is, to me, a weak, weak substitute for empirical knowledge. Some people get off on, and trip on faith. I'm just not one. I am vaguely jealous of those with faith, because of how it affects their cosmology.

In effect, people of faith are (generally speaking) happier, but free thinkers are more free. If you have to choose between freedom and happiness, what would you choose?

If he really cares whether I believe in him or not, I hope he'd do me the courtesy of appearing to me in a vision, changing water to wine, or parting a sea, just so I know he's real, and not a bizarre fantasy of a thousand mutually contradictory religions in the world all claiming to have the final word on The One True God and What He's Like.

If there is a God, I don't believe he talks to people or interferes on earth. And I am suspicious of anyone who thinks God converses with them, such as the president of the country I live in.

In human terms, your point has merit - how can there be pleasure without pain or happiness without sadness?

But this is only true of the human world we know. If we are to honestly consider heaven, we must consider the fact that when we die, God may choose to flip the script, big time, and all of the things that make sense to us as humans, no longer apply to our soul. What if, without a body, it is possible to experience rapturous pleasure, without pain - a spiritual orgasm of sorts, which lasts...forever.

It would be something like, I imagine, Pink Floyd's classic "The Great Gig in the Sky." I sure hope it is. God bless Pink Floyd.

[mrdevious]

Generally something repetetive and constant, no matter how good, starts to feel dull and common place after a while. But the thing is, this is pretty much due to decensitization of certain parts of the brain. Like the dulling cannabis (or any other) high, the lost magic you used to feel at Christmas, the decreased appreciation for a beautiful environment you live in every day. This isn't because you simply chose to lose the magic, it's because repetetive stimulation of particular neural areas becomes the biological norm, and the body continues to adjust to this stimulation until it comes back to a state of homeostasis. Like everything in life, even heroin eventually becomes something you need just to feel normal, because your body/mind has adjusted to the conditions.

That being said, I don't believe this decensitization would be relevant to heaven since god, a being of infinite power and wisdom, would have undoubtedly reset our physical or energetic state to not have homeostasis as a necessity, and therefor continue to reap the same benefits.

[smoke it]

If God takes over our minds to block out all negative thoughts, that would alter our personalities to the point where we aren't even the same people anymore. I don't want to be in a heaven with a bunch of mindless robots that aren't the people I've grown to love and care for. I want their full personalities to be there, their full mental capacities. I do not want to see our potential thoughts and potential emotions limited by a cosmic dictator who wants to restrict what we are capable of thinking or feeling. I do not want it to be a thought crime to feel sad about the suffering that other people in the universe are feeling.

this is exactly why i dont beleive in it :thumbsup:

[Polymirize]

oh look, everything I thought about saying has already been said by Duke Street Kings. Sweet post man.


Why wouldn't you question the human conception of the afterlife?

[Scottydoo]

Hell is going to be fun, lol. Personaly I'd rather live with forced upon bliss then be tortured for eternity, but to each his own :p

[peacetrain]

Exactly, man.

Philosophically, you just can't separate good from evil, bliss from torture. The two define eachother. If you had constant torture (hell), it would cease to hurt because it would be all you knew. You can't have happiness without sadness to compare it to, vice versa.

[Buddha Man]

i think heaven would be a cool place where Biggie and Tupac are chillin on a cloud with Jesus smokin a blunt, and John Lennon ran out to get some munchies.