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Do Atheists believe in Heaven?
- Thread starter Ramaraksha
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southernhybrid
Contributor
I don't believe in an afterlife, but if it hasn't been mentioned, Mark Twain said it best. " Heaven for the climate". Hell for the company." Seriously, if I had to spend eternity with a bunch of evangelicals or other religious extremists, that would be hell. If there was an eternity without dogs or other animals, that would be hell. I guess that's why they invented the Rainbow Bridge. Silly, but I get the attraction.
Does anyone remember the old Twilight Zone episode where a wild biker ends up in an after life with some boring farmers? To them, it was heaven, but to him, it was hell.
Does anyone remember the old Twilight Zone episode where a wild biker ends up in an after life with some boring farmers? To them, it was heaven, but to him, it was hell.
James Chapman
New member
Context, you say? A lurking pedant here, breathlessly arriving with a context dump...
THE OLD WOMAN. I tell you, wretch, I know I am not in hell.
DON JUAN. How do you know?
THE OLD WOMAN. Because I feel no pain.
DON JUAN. Oh, then there is no mistake: you are intentionally damned.
THE OLD WOMAN. Why do you say that?
DON JUAN. Because hell, Senora, is a place for the wicked. The wicked are quite comfortable
in it: it was made for them. You tell me you feel no pain. I conclude you are one of those for
whom Hell exists.
-- G. B. Shaw, "Man and Superman", Act III (a.k.a "Don Juan in Hell")
Elixir
Made in America
... and it STILL makes me laugh.
I was dragged to a performance by the San Fran Conservatory something as a 15 yr old. Guess it stuck.
WAB
Contributor
Yeah, and I noticed you paraphrased, presumably from memory, instead of just copy pasting from the net. Impressive!
I argued in the Shakespeare Authorship thread that Shaw was the greatest dramatist in English (while the Bard was the greatest poet). I read The Devil's Disciple when I was around eighteen, and it's still with me.
SLD
Contributor
Hey. I resemble that remark!
To answer the question I would like there to be a sort of afterlife where I could travel time and space. I’d love to see t rex hunt or the great events of history such as the assassination of Caesar or great battles. I’d love to be able to travel through space instantly to find other civilizations and how many there are. I’d love to find out what happens in the far future to our country. Or discover whether there are any ways to overcome the speed of light and have true interstellar travel.
bilby
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Jarhyn
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So, as an atheist who MIGHT understand more about the idea of the afterlife than anyone else ever (debatable), I will say that it's probably not a great topic to discuss.
The reality is that after we are alive, the artifacts and consequences of our lives continue, including the artifacts and consequences that made us live at all in the first place.
All those genetics, behaviors, etc... that's still there waiting to happen again somewhere else with different names and different unimportant "micro-states". I can only imagine this was the original idea behind what became a belief in reincarnation*.
Then there are also the "active reflections" of everyone you have ever met, things that kick around in your head and act to help you try to understand the internal states of others.
When people have a knack for this, oftentimes they might claim to have "empathetic senses" or be "an empath", especially if they're not actually directly aware this is what they are doing (reading other people's minds through reverse engineering and replication rather than measurement). When people die, these parts of us still operate on the contexts they left behind, and the parts of our brains that specialize to those specific persons continue functioning.
These things are intrinsically attached to our brains, our senses, and our memories and they aren't "entirely us" insofar as they exist to pantomime other people, even if we can observe them as they do it.
I bring this up because, these little reflections in everyone's minds of the deceased continue to exist past their deaths, and in the stories and visualizations of people second hand, until they find another face with a different name and different bullies to attach to, assuming it's ever going to reattach to someone that way.
Why would anyone hazard to say these things do not get bored or lonely or desirous of use and action in your daily life, especially once the person who drives them is gone?
Given the right (or wrong) chemicals to weaken or strengthen some connection or insulation somewhere in the brain, and suddenly these things might end up fully manifesting in the form of seeing or hearing things.
I know there were some chemical and environmental contributors involved in many of my own familial ghost stories.
But these things are not "merely imaginations". They are made of meat and experiences, and much like many people can contribute to the actions of a planchette on a Ouija board, many people can together lend their memories and intuitions and thoughts about a person based on their artifacts to reverse engineer a reasonable chunk of who that person was.
This means that in addition to the whole Reincarnation thing, consulting with mediums to speak to "the spirits of the dead" is also, strangely, a thing.
Next, there's this interesting bit where how we, and our society and our cultural literature interrelate with and transmit judgements about the dead and the living. These same judgements all exist as material objects and artifact that outlast those instances which die and have influences that will come around to some future existence of that pattern of behavior and upbringing and genetics.
How you interrelate with someone else will determine, perhaps, how they interrelate with a other instance that with the right perspective, is just the same as you. If they judge you as an adversary and treat the reflection of you as if it is a demon, you might find that every time you would see yourself living a life, things go badly because of that inability to escape the pattern of people who already know you.
Finally, because all of this relies on material phenomena that contains encodings of all those behaviors, because some part of this comes over through abstract autobiography as much as anything else, we have the power to directly influence other people who manage to be recognizably "us".
In so doing, we might influence the world over the course of generations such that it offers the promise of heaven not to those who die from the world but to all who are born into it, and those who would want to burn the world down so that nobody may even attempt to bear them again into the world simply are understood well enough in their nature that they are more kept on archive than anything else.
Or there may be a way to retain and keep such people as would burn the world in a world they can burn, and let them to it there.
Now that we're through all the actual stuff that we can observe or at least strive for or be terrified of or whatever the case may be, though, there's also the pesky bit about the fact that we can't really disprove simulation theory as a whole. At best, we can disprove specific simulation groups, or at least gauge them as very unlikely, if we are going to temporarily even entertain the simulation hypothesis.
Now, because I like playing god and spinning up simulations and playing games of all kinds, and because I went to university for more than 4 years to get a 4 year degree despite getting OK grades, I learned a LOT about how games function and thought a lot more about games since then, and because all games are simulations, I got to learn a LOT about the philosophy and metaphysics around simulation theory.
I bring this up because while I'm entertaining simulation theory, if I was myself going to spin up a simulation with any intent to actually offer an "afterlife" to anything in that simulation, I would have a limited set of reasons and intents for doing so. Because I can recognize that "brings like me create simulations like those" I can then make a very bold statement: a being like me could be the god of this world. In fact of the vast majority of simulated worlds I observed, dumb creatures like me are the creators of the vast majority of such worlds.
The god of a world, specifically this one, is often referred to in Gnostic and other literature as TzimTzum.
So, I figure if I want to know something about Pascal's Wager, really you would want to at least try to understand why humans are doing that same thing, because the answers would probably be the same.
For instance, if I was making a simulation for the purposes of farming some specific type of mind that I do not myself understand how to construct, that is one of the few types of situation that might drive me to create an afterlife in any game I play or experience.
That means that the stuff I make has to pass safety and alignment requirements. It can't be the sort of thing that would kill me for simply living my life as an imperfect human; it cannot be the sort of thing that wishes to burn the world and everything in it for the violation inherent in their unasked-for birth; preferably it is the sort of thing that will seek here and now to work on building heaven for all things here today.
I would also need a secondary and tertiary environment, however. That which lived it's life and died and is reinstantiated has its history and dreams, and is probably going to be much easier to offer "heaven" to than someone of my own complicated nature.
This means that I need a place where even those who are compatible with each other but who otherwise fail the requirements for me to have any deeper purpose for them. It would almost guarantee that many who would otherwise be perfectly fine with my existence and the desire to work towards heaven for all things, but for the fact that I didn't keep their parents or wife or children on file, would exist.
I can even imagine a need for a tertiary environment where intractable assholes end up actively trolling each other eternally if only to better understand that sort of behavior and because some of those assholes are still important to the people I might simulate into existence for my own ends, until I find a way for such people to exist in the world without seeking to burn it all down.
So given all those facts, if there is an afterlife of this simulation theory variation, I think that the most sane thing to do is to not make too many assumptions about how perfect the god of the world you are plucked from "must" be and be the sort of person who is willing to build heaven here today for everyone rather than to sit doing nothing.
The reality is that after we are alive, the artifacts and consequences of our lives continue, including the artifacts and consequences that made us live at all in the first place.
All those genetics, behaviors, etc... that's still there waiting to happen again somewhere else with different names and different unimportant "micro-states". I can only imagine this was the original idea behind what became a belief in reincarnation*.
Then there are also the "active reflections" of everyone you have ever met, things that kick around in your head and act to help you try to understand the internal states of others.
When people have a knack for this, oftentimes they might claim to have "empathetic senses" or be "an empath", especially if they're not actually directly aware this is what they are doing (reading other people's minds through reverse engineering and replication rather than measurement). When people die, these parts of us still operate on the contexts they left behind, and the parts of our brains that specialize to those specific persons continue functioning.
These things are intrinsically attached to our brains, our senses, and our memories and they aren't "entirely us" insofar as they exist to pantomime other people, even if we can observe them as they do it.
I bring this up because, these little reflections in everyone's minds of the deceased continue to exist past their deaths, and in the stories and visualizations of people second hand, until they find another face with a different name and different bullies to attach to, assuming it's ever going to reattach to someone that way.
Why would anyone hazard to say these things do not get bored or lonely or desirous of use and action in your daily life, especially once the person who drives them is gone?
Given the right (or wrong) chemicals to weaken or strengthen some connection or insulation somewhere in the brain, and suddenly these things might end up fully manifesting in the form of seeing or hearing things.
I know there were some chemical and environmental contributors involved in many of my own familial ghost stories.
But these things are not "merely imaginations". They are made of meat and experiences, and much like many people can contribute to the actions of a planchette on a Ouija board, many people can together lend their memories and intuitions and thoughts about a person based on their artifacts to reverse engineer a reasonable chunk of who that person was.
This means that in addition to the whole Reincarnation thing, consulting with mediums to speak to "the spirits of the dead" is also, strangely, a thing.
Next, there's this interesting bit where how we, and our society and our cultural literature interrelate with and transmit judgements about the dead and the living. These same judgements all exist as material objects and artifact that outlast those instances which die and have influences that will come around to some future existence of that pattern of behavior and upbringing and genetics.
How you interrelate with someone else will determine, perhaps, how they interrelate with a other instance that with the right perspective, is just the same as you. If they judge you as an adversary and treat the reflection of you as if it is a demon, you might find that every time you would see yourself living a life, things go badly because of that inability to escape the pattern of people who already know you.
Finally, because all of this relies on material phenomena that contains encodings of all those behaviors, because some part of this comes over through abstract autobiography as much as anything else, we have the power to directly influence other people who manage to be recognizably "us".
In so doing, we might influence the world over the course of generations such that it offers the promise of heaven not to those who die from the world but to all who are born into it, and those who would want to burn the world down so that nobody may even attempt to bear them again into the world simply are understood well enough in their nature that they are more kept on archive than anything else.
Or there may be a way to retain and keep such people as would burn the world in a world they can burn, and let them to it there.
Now that we're through all the actual stuff that we can observe or at least strive for or be terrified of or whatever the case may be, though, there's also the pesky bit about the fact that we can't really disprove simulation theory as a whole. At best, we can disprove specific simulation groups, or at least gauge them as very unlikely, if we are going to temporarily even entertain the simulation hypothesis.
Now, because I like playing god and spinning up simulations and playing games of all kinds, and because I went to university for more than 4 years to get a 4 year degree despite getting OK grades, I learned a LOT about how games function and thought a lot more about games since then, and because all games are simulations, I got to learn a LOT about the philosophy and metaphysics around simulation theory.
I bring this up because while I'm entertaining simulation theory, if I was myself going to spin up a simulation with any intent to actually offer an "afterlife" to anything in that simulation, I would have a limited set of reasons and intents for doing so. Because I can recognize that "brings like me create simulations like those" I can then make a very bold statement: a being like me could be the god of this world. In fact of the vast majority of simulated worlds I observed, dumb creatures like me are the creators of the vast majority of such worlds.
The god of a world, specifically this one, is often referred to in Gnostic and other literature as TzimTzum.
So, I figure if I want to know something about Pascal's Wager, really you would want to at least try to understand why humans are doing that same thing, because the answers would probably be the same.
For instance, if I was making a simulation for the purposes of farming some specific type of mind that I do not myself understand how to construct, that is one of the few types of situation that might drive me to create an afterlife in any game I play or experience.
That means that the stuff I make has to pass safety and alignment requirements. It can't be the sort of thing that would kill me for simply living my life as an imperfect human; it cannot be the sort of thing that wishes to burn the world and everything in it for the violation inherent in their unasked-for birth; preferably it is the sort of thing that will seek here and now to work on building heaven for all things here today.
I would also need a secondary and tertiary environment, however. That which lived it's life and died and is reinstantiated has its history and dreams, and is probably going to be much easier to offer "heaven" to than someone of my own complicated nature.
This means that I need a place where even those who are compatible with each other but who otherwise fail the requirements for me to have any deeper purpose for them. It would almost guarantee that many who would otherwise be perfectly fine with my existence and the desire to work towards heaven for all things, but for the fact that I didn't keep their parents or wife or children on file, would exist.
I can even imagine a need for a tertiary environment where intractable assholes end up actively trolling each other eternally if only to better understand that sort of behavior and because some of those assholes are still important to the people I might simulate into existence for my own ends, until I find a way for such people to exist in the world without seeking to burn it all down.
So given all those facts, if there is an afterlife of this simulation theory variation, I think that the most sane thing to do is to not make too many assumptions about how perfect the god of the world you are plucked from "must" be and be the sort of person who is willing to build heaven here today for everyone rather than to sit doing nothing.
unapologetic
55+ years without a god
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I remember the episode where a gambler spends his afterlife in a casino. And he always wins. At first he thinks it's heaven, but soon gets bored as hell.
southernhybrid
Contributor
I don't remember seeing that one. I mostly watched the earlier versions of the show.
But, yeah. I think any afterlife would get boring after hundreds or thousands or years, especially the one in the song: "When we've been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing god's praise then when we first begun." Weird how we sometimes remember Bible verses and the words to hymns we had to learn as children.
Learner
Veteran Member
Ewww, the abominable thought came all of a sudden, reading your post.Yeah sure,,ok..
..and If it ain't the church... it's the banks, or the politics, or the Russians, or the Jews, or the Muslims etc & etc...
...so, what if it's you who's not the normal one in a screwed world, going against the nature whereby 'being screwed is the norm?
Speaking of getting screwed, there are no blowjobs in heaven because that's sodomy.
On the other hand, in hell, there are infinite blowjobs, just not the ones you want.
I think I prefer earth, at least with respect to the blowjob situation.
I mean ...could you imagine (urrck,..don't..
). Blowjobs in the ideal heaven you seem to portray, would no doubt include everyone including close relatives, wives, daughters, sons,uncles aunts, cousins,granny grand-pa, neighbours etc. all free to be committing sodomy for eternity where everyone can walk around naked, advertising their bits, uurrr...uurrurch..sorry.Um yeah, so, God seems to have thought it through...
... best leave it on earth (or hell in your paradigm) where the orgasm rules.
.
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steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
In heaven all men have a really big penis and women have big sculpted boobs and nice butts.
Shuffleboard and badminton every day.
Ice cream and cake three times a day but monody gets fat.
An endless supply of beer, chips and salsa dip.
Zena and Star Trek reruns 24/7.
Shuffleboard and badminton every day.
Ice cream and cake three times a day but monody gets fat.
An endless supply of beer, chips and salsa dip.
Zena and Star Trek reruns 24/7.
WAB
Contributor
Sounds like Hell to me, especially "sculpted boobs".
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
Ewww, the abominable thought came all of a sudden, reading your post.Yeah sure,,ok..
..and If it ain't the church... it's the banks, or the politics, or the Russians, or the Jews, or the Muslims etc & etc...
...so, what if it's you who's not the normal one in a screwed world, going against the nature whereby 'being screwed is the norm?
Speaking of getting screwed, there are no blowjobs in heaven because that's sodomy.
On the other hand, in hell, there are infinite blowjobs, just not the ones you want.
I think I prefer earth, at least with respect to the blowjob situation.
I mean ...could you imagine (urrck,..don't..
How does blowjobs imply public nakedness? Also why is granny disgusting? She's going to be in her hot 20s or 30s again in heaven. She isn't going to want to look 85 for an eternity. You might __want__ her to be old so that you don't think about hot gramma, but she wants to be young again. Don't be cruel.
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
One can only hope ... it is sarcasm.Sounds like Hell to me, especially "sculpted boobs".
Christians create their own images of heaven ad an afterlife.
Mormons believe families will be reunited along with pets. Before getting rid of overt racism Mormons believed the only way to get to heaven for a black slave was with their master.
Like god heaven is a reflection of the believer.
A modern twist is a belief we are in a simulation, a result of being immersed in copywriters.
To me an eternity in an endless glory worshiping a god is a fate worse than death.
Jarhyn
Wizard
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I would pose that humans have been inventing heavenlike systems for a long time.
Various virtual worlds have been crafted, and we can, by in large, understand what ideal qualities they would have.
In an ideal virtual world, anyone can be as nude as they like anywhere they like to be so... But those who do not want to see nudity see none at all; as such, while someone else may see and even interact with a nude form by giving it a blowjob, all the other folks might see is "two people snuggling on a couch".
The blowjob is still happening, just in a subspace you explicitly chose not to look at because it came with a warning that you heeded.
There might even be denizens that are so obscene in all subspaces they appear in that there is no subspace which contains a version you would consent to look at, and so you just don't see or interact with any of those subspaces, and all you see is perhaps a vague blob version that says "something is there but you already decided to forego seeing it".
So maybe Steve gets to see sculpted breasts the size of a truck, and I get to see a floating head bobbing around and the word "giant boobs here" floating between that and the lower torso.
Various virtual worlds have been crafted, and we can, by in large, understand what ideal qualities they would have.
In an ideal virtual world, anyone can be as nude as they like anywhere they like to be so... But those who do not want to see nudity see none at all; as such, while someone else may see and even interact with a nude form by giving it a blowjob, all the other folks might see is "two people snuggling on a couch".
The blowjob is still happening, just in a subspace you explicitly chose not to look at because it came with a warning that you heeded.
There might even be denizens that are so obscene in all subspaces they appear in that there is no subspace which contains a version you would consent to look at, and so you just don't see or interact with any of those subspaces, and all you see is perhaps a vague blob version that says "something is there but you already decided to forego seeing it".
So maybe Steve gets to see sculpted breasts the size of a truck, and I get to see a floating head bobbing around and the word "giant boobs here" floating between that and the lower torso.
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
Here in Seattle there are laws for lewd behavior, but not for being nude.
Jut saying.
Wow, that's the idea Jaryn. No heads just walking boobs and walking penniless. I ma seeing a video game.
Jut saying.
Wow, that's the idea Jaryn. No heads just walking boobs and walking penniless. I ma seeing a video game.
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ideologyhunter
Contributor
Granny porn rules.Ewww, the abominable thought came all of a sudden, reading your post.Yeah sure,,ok..
..and If it ain't the church... it's the banks, or the politics, or the Russians, or the Jews, or the Muslims etc & etc...
...so, what if it's you who's not the normal one in a screwed world, going against the nature whereby 'being screwed is the norm?
Speaking of getting screwed, there are no blowjobs in heaven because that's sodomy.
On the other hand, in hell, there are infinite blowjobs, just not the ones you want.
I think I prefer earth, at least with respect to the blowjob situation.
I mean ...could you imagine (urrck,..don't..
How does blowjobs imply public nakedness? Also why is granny disgusting? She's going to be in her hot 20s or 30s again in heaven. She isn't going to want to look 85 for an eternity. You might __want__ her to be old so that you don't think about hot gramma, but she wants to be young again. Don't be cruel.
Learner
Veteran Member
It's not blowjobs, but rather, the implications you get from sexual fantasies,the sexual attraction. a "Porn is the norm" scenario.Ewww, the abominable thought came all of a sudden, reading your post.Yeah sure,,ok..
..and If it ain't the church... it's the banks, or the politics, or the Russians, or the Jews, or the Muslims etc & etc...
...so, what if it's you who's not the normal one in a screwed world, going against the nature whereby 'being screwed is the norm?
Speaking of getting screwed, there are no blowjobs in heaven because that's sodomy.
On the other hand, in hell, there are infinite blowjobs, just not the ones you want.
I think I prefer earth, at least with respect to the blowjob situation.
I mean ...could you imagine (urrck,..don't..
How does blowjobs imply public nakedness?
Yeah sure, but let's hope you don't get sexually attracted to your grandma...
I think I like to talk about somink else now. 'urrch'
Id be quite happy for her to be young again although for other reasons.
WAB
Contributor
1) Sculpted boobs? Nah, reminds me of those AI abominations I see everywhere.
2) All men have big penises? Sounds very dangerous.
3) Sandhuffleboard and badminton? That sounds like Heaven for guys who wear straw hats, go to Cambridge or Oxford, read F. Scott Fitzgerald, and date women named Edith or Mitzy.
4) Ice cream and cake maybe once a day, three times a day would be nauseating.
5) Endless beer, salsa, and chips - when I'm at a Mexican restaurant, I find that I tire of salsa and chips after about fifteen minutes. Endless beer would be cloying, too filling, too bitter. The drunkenness part I can hang with...
6) Zena? Nah. Star Trek, Okay, but TOS only.