What's your heaven?
- Thread starter Hygro
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warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Assuming the afterlife lasts for infinity, an infinite amount.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
I guess that's why 72 wasn't enough.
Farm Boy
I hope you dance
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Lovely town that, for a city.
azzaman333
meh
Without the context of the lows, how can you say you're experiencing the highs?
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
If all you were experiencing was the highs, you probably wouldn't care. Us meatfolk feel compelled to define suffering as the precondition of happiness because we know that we're going to suffer anyway, so we want to make sense of it all. If you were an eternal space-mind hanging out in Globspace without even the possibility of suffering, and thus capable of conceiving of suffering as pointless without being drive to existential despair, it would seem bizarre if not perverse to demand suffering.
The Heaven I meet is the one described in the Bible; an existence on the new Earth, where Heaven has decended down to Man, and God dwells with us.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Because that's what makes it heaven.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
I'm just talking about my version of heaven. If there's an infinite amount of time for activities, I will want an infinite number of options. Otherwise I'm going to get bored at some point, and that doesn't sound like heaven to me.
Greizer85
Emperor
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I'm not sure that's what Darkflight meant. The op specifies that Heaven exists if you want it to, for the purpose of the hypothetical. Why would you then want to cease existing, if you had the choice not to (and indeed, could choose any kind of existence you can imagine)? I'd still like to hear Darkflight's answer.
As to the hope that you lament as toxic, slim though it be, without it life would be pointless, imo. Well, other than to try and develope a cure for mortality, I guess. But anyway to lose this hope would be intellectually dishonest; hard atheism ('I KNOW there is no afterlife!') is a fanatical position, albeit more sensible than religious fanaticism. I'm about 85-95 % atheist, depending on my mental and physical circumstances.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Although perhaps not any more fanatical, when you think about it, than a hard agnostic position of "neither I nor anybody else can possibly know anything one way or the other".
If one assumes that the others are human as well, and that by and large the (obviously existent and often very notable) differences from human to human do not also include a variation regarding knowing what an afterlife is like or if it exists, then i don't see how the agnostic position is 'fanatical'. (of course even this assumption, theoretically, may be false, but it is even less logical to think it is likelier to be false than not...).
A bit like having two knights duel and chop each other up, and claim that a third person who did not see any logic in taking part in this massacre is 'fanatically peaceful'
Greizer85
Emperor
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A fine answer. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence... I already implied that it's reasonable to think it *very, very likely* there is no God (or afterlife), when I said I'm 85-95 % atheist, myself. But to make that 100 % is intellectually dishonest, since you have no way of knowing for sure. Make it 99,999999 % if you want though, or keep adding nines until you're comfortable. YMMV.If one assumes that the others are human as well, and that by and large the (obviously existent and often very notable) differences from human to human do not also include a variation regarding knowing what an afterlife is like or if it exists, then i don't see how the agnostic position is 'fanatical'. (of course even this assumption, theoretically, may be false, but it is even less logical to think it is likelier to be false than not...).
A bit like having two knights duel and chop each other up, and claim that a third person who did not see any logic in taking part in this massacre is 'fanatically peaceful'
Of course you might argue I can't be sure that e.g. Mars exists, since I've never been there, etc. And I can't, 100 %. Only tautologies like 'A = A', inclusive logical statements ('all Chinese are Asians', when we have defined China to be a part of Asia), and our immediate perceptions are certainly knowable. For everything else we must assign some probability, based on available evidence. What consitutes evidence about the existence of God is a bit tricky of course; for Christians it is all of creation, so it's easy for them to believe in God. But for most agnostics evolution and the laws of physics are sufficient to explain the world, so that God is not needed. ... The probability of God (or some entity) causing the Big Bang is even trickier. We have no way of assessing that, since we can't go outside this Universe. We therefore cannot know how likely it is. Based on what we know of this Universe -- vast emptiness, natural laws enacting their merciless inevitability, etc -- it appears to us as unlikely; but this evidence can't be reliably used to assess something that is outside of our conception of time and space. And there is that nagging voice of our human logic, '*something* must've caused it!', impossible to silence. It is as fine a branch as agnostics can get to hang their hopes upon, and I don't mind hanging mine on it.
EDIT: I guess AntiLogic's vague phrase, "intellectually know" might be the same thing as thinking there's a 99,999999 % chance of God not existing. In that case much ado about nothing.
EDIT2: Given what I said above, I should reassess my own belief system. I believe that I cannot know how likely it is that God exists... What do you even call this position?
'Strong agnosticism'? --So now I have no reliable percentage, just one based on vague feelings. Great, just what I need in my life! More uncertainty. How do I keep going with my life from now on? Help the poor and needy for a half of the week, drink and do drugs and contemplate suicide the other half?
... I should throw dice about how often I do either, to be exact. ... Can't do that either. I'll stop editing my post now. Help me out here, someone? 
A small, village in southern England -- something Shire-like.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
The hard agnostic position might be legitimate if alternative positions meant claiming definite empirical knowledge. But in practice, that isn't how it works: most people don't "known" that an afterlife does or does not exist because they claim empirical proof, but because they have a valid model of conciousness that either precludes or entails an afterlife. Materialists don't "know" that an afterlife does not exist because they have proof to that effect, but because they think that the only plausible models of human conciousness precludes the possibility of non-material being and therefore a spiritual afterlife. The hard agnostic, in denying outright not only that that such a position is true but that it is legitimate, that it is a position people are allowed to take, is adopting a fanatical scepticism.If one assumes that the others are human as well, and that by and large the (obviously existent and often very notable) differences from human to human do not also include a variation regarding knowing what an afterlife is like or if it exists, then i don't see how the agnostic position is 'fanatical'. (of course even this assumption, theoretically, may be false, but it is even less logical to think it is likelier to be false than not...).
A bit like having two knights duel and chop each other up, and claim that a third person who did not see any logic in taking part in this massacre is 'fanatically peaceful'
And how is such a position (at least to be deemed as) legitimate, as you claimed?
Given that no one is conscious of his/her entire mental world, it seems unlikely that they have logical grounds to extrapolate the existence or not of an afterlife even in that way.
FWIW, the mere sense that the mental world is impressively vast, might be tempting to be deemed as some sort of hint that something of it will go on after death. But that is not actual reason; it is not enough to be of the view that one knows one way or another.
Darkflight
Prince
@Darkflight: I've never been able to fathom folks like you. How can you possibly want the end of your consciousness, unless in terrible physical and/or mental pain (which, presumably, Heaven could correct, whatever their nature)?
I just don't find the idea of some sort of eternal existence as tempting as I find the idea of eternal peace or whatever you want to call it. While I have suffered from depression in the past and probably will again in the future, existing is enjoyable as a whole for me in the long run. But it's just not something I want to do forever. I kinda look forward to not having to deal with existing anymore.
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