Heaven?

[pasithea]

You know. Just thinking about the whole religion thing some more and it occurred to me... All these people who are trying to get into heaven... What are they going to do when they get there? I've never heard a single religious person mention their post-heaven-arrival plans. You're going to be happy for all eternity? How, exactly? Eating from the tree of knowledge is a sin, so you probably won't get to catch up on your reading. Likewise, adultery, sloth, gluttony, etc... So.. How exactly are you going to be 'happy'?

Comments

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

It's funny that americans would go with the whole 'one with god' and 'remade' concepts. Zombie movies and red panic sort of suggest that this would be one of the things they're most terrified of. The idea of a loss of individualism.

As for me, my view is far far more twisted than any religion but I have a little difficulty explaining it. If you ever watched Star Trek: TNG, there's one episode with Q where he explains that he interacts with humans because he's _bored_ He's been all the characters in Q world. The old man, the young girl, the dog, the puddle of water. He and all the other Q have been them all and played out a million different scenarios.

That's sort of my view in a way. Either there's no higher power or we're all effectively god-fragments all exploring what it means to be You, me, poison oak, or George Bush. (Which probably isn't much different from the poison oak) If God exists/is everything, then we're just exploring a particular set of paths. When we die, this path will ends but the data of what we are is preserved as part of what happened in the universe. In other words, God and universe are exactly the same thing. The universe has gained the experience of what it was like to be me, which is very very similar to but slightly different from what it was like to be any of a hundred million other humans. When I die, I'll just free up resources to run a new instance of existence. Maybe experience what it's like to be a rock or a goldfish or another human or possibly exist in another version of reality all together. Maybe I'll exist in a universe where I retain information from this thread or maybe I'll be totally blank. In either case, I won't be 'me' in the sense that I am now, but the universe will always retain what it was to be, even if I'm a minuscule fragment of data in the inconceivably large set that is all of everything.

The real trick is figuring out whether or not I can hack the constraints of the system I was written into. Surely that's an experience worth having. :)