Heaven and Hell= Nonsense

D

DefSkeptic

Registered Senior Member
I find the whole idea of Heaven and Hell completely absent from intellectual grounds. Here is my way to make this issue quite clear from the perspective of "free will"

No one is responsible for their brain makeup when they were first born. So one's first actions are the result of their brain dictating one's responses to environmental stimuli. The enviornmental information is taken in and the brain will make some new connections in its neural makeup as a result..... the next behavior is the result of the new combination of biological and enviornmental influences. So if we start with something no one had a say in (one's genetic composition) then how are responsible for actions that result of "choices" made by your brain. We are never truly in control to the extend we want to think. We have begun to experience a spiral of actions that are a result of choices made when we had no control.

To think a person deserves eternal bliss or eternal damnation is far fetched. What determines how a person will turn out? Genes and enviornment, some people were given good genes along with an enviornment conducive to becoming a well-rounded adult. Others were not that lucky. Why is that a personal fault?

If i believed in a supreme being I would think that everyone went to heaven, this is the most compassionate view. Why think someone who did not have a substantial say in his ultimate turnout would be burning and tourted in eternal hell.

Instead examine this- we are highly social creatures that develop concepts similiar to the heaven/hell concept because of the way we interact and the need to preserve order.

I believe when we die, we cease to exist. Conciousness is a earthly concept that is a result of various mental processes in the brain. If the brain dies then so does conciousness. To think there is another plain of conciousness is extreme wishful thinking. I theorize that it is a defense mechanism to protect one from the pain associated with the thoughts of losing a loved one. Also it is very hard for some people to accept the concept of death. To think one will never experience anything is quite frightining, so it would be beneficial to self deceive in order to not come to the grim realizations that come with the idea of human existance.
 
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I find the whole idea of Heaven and Hell completely absent from intellectual grounds.
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If you speak about the traditional monotheistic interpretation of cloud A being Heeaven and cloud B being hell I cannot but agree .

The concept of heaven and hell can be explained in many ways theologically and non-theologically (for instance Karmatic systems)

Here is my way to make this issue quite clear from the perspective of "free will"
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Allahs_Mathematics-

The concept of heaven and hell can be explained in many ways theologically and non-theologically (for instance Karmatic systems)
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Interesting......can you elaborate?
 
So if we start with something no one had a say in (one's genetic composition) then how are responsible for actions that result of "choices" made by your brain
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Responsible as in some spook will judge us , indeed we are not . But we are responsible as being capable of controlling cause weither we controlled what caused that case yes or no .
Say I get an A , and from that A I make a B , I am the cause of B as i was capable of creating B . I was not capable of creating A , thus I am not responsible . This only goes for choices that are conscious , ofcourse we are subject to all cause and all effect when there is no consciouse , by the same law we're responsible as well as we as the cause lies within us . But sometime we end at the sperm/egg cell that is cause , beyond that point we're no longer cause but merely effect . Untill that point technically we are responsible .

But no , not responsible in a courtroom on a cloud

If i believed in a supreme being I would think that everyone went to heaven, this is the most compassionate view.
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emotion shouldnt be considered as equal to superiority .

Why think someone who did not have a substantial say in his ultimate turnout would be burning and tourted in eternal hell.
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I dont think you're making a good point although I agree with your view . You see the chances that one would be able to consciously choose the "good" over the "bad" are so incredibly superior to that small portion of unconscious choosing , it would be irellevant . Just because its the beginning doesnt mean its more decisive , its just sooner decisive . Everything is always equally decisive , its a simple matter of mathematics .

Instead examine this- we are highly social creatures that develop concepts similiar to the heaven/hell concept because of the way we interact and the need to preserve order.
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In other words our emotions combined with psychology make us do so

I theorize that it is a defense mechanism to protect one from the pain associated with the thoughts of losing a loved one
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Couldnt agree with you more . U should check out the emotion thread at human science

Also it is very hard for some people to accept the concept of death.
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Its totally unacceptable

I believe when we die, we cease to exist.
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Perhaps , but we wouldnt ever know would we ?

Interesting......can you elaborate?
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1)emotional concept :
Heaven is every + emotions we experience .
Hell every - emotion .

2)theological : God is simply the potential within man
As god has created ethics , aesthetics , epistemology , ontology

Heaven would be Gods surrounding within these concepts (positive) :beautifull , good , knowledged , existing

Hell would be Satans surrounding within these concepts (negaitve) :ugly , bad , ignorant , dead

How about that ?

as for Karma :
good living creates better situation in the next existence (more heaven)
bad living creates worse situation in next existence
 
good living creates better situation in the next existence (more heaven)
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yeah but in Karma isn't it a continuous thing that you can make bettter or worse at anypoint durring one of your many lives?

heaven and hell is more of a end of the line judgement. either eternal bliss or damnation. an all or none once and for all judgement by god.
 
yeah but in Karma isn't it a continuous thing that you can make bettter or worse at anypoint durring one of your many lives?

heaven and hell is more of a end of the line judgement. either eternal bliss or damnation. an all or none once and for all judgement by god.
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No thats just the intepretation of our 3 wonderfull and highly irrational religions .

Its they who connect everything to finitism just because they are incapable of experience something infinit . I understand this whole spacealien-on-cloud/ethic/kjudgement/finicy , its all linked very fallasciously I wouldnt trust their funny defintions , rather read the scriptures themselves .

If shit makes sense its in code peoples .

And I think this the way that leads to deciphering
 
Let me elaborate-

Everyone is a victim not of genes, but of genes and enviornment together; knobs and turnings. Of course, you can argue with the preposition that all we are is knobs and turnings, genes and enviornment. You can insist that there's something......something more. But if you try to visualze the form this something would take, or articulate it clearly, you'll find the task impossible, for any force that in not in the genes or the enviornment is outside of physical reality as we perceive it.

Darwin sheads some light on this topic...... Darwin saw how these forces have their combined effect: by determining a person's physical "organization" which in turn determines thought and feeling and behavior. Darwin makes a point that even today goes ungrasped: ALL influences on human behavior, enviornmental as well as hereditary, are mediated biologically. Whatever combination of things has given your brain the exact physical organization it has at this moment( including your genes, your early enviornment, and your assimilation of the first half of this sentence), that physical organization is what determines how you will respond to the second half of this sentence.

As for why , if all behavior is determined, we "feel" as if we're making free choices, Darwin had a modern explanation....: our concious mind isnt privy to all the motivating forces. "The general delusion about free will is obvious- because man has power of action, and he can seldom analyze his motives (originally mostly INSTINCTIVE, and therefore now great effort of reason to discover them: this is important explanation) he thinks they have none."

Some of our motives are hidden from us not incidentally but by design, so that we can credibly act as if they aren't what they are; that, more generally, the "delusion about free will" may be an adaption. Still he got the basic idea: free will is an illusion, brought to us by evolution. All the things commonly blamed or praised for- are the result not of choices made by some immaterial "I" but of physical necessity.

A response to dehumanizing human behavior is what Darwin thought- complete surrender. Give up on free will; no one really deserves blame or credit for anything; we are all slaves of biology. "we must view a wicked man, like a sickly one, it would be more proper to pity than to hate and be disgusted." The hatred and revulsion that send people to jail- and in other contexts lead to arguements, fights, and wars- are without intellectual foundation. Of course they may have a PRACTICAL foundation. Indeed thats the problem: blame and punishment are as practically necessary as they are intellectually vacuous.

So the funny thing is that us "scientifically minded" people are more understanding and thus compassionate to others due to understanding the extends to which they acted. Theists will many times want to look down upon people as if they were somehow removed from the influences that make humans...... humans. Truth is; we are all of a robotic nature and by understanding this concept we can progress instead of blaming people for acts that were ultimately out of their control. This doesnt mean that punishment isnt a good deterant, because it is necessary to hold society together.

When I say that actions are out of one's ultimate control, I mean this to illustrate my opinion on the illogical thinking of heaven/hell concept. People are responsible in the sense that they are the ones making the decisions, but I am trying to show how the decisions are not ultimately "free" in the sense to make the notion of "free will" validate the heaven/hell concept.
 
Karma/Cause and Effect

Originally posted by spacemanspiff
in Karma isn't it a continuous thing that you can
make bettter or worse at anypoint durring one of
your many lives?
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You know what they say: "you reap what you sow." :)

"...whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
-Galatians 6:7 (KJV)


"According to the seed that is sown,
So is the fruit you reap
The door of good will gather good result
The door of evil reaps evil result.
If you plant a good seed well,
Then you will enjoyed the good fruits."
-Buddha, Samyutta Nikaya


For more info see:

The Theory of Karma

Principles of Cause and Effect
 
Originally posted by DefSkeptic
I find the whole idea of Heaven and Hell completely absent from intellectual grounds. Here is my way to make this issue quite clear from the perspective of "free will"

No one is responsible for their brain makeup when they were first born. So one's first actions are the result of their brain dictating one's responses to environmental stimuli. The enviornmental information is taken in and the brain will make some new connections in its neural makeup as a result..... the next behavior is the result of the new combination of biological and enviornmental influences. So if we start with something no one had a say in (one's genetic composition) then how are responsible for actions that result of "choices" made by your brain. We are never truly in control to the extend we want to think. We have begun to experience a spiral of actions that are a result of choices made when we had no control.

To think a person deserves eternal bliss or eternal damnation is far fetched. What determines how a person will turn out? Genes and enviornment, some people were given good genes along with an enviornment conducive to becoming a well-rounded adult. Others were not that lucky. Why is that a personal fault?

If i believed in a supreme being I would think that everyone went to heaven, this is the most compassionate view. Why think someone who did not have a substantial say in his ultimate turnout would be burning and tourted in eternal hell.

Instead examine this- we are highly social creatures that develop concepts similiar to the heaven/hell concept because of the way we interact and the need to preserve order.

I believe when we die, we cease to exist. Conciousness is a earthly concept that is a result of various mental processes in the brain. If the brain dies then so does conciousness. To think there is another plain of conciousness is extreme wishful thinking. I theorize that it is a defense mechanism to protect one from the pain associated with the thoughts of losing a loved one. Also it is very hard for some people to accept the concept of death. To think one will never experience anything is quite frightining, so it would be beneficial to self deceive in order to not come to the grim realizations that come with the idea of human existance.
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I know what you're saying but we are not 100% positive on what consciousness is,
it could be a quantum process,in fact personally im pretty sure it is.

Treat is as quantum computation.

Now the thing about quantum theory is the many worlds/many histories.parrallel universe interpretation,
about 60% of your top physicists belive the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics is indeed correct.

Now this is important because it underlines the fact that you still exist somewhere when you die.

Thats why my personal theory is to suggest that a quantum consciousness must survive also,but memory may be different.

I swear to you that all the strange things people see,feel
i.e aliens,deja vu,ghosts,time warps,nightmares,strange dreams,
OBE is all to do with the very occasional experience of supposition of states when two worlds split apart.

Gotta remember that anyone who claims to have seen weird things is not lying,why would they lie?they often stand to lose more than they would gain by lying about it.

They saw something,and i think these "somethings" are infact either elsewhere externally or elsewhere internally.

Afterlife?
well theres a possibility that everyone has infact died many times,think of death as a standard measurement experiment,
death is irreversable,therefore in quantum physics it could be the consciousness switches to a nearest counterpart,it could do this.

Memory wise you can only know something in a causal world,thats to say that if an event does not happen(or you think its not happened) then naturally relative to you it has not,
however the world in which you died ITS obsevers percieve you as dead.

Quiet a complex idea of an afterlife dont you think?

But not much stranger than the many worlds interpretations that you are infact alive elsewhere,many many copies of you that may have made different choices.
It would be most foolish to think this abandons freewill,it cannot,for thats like saying a coin has only two tails or two heads,theres quiet clearly 2 sides to the coin,things from our perspective are indeed indeterministic,but it could look deterministic if you were standing outside all these worlds looking in,although they are still all moving towards undetermined future.
 
an idle thought

Just an idle thought, but something that's been bugging me about this concept of heaven/hell.

Humans go to heaven, right?
Humans share common descendants with apes. So apes should go to heaven, right?
Our common descendant evolved from another animal, who evolved from another animal, and so on. So, with this type of reasoning, all animals should go to heaven, right?
But aren't plants and animals related? So would plants go to heaven/hell?
Come to think of it, would bacteria go to heaven or hell? After all, everything in the universe evolved from a bacteria like creature.
Why should humans be the only creatures to go to heaven/hell? Animals have crude emotions and can feel pain. Plants and bacteria respond to the environment, and they are living.

So, in otherwords, heaven/hell will be full of humans, animals, plants and bacteria. This just seem rather silly to me.
 
Re: an idle thought

Originally posted by mountainhare
Just an idle thought, but something that's been bugging me about this concept of heaven/hell.

Humans go to heaven, right?
Humans share common descendants with apes. So apes should go to heaven, right?
Our common descendant evolved from another animal, who evolved from another animal, and so on. So, with this type of reasoning, all animals should go to heaven, right?
But aren't plants and animals related? So would plants go to heaven/hell?
Come to think of it, would bacteria go to heaven or hell? After all, everything in the universe evolved from a bacteria like creature.
Why should humans be the only creatures to go to heaven/hell? Animals have crude emotions and can feel pain. Plants and bacteria respond to the environment, and they are living.

So, in otherwords, heaven/hell will be full of humans, animals, plants and bacteria. This just seem rather silly to me.
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Yeah but some people are a couple of a hundred screws short of a meccano set and just dont think logically cos there scared of dying with there being no point to living.

Some people just cannot believe this is all there is,what you make it,with no one to hold your hand when youre alone.

I think these people would actually go insane if they thought rationally in terms of "hey youre born,you die thats it,youre no different to animals and bacteria apart from intelligence"
unfortunatly thats the most probable case.
 
Heaven/Hell a state of conscienceness

According to the bible, hell is a place where you will suffer, be in turmoil,grief, etc for all eternity.

Heaven on the other hand is a place opposite to that. A place where you will be happy,joyful,enlightened, experience eternal bliss.

Personally im what most people would call in the "new age belief"
simply put it we are be the whole deffinition of GOD"
anyways.

Heaven is a collection of all the possitive feelings we experience in this human life. Hell is the is the collection of all the negative feelings we experience in human life.

I believe that we do exist in another "existance" whethere we go to hell or heaven we either decide or fall in without realizing why.

To be human is to experience emotions. We experience both good and bad imotions through our course of life.

What ever we come a costum to we will precipitate in this other existance.

eg. Think a man, is a theif, drug user, lier,killer, etc. A man who his whole life has felt hatred, betrayed.. etc.

This man (a bad man) in most religious views thsi man would go to hell.

In my believe this man not conscience of an after life, would fall into turmoil. He would experience what he has always been a custom of experiencing.

Ofcourse if you are aware of an after life and you realise that hell/ heaven is simply a conscience state. You would simply chose to stop experiencing those negative imotions that put you in this so called hell state.

to conclude we were born with the ability to make choices, therefore we are condition to continue to make such choices. :)
 
You need a soul to go to heaven/hell correct? No body believes that an inanimate object has an afterlife.

Ok. How does one explain this from the religious standpoint.... Once we die our bodies shut down and we cease to experience consciousness as we know it. A dead body does not emit energy that could be considered a soul. The body decomposes and the molecules diffuse into nature. Everyone is working off of borrowed material. Eventually every single atom in your body will become part of something else, even the energy contained in your body will diffuse into the atmosphere later to be consumed by something else.

So I ask you; which makes more sense- Humans die and everything that is defined by human experience ceases to be, or somehow our energy is magically wisked away to some distant place of everlasting stimulation.

The concept of an afterlife is so juvenile and plagued with wishful thinking that I even find it hard to entertain and maintain my dignity at the same time.
 
What can decompose or decay cannot be eternal, I agree - and that is also what the Bible says. You're real problem is that you do not believe that we could possess something that might be eternal. 'Soul' could be just a metaphysical concept, a metaphor for all existence and life, but at an individual and personal level.

From the Biblical perspective, Christians believe that God 'knew' each of us even before we were born, i.e. "physical beings". The Bible describes our bodies as temporary 'tents', which will return to the earth, but our spiritual bodies will be resurrected. We will be changed - without that change, what you believe might have been true, and we would simply slip out of consciousness.

By the way - hell will also cease to exist, along with death:
Revelation 20:14
Then death and Hades [hell] were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death.

Maybe hell is only punishment for a little while, and thereafter - nothing.

Just to clarify what we believe:
1 Cor. 15:42
So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.
If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.

50... flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed-- 52in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. 54When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."
___ 55"Where, O death, is your victory?
_______Where, O death, is your sting?"
56The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
 
hell is eternal. dying and death is GENERALLY not a pleasent expierence. so that's why they call it a second death because it's horrible, but it lasts forever.
 
A lot of people die blissfully in their sleep. That doesn't mean they went to heaven (or to hell). The second death mentioned in the Bible occurs after "the resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked". Before then, nobody feels or knows anything - they are 'sleeping'. Dead people can't feel "tortured".

At the resurrection God will judge over all people, and nothing impure, or anybody whose name isn't written in the book of life will be thrown in the lake of fire (cut off and destroyed). That is the second death. It is NOT a scare tactic, however. If there is to be any fear, it should be of God who will judge you according to what you do.

To quote A.W.Pink:
"... if the sinner has despised and rejected [the gift of] eternal happiness, is there any reason why he should complain against the justice of eternal misery? Finally, if there is an infinite evil in sin—as there is—then infinite punishment is its due reward."
 
Jenyar-

You're real problem is that you do not believe that we could possess something that might be eternal.
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I could entertain the notion, but I have gathered no reasons to believe it to be so.
 
Something you have to remember is actually all mass/energy in this universe is infact eternal,so you are made of the eternal mass/energy of the universe,so in that sense your physical mass is indestructable on a universal scale,this is definatly correct and proven.

On a quantum scale the only difference between life and death is the arrangment of your atoms,just think about that.

We know the biological,the necrosis the rotting etc,but it begs the question:

Why does mass/energy need to be eternal?
I suppose if your weak anthropic youll say "well it is what it is for we are here to talk about it,thats the reason:it is what it is"
ha! its not called weak for no reason.

Is it because on a quantum level they are doing something different elsewhere,but at the same time,but both need to exist?

Thats why i stay agnostic and skeptical,i dont believe in heaven and hell exactly,but i think if there is a god(and there has to be just for this subject) then id have thought he sees it like this:

"ill create everything,so everything happens,for some it may be hell,for some it may be heaven,but all will see both(i shall see all),but not so either will meet,thus the same person experiences heaven/hell"

For some the second world war happened and it was hell they got killed,for them same people also hitler never existed.

Could work like that.
 
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