Not a 7th...just a 3rd heaven.
Hell...yes, indeed...
Not a 7th...just a 3rd heaven.
Hell...yes, indeed...
Les Miserables,
Volume 1, Fifth Book, Chapter 3
Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.
My blog: https://frankhubeny.blog/
Well my first instinct is that yes, there is an afterlife. But I find the notion of heaven/hell implausible as there is no omniscient god who can decide whether we are good or bad. So it seems to me that the most likely theory is that our souls go somewhere else (though not necessarily on our world).
Yes. I believe in a heaven. (Btw, the "3rd heaven" thing is because in both Hebrew and Greek the word "heaven" has much of the same flexibility that it does in English. The first heaven is the sky in which the birds and such fly, the second is what we'd call the atmosphere and the third is the abode of the Lord.)
And just in case you weren't ready to laugh at me, I believe in a heaven where not only the soul will dwell, but both my body (raised from the dead and made imperishable) and my soul will be united as I dwell there.
Even for those who are not Christians I find it shocking and not a little sad (in the heart-wrenching, not pathetic sense) that some assume they are merely a collection of cells. What happened to the philosopher and the "I am more than the sum of my parts?" <sigh>
I suspected you didn't know what "irony" meant.
I am neutral on religon, but I always that it interesting that Judaism places relatively low interest or emphasis on the afterlife, whereas that is the whole point with most major religons.
It would seem to me that religon was spawned for a number of reasons- the answer to the afterlife question being one of the big reasons.
There are hellish and heavenly conditions here on earth. A few people live very luxurious and pampered lives, and unfortunately more people live in hellish conditions. If you believe in an afterlife, then the fact that these conditions exist on earth already - even if they are temporary - means that they could exist in the hereafter too. Scary.
The idea of eternal heaven and eternal damnation in the Christian tradition makes no sense on a purely logical level. What crime could possibly justify eternal damnation? Then again, the ideas we have about what heaven and hell are like are not borne out in the bible either. There is no description in the bible of our modern conceptions of heaven and hell. If I am wrong I'll stand corrected.
It dos beg the question about where such ideas came from.
I personally don't believe in an afterlife, simply because there is no evidence for it.
But in most afterlife-based hypotheses it's not the brain that ascends to heaven but rather the soul, and you can't disprove a soul. The concept of "soul" is inherently unrational, it is beyond the realm of the rational.
"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear."
-As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
I don't think this is so. Christianity and Islam tend to place more emphasis than most religions. In most ancient religions (Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Norse, Celtic) the afterlife is very unified - basically everyone goes there. Greece introduced the idea of Hell (Tartarus) and Romans added heaven (Elysium) - but these were reserved for only a few - the vast majority just went to the underworld. Judaism is basically the same, they just never gave a strict vision of their underworld.
I wrote a poem on a leaf and it blew away...