Hi, it’s newbie Jimbo, proudly presenting my very first new topic!
It’s slightly silly… but I’ve honestly never seen it addressed on any atheist sites (a small sample, I grant you), or YouTube anti-apologetics sites (a very large sample group): how is aging handled in the great by-and-by? Since the so-called grandfather paradox is a fave among logicians and philosophers, let’s start with something vaguely like that:
—a young 22-year-old infantryman is tragically killed in WWll. He was a devout Christian, so let’s assume off to heaven he goes. But before his deployment, he impregnates his wife. The little boy is born after his daddy dies, and goes on to live a long devout Christian life, dying at age 88, and just like his dad did nearly 90-years earlier, passes easily through the pearly gates.
So…. where to begin? Is dad going to be 22 for all eternity? Will his son be 88? That means until the end of creation 22-year-old Dad will be sitting at the same heavenly table as his 88-year-old son. That would be so awkward.
Or…. Is there some median age everyone will work their way towards? Will Dad age to 35, and then stop, while his son de-ages to 35? (Although having your child be the same age as you until all the stars blink out would also be weird in the extreme).
The questions began to ask themselves: will infants always be infants? That doesn’t sound good. If you died before you learned algebra, will your eternal soul also be limited by never getting past 7th grade general math?
See what I mean? Fun! Anybody wanna play?
I think physical bodies are irrelevant in heaven, as even Jesus said so.
Philippians 3:21 in the Bible says that Christ will transform people’s bodies in heaven to be like his glorious body. This verse suggests that people will have new, perfect bodies in heaven.
Of course, that’s if you buy into this kind of thing, which I generally don’t.
I’ve honestly never thought about it because the idea of an afterlife seems so foreign to me. I would imagine, though, that folks who do believe there is such a place, each fancies it according to their own wishes.
Hey, Kevin. No, me neither. But it’s a fun way to counter one of the many uttterly nonsensical notions that go with the Christianity thing.
I’m impressed with your Biblical knowledge. But the physical form aspect was only a part of what I was, umm, satirizing. Mostly it was consciousness I was thinking of. The heavenly brains. Here’s a passage from the doctrinal message from a church in, of all places, New Canaan, Connecticut. Claims to be non-denominational, but checks every box for evangelical:
“We teach that this resurrection of the unsaved dead to judgment will be a physical, bodily resurrection (John 5:28–29) in which they will be committed to eternal conscious punishment in the lake of fire (Matthew 25:41; Revelation 20:11–15).
So, physical continuity and consciousness of their agony are the eternal conditions of the mind of the sinner bathing in the lake of fire, but in heaven, it’s transformation to perfect bodies, and let the good times roll?
Hey, as you just read, this is doctrinal in many Christian churches and sects. Failure to believe it will consign you to said lake of fire. Saying each Christian in their own way rationalizes this away is a bit of a cop out.
I’ve thought about this before. I’ve come to a conclusion that in such a place there would have to be no time or age, which is a concept I don’t think humans could understand in our current form. I’d like to think there would be no mother/daughter/father/son either or body as we know it right now. Basically what I’m saying is that it would just be you/us, no masks, no unfair advantages/disadvantages through the physical form, no decay, etc. A totally new alien place completely different than here.
I think you’re right Jimbo that everyone would want to be their ideal age, but how would that work? I don’t think anything that was learned or not learned here would carry over as there is so many unfair advantages that you mention between some dying as infants.
Whenever I’ve asked christians this question in the past they’ve usually said things like, “We WILL be this, or WON’T be that, etc” like they are so sure of what it will be like, except no one can come up with anything when you mention serious issues with that way of thinking.
Idk, as far as an afterlife there’s so many people including my own father that I would never like to see again, so I tend not to care or even want an afterlife if it involves seeing some people again just because we’re blood related. Many christians seem to have this belief that everything will work itself out magically somehow, and I don’t really buy into that.
That is why they bury their dead, and find cremation scandalous. Their god is strong enough to have created the universe, but can’t resurrect you if your body gets destroyed by a fire…
What difference would it make since everyone in heaven will eventually end up in hell, (Think about it.) We know for a fact the god of the bible is an asshole. We know for a fact the angels in heaven have rebelled. We know for a fact, Hell was created to torture them. We know that once in heaven you can move from heaven to hell. However, once in Hell, you are there forever. Hell is eternal. Given an eternal existence and the piss-poor nature of god’s personality, everyone will end up in Hell.
Do you know any atheists that believe in heaven, or in any kind of afterlife? Can’t say I’ve ever met any tbh, but that would be my answer, I don’t believe in an afterlife, or that we can survive the physical death of our brains in any meaningful way.
If anyone ever manages to demonstrate any objective evidence for those ideas, I shall examine them critically and with an open mind. The hypotheticals you listed just highlight rational contradictions in the notion of heaven, and most religious apologists I encounter seem to have a poor grasp or understanding of informal logic, judging from their relentless use of known common logical fallacies.
This is pretty much what I have seen, they use various rationalisations to cope with the obvious contradictions, and wave any cognitive dissonance away. If all else fails they make appeals to mystery, “god is mysterious, it’s not for us to question god’s plan, through god all things are possible” etc etc etc…it is in vain to question these new assertions, or point out that they are begging the question, just to create circular arguments, because as I said above, they either don’t care that their beliefs are demonstrably irrational or they lie, and pepper their irrational claims with the word logic used purely as rhetoric, like someone using the word fact at the end of a subjective and unevidenced claim, as if that transforms into a fact.
So firstly this strikes me as pretty unimaginative, though imagined it is to be sure, it scares roughly as much as the notion I will be dragged to a watery grave by a nefarious mermaid, and for the same reason, there is no objective evidence the ideas are possible, or real.
Really? If it’s physical existence as the biblical quote above suggests, then all the physical states we observe are necessarily temporal, so this seems like a pretty obvious special pleading fallacy to me.
Really good replies, y’all. Sheldon, you put it very well in your exactly correct take on why I raised the topic in the first place:
“The hypotheticals you listed just highlight rational contradictions in the notion of heaven”
So yes, a frivolous topic on one hand, but something (among the many) that you can use to slap an apologist touting the ridiculous notion of heaven. Heaven, eternal life where everyone is just alike, all kissing God’s ass unto the end of time and beyond. What sane person would believe that for one second?? (I know, I know…about 80% of all Americans. We are a stupid species). Can anyone out there think of anything more horrible than eternal life? I’ve pretty much fucked up the one life I’m actually living… so, no. One and done, thank goodness.
Two more thoughts before I end this already-too-long post: one, if you’re physical and conscious, wouldn’t you burn to a crisp in the lake of fire in about 2 seconds? There wouldn’t be anything left to torture! It’s a lake, not a bush
Second, if my behind seems a bit chafed on the topic of religion this morning, there’s a reason. Yesterday was the memorial for my mom, who died at 94 two weeks ago, lying helpless in a hospital bed in the dementia ward of my parents’ retirement village. On a scale of religious-ness, she was somewhere between a one and a two. I balked when my 93-year-old dad wanted to make it a Jesus service at ALL But he insisted. Well, we didn’t get a service for a person who was between a one and a two; we got a service for an eleven. I and my brother were horrified, and really put out. I don’t think my dad went over with the minister what the “tone” of the event should be. And why should he have?? For fuck’s sake, the officiate is a minister of a Presbyterian church in a leafy upper-middle class suburb, where nearly everyone went to college. A pretty rational and secular crowd, overall. Instead, we get this Pentecostal preacher from Mississippi… I half expected him to start speaking in tongues.
So that will forever be the overriding memory of my lovely and secular mom’s memorial service. Anybody else ever experienced anything like this in services for a newly-departed loved one?
That sucks, @Jimbo, and I’m so sorry you had to endure that. The lovely thing about memories is that you get to choose which ones to focus on. It’s an active endeavor though. With some time and practice, you’ll get to the good ones as primary.
Back when I was a Christian, I was led to believe that we were given young healthy bodies that did not age. That is all I have to contribute to the conversations. When I was a Christian I was fucking stupid and just believed what I was told. I never questioned it, never looked into why we believed it, and never gave it a second thought. I just knew that I knew, that I knew, I would get a young body that did not age.
Something similar happened to me not long ago when a close friend died and although she was not religious had her Celebration of Life commandeered by her Baptist daughters. Her spouse recently invited me to a celebration of life in their backyard. He told me that he had had lots of feedback that the religious ceremony was not in keeping with the wonderful woman we all knew or, for that matter, his partners. So he was choosing to do a do over.
Just saying, if you and your brother want a different memorial memory of your mom then go ahead and create one. It’s possible that some of your moms friends and yours might want to join with you.
No. If we did could you imagine a 1 million year old person. I believe someone stays young but our ages will vary, how that is measured is news to me. How ever old we are i believe we will stay that age for eternity.
I am less interested in what you believe, as why you believe it. At any point will you be engaging in debate, or offering anything beyond bare claims for your beliefs? The idea we would age or safety the same age forever, are both irrational absurdities as by inference they would both violate the law of non contradiction.
