What if heaven is real, does that mean that every person that has lived and died in say the past 10,000 years would be there, as long as they were a good person? Or has heaven only been something to aspire too for those who’ve lived in the last 2021 years? Was everyone that lived before the invention of christianity sent to hell because they weren’t lucky enough to know about a certain carpenter that lived in jerusalem?
I’m just wondering, because I was thinking it would be fucking cool if going to heaven meant that you’d have the opportunity to talk to anyone/everyone from the past, as long as they were lucky enough to be granted eternal happiness in paradise.
I would love to have the opportunity to speak with some of my favorite authors such as Poe or Lovecraft, or someone like Lincoln or Churchill.
It would really suck though if some asshole like Stalin or Hitler were there because they begged forgiveness before they died. Some christians actually believe this to be the case, including my wife. Insanity! Please don’t tell her I said that.
I’m a lifetime atheist and don’t believe anybody’s bullshit religion, but I thought it could be an interesting question to ask. I wonder if LuKang knows the answer, he knows everything.
I had to enter the title twice to make 15 characters, sorry.
From what I understand, you’d be spending your eternity worshipping, bowing and scraping, and singing to the Biblical “God”.
No. Sounds more like a prison.
The entire idea sucks.
Well. I had some issues with my ex wife about Christianity and I tried to believe in and worship the Christian deity. But it just didn’t happen. You can’t believe in something that you know is a lie. That’s like trying to believe in Santa Claus, you can’t because that’s bullshit.
And my ex wife even gave ultimatums that I had to believe or else a divorce. She knew that I was an Atheist when we met & it became problematic for her later on in our relationship. She indoctrinated her shit beliefs onto the kids. My son believes in her imaginary friend. My daughter doesn’t. I’m glad.
I don’t want them growing up with crazy superstitions. That just causes problems for them down the road.
The concept of the application of heaven has some conflicts. You are supposed to be “happy” there. But according to the rules in the bible, some make it, some don’t.
For example, my mother and father make it past the pearly gates. But they can’t find me and the expected response is they would not be 100% “happy”. But according to many theists, they are supposed to be in a state of complete bliss.
My conclusion is that their minds are wiped of any memory of me. Thus there is no free will in heaven. Once there, you are not the person you were while on this earthly plane.
What is another alternative? A fleshed out “robot” that looks and acts like me is planted in heaven? Deception? Lies?
These are some of the conflicts that lead me to believe that although there maybe a god, it is not the one described in the bible.
Every version you were speculating about (and much more along those lines), I’ve been told by a Christian who seemed very serious.
Back when I believed, one of my close friends, besides my wife, said to me, “knowing you, you’d probably get to heaven and decide, ‘no, I don’t like it.’” And he chuckled. I replied he might be right.
I’m pretty introverted and I enjoy my solitude. Considering heaven, I figured I’d either be ‘accommodated,’ or I’d be altered to like living among a crowd.
With the first consideration, I hoped I’d get some respite and have some time to myself. But I supposed that would make god jealous, knowing how he is, ha!
With the second consideration, if I’m to be altered, then I’d practically be someone else. And I wondered what the difference would be between losing myself in hell or losing myself in heaven. The real me would be gone.
That doesn’t account for the other dilemma I’d thought of: knowing that some of my family and friends on Earth might be suffering forever in hell would ruin my heaven. So, unless I were altered to forget those people, and again lose my real self, I wouldn’t feel like I’d be in heaven.
I help a theist friend of mine with his biblical nonsense websites as a webmaster (he can’t code anything, let alone learn anything not derived from the bible) (but we grew up together and I’ve known him for 50 years, plus he’s a friend even if he’s into that stupidity).
He says Heaven is full. Something about 144 Thousand was the maximum occupancy up there and the dead will stay dead until the 2nd coming when they all get raised and judged. After that the good will live forever on a paradise earth and the bad will go to hell. He says it’s in Revelation. That’s not what I took away from that bit, but we never see the same things in that crazy book.
I stopped trying to explain to him that there would not likely be room on earth for all those billions or any other logical arguments since logic is not his strong point.
Still, it’s a funny concept and it relates to the topic at hand, so there it is.
I can’t get past how much such questions sound like, “are mermaids slippery”.
If you concentrate hard enough and long enough I’d bet quite a few people can’t help forming an opinion.
If only this was just some harmless nonsense. There’s an on going case in Idaho/Arizona where a man and woman think that they are destined to organize and lead the 144,000 people that God has picked out to go to heaven at the end of times. Unfortunately they decided that their respective spouses and 2 of the woman’s children were in the way of their “mission”. So of course they killed them. They had actually gotten away with killing their spouses. Watching the police interview where Lori Vallow/Daybell quickly convinces the cops that she was the victim when her husband was shot is chilling. It wasn’t until the children went missing that anyone really payed any attention to what these people were up to.
On a lighter note my favorite version of heaven has to be by the evangelist Kat Kerr who claims she visits heaven regularly and has stroked god’s hair. Heaven is apparently made of jello and full of amusement park rides.
- If anything is possible, can anything be impossible?
- If you hate a hater, do you hate yourself?
- Why do we make exceptions to rules if we are supposed to follow the rules?
- When does the future begin?
- How many roads must a man walk down?
I believe The Good Book says Forty Two!
Interesting. According to my friend, those 144,000 were already picked and are in heaven now. So there’s no more room. Heaven isn’t infinite after all…
It’s almost enough to make me want to re-read that part, but I swore off reading that stuff ever again. Let them read up on Science enough to debate me about that!
Some JW teaching in this. The “hell” is just everlasting death (nonexistent).
One question I’ve never seen even being asked of the usual suspects, let alone observed anything resembling a substantive answer thereto, is this - given that human beings in their modern form have only been in existence for approximately 200,000 years, what was the point of opening the requisite celestial theme park billions of years before it would start seeing customers pass through the gate?
Only according to the hilarious assertions in Genesis, said celestial theme park was purportedly open for business right from the start of the existence of the universe, which would involve some interesting cosmological physics to pull off to put it mildly, but I’ll leave that class of question for another time. However, I’m not aware of any construction project, even on a modest scale, that was undertaken without a reasonably immediate prospect of it being put to use. Building something 13.6 billion years before it starts seeing use strikes me as woefully extravagant.
Of course, this assumes that the only intended occupants thereof were humans. If admission passes are granted to all life forms, then of course this objection recedes to a limited extent - we’re only seeing it stand empty for around 10 billion years instead of 13.6. But a second question then arises, courtesy of the vast space that would be required to house the quintillions of organisms that have existed over the past 3.6 billion years or so. Unless of course there’s some sort of admission test for said organisms, in order to reduce the numbers needing housing. Except that the only admission test ever mentioned in the requisite mythology, centres upon this weird concept of “sin”, and I’d like to know what sort of “sin” a bacterium could commit, for example, given that it’s a single celled organism with no detectable sentience. Choosing the wrong molecule to metabolise?
Indeed, the only reason for bothering with any of this, apart from the necessary discoursive duty of pouncing upon manifest nonsense and shredding it, the moment someone tries to present said nonsense as fact, is because the spectacle of seeing the usual suspects squirm over such matters is hilarious.
When I was going to church and putting up with the superstitious bullshit from those believers. They said anyone who believed in “God” was going to “Heaven”.
I had no idea that the golden after life had a limited occupancy 
Interesting ascii coincidence, but Douglas Adams said in an interview that he just thought it was the funniest sounding number after trying a few out on friends.
Of course, he was a writer so that could have just been for dramatic effect and it could well have been thought out.
I chose to go with his explanation from the interview, but don’t rule out the ascii idea!
Yeah, he’s a big fan of Judge Rutherford and pals. Has a poster of Chucky T Russell in his place where he holds those crazy bible studies.
He fell for it big time.
I had never heard such a thing growing up either. The big selling point was that if you believe in Jesus and follow his teachings you get to go to heaven. Nothing too complicated that might discourage people. Though I suppose that if you can believe in heaven it’s not much of a stretch to think you’re one of the 144,000 who’s getting in. I saw one woman all happy because her marriage date was 12/12 and 12x12 equals 144. Apparently that’s close enough to 144,000 to be a sign that her and her spouse are going to heaven. Proving once again that people will believe anything. I’ve never understood the mystical connection a lot of people think numbers have. Numerology and Astronomy make even less sense to me than most religions.
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.
Well, I am just wondering if all those interesting people one would like to talk to, are actually interested in talking to all those interested people about the same subject again and again. It would not be what I’d like to do in heaven (not that I ever created something so meaningful people would want to talk to me all the time about it, you get the idea, right?)
Absolutely nothing comes pretty close to what one could wish for. No more missing a loved one, no more pain, no hate nor misunderstanding. So I’m afraid that the wish for heaven is born out of lack of imagination about what completely nothing can be.