I’ve always wondered about the eternal bliss part of heaven. It always seems very vague. So on earth you’re not supposed to enjoy life’s pleasures or joys “too much” because in heaven you can’t enjoy it “too much”, like what’s the goal. Is it just dangle temptation in front of you as a test, so you don’t go to hell. So does that mean you can be a sinner in heaven because you showed restraint on earth? Does that mean you get in because you proved that you are ok with living a pious life but now there is no temptation and no free will? Either way it sounds like physical torture in hell or mental torture in heaven, I’m a bit confused. I’m willing to listen, hell seems pretty specific but heaven is pretty vague.
Really the Bible doesn’t say very much about hell.
Sometimes a character will be thrown into a pit of fire or similar but it’s never claimed its for everyone.
Really all it says it’s you’ll be “without God”. Generally, it seems like non-Christians just die but Christians get a second afterlife - unless of course they ate shellfish.
No interest in spending eternity praising and worshiping a vengeful, spiteful, narcissistic god. Might be his idea of heaven, but it’s not mine. Give me the void.
Also, the only account we have of Hell is the Bible, and I wouldn’t call that an unbiased source. Why would the Devil torture his bois? It doesn’t make any sense.
Erm, either the devil was some good creature that rebelled and got slandered, or more likely: other narcissist who got cuckolded, and is now playing the victim.
But overall, I pick believing in action, rather than spirits.
What if you worship the god of critical thinking and pray by thinking critically?
In Judaism, Satan is basically a lawyer guy that Elohim hires to question him and call him on his bullshit. That may explain why Jewish people place a lot of importance on having a nice argument.
The ancient Greek philosphers were also very fond of critical thinking and they were religious. The Athenians revered Athena especially, the goddess of wisdom. So it was considered virtuous to spend your days in thought and debate.
Like, I get that your experience is with Christianity, which is not a very thought-heavy religion. But I find it difficult to believe that you’ve studied a representative sample of the world’s religions. I think you’re just repeating a trope you read online, that religious people are stupid, without thinking critically about it.
I came up with an idea of a deity, The Forbidden God, who hates worship. You worship them and they smite you. It/he/she values critical thinking and logic. You don’t have to be right, but blind faith and grovelling, smite. I’ve yet to incorporate them into some kind of short story. One day.
Magic is the technology we use to change our minds and perceptions with our thoughts. For example, the placebo effect. The mere thought that you’ve taken medicine can cause a psychosomatic healing effect. I’m a chaos magician, which means I believe in using psychology to take magic a step further than mere placebos.
Magic is powered by belief. Your classic medical placebos are powered by your belief in medicine. Studies show that placebos work even if you know they’re placebos. I call that faith. You know, choosing to believe, and the belief having an observable effect. Faith is a form of belief powered by will. And you can will yourself into all kinds of things, which is pretty cool. You don’t even need the placebo effect if you’re strong enough to will yourself to get better.
But that’s exhausting, and not everyone has that much faith in themself. We can actually multiply the effect of faith to get a bigger result, using belief structures. You know, like medicine. We choose to believe in medicine, take a sugar pill, and believe the medicine will heal us. It’s more efficient, takes less will to get more healing.
And religions are useful because they can provide large scale systems of belief to multiply the power of our faith. I mean, there’s also the way they can influence society through memes, but let’s focus on magic. Religions make magic stronger.
I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen mortals pray to gods, and the idea of their god gives them strength, multiples the effect of their faith. Because human beings are a social species, and aren’t really designed to do anything alone, including magic. With a coven or a laborator or an atelier or a cult or a relationship with a god, magic gets stronger. Minds get stronger and can do more.
Critical thinking helps you with truth, and truth is great. But truth isn’t everything. Knowing the solution to a problem and doing it are too different things. Religious magic can help people do what critical thinking says is the right solution to their problems. That’s religion and critical thinking working together.
Our experience of reality is not the same thing as reality itself, it is our brain’s interpretation of internal and external stimuli based on our prior experiences of those stimuli. In addition, our brains really hate when our perception doesn’t line up with our expectations, which causes the feeling known as cognitive dissonance.
So, our brain expects a certain outcome and begins to produce the chemical responses (the internal stimuli) to have its perception of reality match its expectation of the external stimuli to avoid cognitive dissonance.
This is an incredibly oversimplified parsing of what’s happening but it’s the gist of it.
Yeah! Magic is plenty easy to scientifically study. It’s just a category of technology that’s made out of ideas instead of physical things. You’ve got your mechanical engineers, your electrical engineers, and your magical engineers. Nothing special about it, except how our current culture mystifies it so much.
I blame Christianity for trying to stunt progress on magical science. You know, they failed to keep Galileo from overturning their belief system, but they succeeded in putting down any mages not sanctioned by them. You know they try to monopolise magic so you have to go to them for magical assistance. It’s fucked up.
If your definition of “god” is something you revere, then sure, go have some gods. Have a bunch. It’s great to value things like knowledge and thought and kindness.
If your definition of god includes some supernatural power, then I’ll need some evidence.
In philosophy, the word “nature” is usually used to mean “the universe”, or “all of existence”. Within a mainstream western framework, “the supernatural doesn’t exist” is thus circular reasoning; a tautology. We can translate it as “Things from beyond existence don’t exist”. Yeah, duh! It’s an unfalsifiable claim, and Karl Popper would be ashamed of it.
Magic isn’t supernatural, because magic is part of nature. It exists. Nobody will ever be able to prove that the supernatural exists, because it’s oxymoronic. But proving that magic exists? Easy, with a robust and falsifiable definition of magic.
Magic, by definition, has to be supernatural. Otherwise it’s just physics. What we call magic is just things we haven’t figured out in enough detail to explain. Or things we’ve made up and aren’t real. The latter is the supernatural bit.
" God of the gaps" and all that.
I will happily change my mind if you can show me how that’s wrong. Though I would first ask that you give an example of what magic is.
My favourite example of magic is money. See, I define magic as “observable phenomena caused by things that aren’t real”. Now obviously the value of money is a construct imbued with illusory realness by society. But if we’re talking about genuine realness, the value of money is obviously not real. Thus, money is constructed by society as mundane, but if we call bullshit on capitalism, then our perspective changes and money is magic.
You appear to be defining magic as “unexplained phenomena, incompatible with science”. Under this definition, a Wizard casting a fireball spell in the Forgotten Realms isn’t magic, because it’s perfectly explained by science; magic in Dungeons and Dragons is caused by manipulating the Weave, which is a field that projects reality. I think that’s absurd.
And if a fraud psychic who posts on tiktok used your definition, then they would say psychic powers aren’t magic, because they claim to have a perfectly logical and scientific explanation for their psychic powers. It’s bullshit, but the point is that they’re claiming it’s not bullshit, and your definition of magic basically boils down to “bullshit”.
So while your definition is useful for communicating with other nonbelievers (Myself among them in this case), it’s not useful for communicating with believers in psychic powers, and it’s fundamentally illogical. Because it’s circular reasoning. Your conclusion is in your definition. It’s just like you said: if it were true, it would be physics. Believers claim it is physics. There’s a fundamental disconnect.
I mean, yeah, but learning particle physics is theoretically useful in society. Becoming a Lord of the Rings expert is only real useful for Trivia night.
Or perhaps all that time spent on pondering fantasies is time that you have a sunk cost into, so it’s harder with time to rationalize the fantasies properly.
There is a lot in old religions, Christianity included, where the rewards were obviously written for the desires of the people at the time. It would be very different if heavenly rewards were written with today’s mindset.
In the book, “Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect”, an AI takes complete control of physicsl reality and provides an environment on command for everyone.
There are groups of people who tell the AI to permanently stimulate neurons to flood their brains with dopamine, and just become non responsive husks.
I always preferred the ‘Friendship is Optimal’ version. It’s a my little pony fanfiction in which a video game based on the franchise featuring AI achieves the singularity and creates a sort of digital afterlife. Humans can be uploaded, but the process is destructive, resulting in their real body’s death.
The afterlife created for them is uniquely calibrated to provide maximum contentment. Each space features a small number of other people (some real, some NPCs) following Dunbar’s number to ensure our minds can care about them. The people chosen are calibrated to mesh well with your personality.
It features interesting things for us to do, with enough challenges to keep things fresh and engaging, but not so many as to overly frustrate us. Basically it turns our experience into that of an idyllic version of reality.
That’s about as close a description of ‘eternal bliss’ as I can fathom except for the fact that by nature it’s not 100% bliss all the time. It’s just living in a world where you matter, can surround yourself with loved ones you gel with and can pursue your passions endlessly in ways that are personally rewarding to you. Even then I’m not sure how it’d actually keep working after a few thousand years or so.
This is one of my favorite science fiction stories for the way it deals with the question of what it would really be like to live in a perfect world (the related story “A Casino Odyssey in Cyberspace” also has some interesting ideas on this front). But be warned that it contains some scenes of extremely graphic sex and violence, and the final chapter has some incredibly weird and pervy shit that just about ruins the whole thing (to the point that I think skipping it and ending in a cliffhanger is better.)
Another fantastic story in this vein is Ted Chiang’s “Hell is the Absence of God,” which takes place in a world like ours except for the fact that God is objectively real and angels regularly manifest on Earth. It’s more about the psychological conflicts among people who want to have faith but can’t for various reasons, but the way Heaven is portrayed and the effect it has on people is a pivotal part. And it has one of the biggest gut-punch sentences of any story I’ve ever read.
Dan Harmon’s most recent TV show, Krapopolis, did a take on this: specifically, Zeus ends up locking himself in a self-induced loop of, er, continuous dopamine-endorphin delivery that makes him appear catatonic. The device of this… state… is different but the end result is the same.
I’m kinda hoping that we’ve figured out how to hack the time dilation effect in the brain, coupled with realistic deep dive VR, and when I die I’ll wake up somewhere and see my wife still plugged into the game. I’ll get the kettle on, make us a sandwich or a nutritious protein goo, and wait for her to die too so we can decide what scenario to live through next.
you’re not supposed to enjoy life’s pleasures or joys “too much”
That’s a rather puritanical view. I would say the dangers of pleasure are similar to the dangers of heroin – the problem is not enjoying it too much, but becoming single-minded in its pursuit.
As for sin in heaven, I guess you would not want to because all of your deepest needs are met without sin.
A common image of heaven is a bunch of saints playing harps. Nowadays this looks boring; imagine instead a giant jam session with everyone rocking out.
It’s a bit of a mistake to assume that you would be your fully conscious, rational, Earthly self in the afterlife; with all your memories and such intact. Death is transformation. A better way to imagine it is as if you would have a really nice and long dream. You don’t get bored of dreams.
Could be interesting to reach a higher state of consciousness even if it’s not me anymore or I might not care because I would have nothing to compare it to, so it would just be a normal day to my new self. But if it’s just like being on a heroin high for eternity, then I’m good, I’ll pass.
It’s not as bad as some fear, but not as nice as others hope for. You don’t even have to do drugs or fully die to try it out, but it’s a bit tricky to set up in modern life for most people. Lemmy is generally not the demographic for stuff like this though
‘Hello, brother!’
‘Hello, brother!’
‘Hows your day been?’
‘Same as yesterday, just great!’
‘Great! See you again tomorrow, brother!’
‘Great! See you again tomorrow, brother!’
I’ve always wondered about the eternal bliss part of heaven. It always seems very vague. So on earth you’re not supposed to enjoy life’s pleasures or joys “too much” because in heaven you can’t enjoy it “too much”, like what’s the goal. Is it just dangle temptation in front of you as a test, so you don’t go to hell. So does that mean you can be a sinner in heaven because you showed restraint on earth? Does that mean you get in because you proved that you are ok with living a pious life but now there is no temptation and no free will? Either way it sounds like physical torture in hell or mental torture in heaven, I’m a bit confused. I’m willing to listen, hell seems pretty specific but heaven is pretty vague.
Really the Bible doesn’t say very much about hell.
Sometimes a character will be thrown into a pit of fire or similar but it’s never claimed its for everyone.
Really all it says it’s you’ll be “without God”. Generally, it seems like non-Christians just die but Christians get a second afterlife - unless of course they ate shellfish.
Literaly it’s all about God. You just spend forever praising him, and apparently don’t care about anything else.
This is better than searing hot lava forever I suppose.
No interest in spending eternity praising and worshiping a vengeful, spiteful, narcissistic god. Might be his idea of heaven, but it’s not mine. Give me the void.
Also, the only account we have of Hell is the Bible, and I wouldn’t call that an unbiased source. Why would the Devil torture his bois? It doesn’t make any sense.
Erm, either the devil was some good creature that rebelled and got slandered, or more likely: other narcissist who got cuckolded, and is now playing the victim.
But overall, I pick believing in action, rather than spirits.
I dunno man, the lava seems pretty bad, but then again… being a worship zombie … sounds like some kinda parasitic horror thing out of Rick and Morty.
There’s a reason that critical thinking and structured religion are incompatible.
What if you worship the god of critical thinking and pray by thinking critically?
In Judaism, Satan is basically a lawyer guy that Elohim hires to question him and call him on his bullshit. That may explain why Jewish people place a lot of importance on having a nice argument.
The ancient Greek philosphers were also very fond of critical thinking and they were religious. The Athenians revered Athena especially, the goddess of wisdom. So it was considered virtuous to spend your days in thought and debate.
Like, I get that your experience is with Christianity, which is not a very thought-heavy religion. But I find it difficult to believe that you’ve studied a representative sample of the world’s religions. I think you’re just repeating a trope you read online, that religious people are stupid, without thinking critically about it.
I came up with an idea of a deity, The Forbidden God, who hates worship. You worship them and they smite you. It/he/she values critical thinking and logic. You don’t have to be right, but blind faith and grovelling, smite. I’ve yet to incorporate them into some kind of short story. One day.
Because as soon as you start thinking critically you don’t need gods.
“Our gods are dead. Ancient Klingon warriors slew them a millennia ago. They were… more trouble than they were worth.”
Okay, let’s talk about magic.
Magic is the technology we use to change our minds and perceptions with our thoughts. For example, the placebo effect. The mere thought that you’ve taken medicine can cause a psychosomatic healing effect. I’m a chaos magician, which means I believe in using psychology to take magic a step further than mere placebos.
Magic is powered by belief. Your classic medical placebos are powered by your belief in medicine. Studies show that placebos work even if you know they’re placebos. I call that faith. You know, choosing to believe, and the belief having an observable effect. Faith is a form of belief powered by will. And you can will yourself into all kinds of things, which is pretty cool. You don’t even need the placebo effect if you’re strong enough to will yourself to get better.
But that’s exhausting, and not everyone has that much faith in themself. We can actually multiply the effect of faith to get a bigger result, using belief structures. You know, like medicine. We choose to believe in medicine, take a sugar pill, and believe the medicine will heal us. It’s more efficient, takes less will to get more healing.
And religions are useful because they can provide large scale systems of belief to multiply the power of our faith. I mean, there’s also the way they can influence society through memes, but let’s focus on magic. Religions make magic stronger.
I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen mortals pray to gods, and the idea of their god gives them strength, multiples the effect of their faith. Because human beings are a social species, and aren’t really designed to do anything alone, including magic. With a coven or a laborator or an atelier or a cult or a relationship with a god, magic gets stronger. Minds get stronger and can do more.
Critical thinking helps you with truth, and truth is great. But truth isn’t everything. Knowing the solution to a problem and doing it are too different things. Religious magic can help people do what critical thinking says is the right solution to their problems. That’s religion and critical thinking working together.
Crazy take. The placebo effect isn’t magic. Science doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t make it magic.
Science absolutely understands the placebo effect though.
News to me! I didn’t think we knew why it has any real effect on the body. I guess I’ll do some looking.
Put in simple terms:
Our experience of reality is not the same thing as reality itself, it is our brain’s interpretation of internal and external stimuli based on our prior experiences of those stimuli. In addition, our brains really hate when our perception doesn’t line up with our expectations, which causes the feeling known as cognitive dissonance.
So, our brain expects a certain outcome and begins to produce the chemical responses (the internal stimuli) to have its perception of reality match its expectation of the external stimuli to avoid cognitive dissonance.
This is an incredibly oversimplified parsing of what’s happening but it’s the gist of it.
Yeah! Magic is plenty easy to scientifically study. It’s just a category of technology that’s made out of ideas instead of physical things. You’ve got your mechanical engineers, your electrical engineers, and your magical engineers. Nothing special about it, except how our current culture mystifies it so much.
I blame Christianity for trying to stunt progress on magical science. You know, they failed to keep Galileo from overturning their belief system, but they succeeded in putting down any mages not sanctioned by them. You know they try to monopolise magic so you have to go to them for magical assistance. It’s fucked up.
I’m not on your side about the magic nonsense. I agree with the other user, I just disagree that science doesn’t understand the placebo effect.
Still not magic. Magic is bullshit
The placebo effect isn’t even real.
If your definition of “god” is something you revere, then sure, go have some gods. Have a bunch. It’s great to value things like knowledge and thought and kindness.
If your definition of god includes some supernatural power, then I’ll need some evidence.
In philosophy, the word “nature” is usually used to mean “the universe”, or “all of existence”. Within a mainstream western framework, “the supernatural doesn’t exist” is thus circular reasoning; a tautology. We can translate it as “Things from beyond existence don’t exist”. Yeah, duh! It’s an unfalsifiable claim, and Karl Popper would be ashamed of it.
Magic isn’t supernatural, because magic is part of nature. It exists. Nobody will ever be able to prove that the supernatural exists, because it’s oxymoronic. But proving that magic exists? Easy, with a robust and falsifiable definition of magic.
Magic, by definition, has to be supernatural. Otherwise it’s just physics. What we call magic is just things we haven’t figured out in enough detail to explain. Or things we’ve made up and aren’t real. The latter is the supernatural bit.
" God of the gaps" and all that.
I will happily change my mind if you can show me how that’s wrong. Though I would first ask that you give an example of what magic is.
My favourite example of magic is money. See, I define magic as “observable phenomena caused by things that aren’t real”. Now obviously the value of money is a construct imbued with illusory realness by society. But if we’re talking about genuine realness, the value of money is obviously not real. Thus, money is constructed by society as mundane, but if we call bullshit on capitalism, then our perspective changes and money is magic.
You appear to be defining magic as “unexplained phenomena, incompatible with science”. Under this definition, a Wizard casting a fireball spell in the Forgotten Realms isn’t magic, because it’s perfectly explained by science; magic in Dungeons and Dragons is caused by manipulating the Weave, which is a field that projects reality. I think that’s absurd.
And if a fraud psychic who posts on tiktok used your definition, then they would say psychic powers aren’t magic, because they claim to have a perfectly logical and scientific explanation for their psychic powers. It’s bullshit, but the point is that they’re claiming it’s not bullshit, and your definition of magic basically boils down to “bullshit”.
So while your definition is useful for communicating with other nonbelievers (Myself among them in this case), it’s not useful for communicating with believers in psychic powers, and it’s fundamentally illogical. Because it’s circular reasoning. Your conclusion is in your definition. It’s just like you said: if it were true, it would be physics. Believers claim it is physics. There’s a fundamental disconnect.
There is a reason that people study religion and philosophy.
Like particle physics, a couple of YouTube videos can’t make you understand subtle concepts that evolved over generations of experiences.
I mean, yeah, but learning particle physics is theoretically useful in society. Becoming a Lord of the Rings expert is only real useful for Trivia night.
Or perhaps all that time spent on pondering fantasies is time that you have a sunk cost into, so it’s harder with time to rationalize the fantasies properly.
Because the mind recoils from mortality and desires there to be more.
There is a lot in old religions, Christianity included, where the rewards were obviously written for the desires of the people at the time. It would be very different if heavenly rewards were written with today’s mindset.
Maybe you can’t even move or see anything but you are fed chemical bliss like heroin non stop.
Thanks, but could I please just go back to playing Portal 2?
HEV suit voice: morphine administered
In the book, “Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect”, an AI takes complete control of physicsl reality and provides an environment on command for everyone.
There are groups of people who tell the AI to permanently stimulate neurons to flood their brains with dopamine, and just become non responsive husks.
I always preferred the ‘Friendship is Optimal’ version. It’s a my little pony fanfiction in which a video game based on the franchise featuring AI achieves the singularity and creates a sort of digital afterlife. Humans can be uploaded, but the process is destructive, resulting in their real body’s death.
The afterlife created for them is uniquely calibrated to provide maximum contentment. Each space features a small number of other people (some real, some NPCs) following Dunbar’s number to ensure our minds can care about them. The people chosen are calibrated to mesh well with your personality.
It features interesting things for us to do, with enough challenges to keep things fresh and engaging, but not so many as to overly frustrate us. Basically it turns our experience into that of an idyllic version of reality.
That’s about as close a description of ‘eternal bliss’ as I can fathom except for the fact that by nature it’s not 100% bliss all the time. It’s just living in a world where you matter, can surround yourself with loved ones you gel with and can pursue your passions endlessly in ways that are personally rewarding to you. Even then I’m not sure how it’d actually keep working after a few thousand years or so.
This is one of my favorite science fiction stories for the way it deals with the question of what it would really be like to live in a perfect world (the related story “A Casino Odyssey in Cyberspace” also has some interesting ideas on this front). But be warned that it contains some scenes of extremely graphic sex and violence, and the final chapter has some incredibly weird and pervy shit that just about ruins the whole thing (to the point that I think skipping it and ending in a cliffhanger is better.)
Another fantastic story in this vein is Ted Chiang’s “Hell is the Absence of God,” which takes place in a world like ours except for the fact that God is objectively real and angels regularly manifest on Earth. It’s more about the psychological conflicts among people who want to have faith but can’t for various reasons, but the way Heaven is portrayed and the effect it has on people is a pivotal part. And it has one of the biggest gut-punch sentences of any story I’ve ever read.
Dan Harmon’s most recent TV show, Krapopolis, did a take on this: specifically, Zeus ends up locking himself in a self-induced loop of, er, continuous dopamine-endorphin delivery that makes him appear catatonic. The device of this… state… is different but the end result is the same.
I’m kinda hoping that we’ve figured out how to hack the time dilation effect in the brain, coupled with realistic deep dive VR, and when I die I’ll wake up somewhere and see my wife still plugged into the game. I’ll get the kettle on, make us a sandwich or a nutritious protein goo, and wait for her to die too so we can decide what scenario to live through next.
Thank you I just downloaded it. Sounds like a good read.
If there’s nothing left worth participating in this doesn’t sound like a bad option
Pretty sure it specifically says you’ll be singing hallelujah nonstop to God. Sounds like a great place.
That’s a rather puritanical view. I would say the dangers of pleasure are similar to the dangers of heroin – the problem is not enjoying it too much, but becoming single-minded in its pursuit.
As for sin in heaven, I guess you would not want to because all of your deepest needs are met without sin.
A common image of heaven is a bunch of saints playing harps. Nowadays this looks boring; imagine instead a giant jam session with everyone rocking out.
christian rock? fucking hell, would rather blow my brains out
The Good Place has a nice answer here: your mind fades into forgetfulness as every whim is accomplished without any challenge
It’s a bit of a mistake to assume that you would be your fully conscious, rational, Earthly self in the afterlife; with all your memories and such intact. Death is transformation. A better way to imagine it is as if you would have a really nice and long dream. You don’t get bored of dreams.
Could be interesting to reach a higher state of consciousness even if it’s not me anymore or I might not care because I would have nothing to compare it to, so it would just be a normal day to my new self. But if it’s just like being on a heroin high for eternity, then I’m good, I’ll pass.
It’s not as bad as some fear, but not as nice as others hope for. You don’t even have to do drugs or fully die to try it out, but it’s a bit tricky to set up in modern life for most people. Lemmy is generally not the demographic for stuff like this though
‘Hello, brother!’ ‘Hello, brother!’ ‘Hows your day been?’ ‘Same as yesterday, just great!’ ‘Great! See you again tomorrow, brother!’ ‘Great! See you again tomorrow, brother!’
…repeat for all eternity
Reminds me of a classic short