Heaven, Earth, and Death

Forums: Heaven, Earth, Death, Hell, Existence
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So, I recently had this thought about death and what heaven and hell really are. My current understandings/beliefs of Heaven and Hell are as follows:

Heaven: a place with no suffering, sickness or death etc. Heaven is above in the sky.

Hell: place of suffering, death, and bad things. Hell is below heaven. I also believe hell is to be a corrective place.

Given these, descriptions, I now come to believe that earth is hell. Earth is full of suffering and everything bad. People die every day, people starve, people are sick, people are forced to do things they don't want to do. It Sounds a lot like hell to me. While you're not surrounded by fire, the fire might as well be a metaphor for life on earth. Even for the rich, who have everything, they must be affected by all the negatives in the world, they still feel sad, feel pain, and etc; the only difference is that their wealth makes it a little more bearable.

So, that leads me to my next thought. What if death is just gods way of taking you out of hell (earth) so that you can live in heaven and the only reason you're on earth is to learn a lesson or teach a lesson? This kind of answers the atheist questions of why there is pain and suffering. People suffer so that other people can learn from them. Once their job is done teaching/learning, they pass on to the next dimension (heaven).

What if every horrible thing that happens and exists on earth is done only to teach a lesson? That you only pass on to next stage, once you've learned your lesson or that someone learned from your misfortune?
For example, you see someone dying, and you go to help them. You learn compassion for your fellow person. That person passes on.

I think this thinking answers a lot of questions about existence of hate, sickness and other negative things on earth.

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@crayon851,

Quote:

the only reason you're on earth is to learn a lesson or teach a lesson

Quote:

I think this thinking answers a lot of questions about existence of hate, sickness and other negative things on earth.

What you call "answering questions" others might call "egocentric simplistic rationalization". What, for example do you suggest a disabled or abused child "learns" from his often short painful life on earth ?

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@fresco,

You tell me. What has society learned about dealing with disabled and abused children.

people taking care of the abused child learn compassion. The child is a vehicle for a lesson and can also learn to cope with the disability. Same goes for the abuse. There's a generally a lesson to be learned in almost everything. You just have to look for it.

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@crayon851,

You have avoided the question. What does THE CHILD learn from his suffering ?
If the answer is nothing, then it is futile to advocate "learning" as a general principle of "life's purpose" irrespective of your own vested interest in such a principle to rationalize you own existence. If a hypothetical "divine entity" actually made use of the suffering of a child as "a vehicle", then that entity would be the embodiment of what we call "evil".

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You views of heaven and hell are somewhat naïve and based on ancient tratition. Many, many cultures have seen heaven as the residence of the gods, and far away off in the sky. Julian Jaynes claims that this is because, in his putative era of the bicameral mind, people hallucinated their gods walking beside them on the earth. However, when the two hemispheres of the brain began to communicate, once again according to Jaynes, then the gods retreated to their home in the sky.

You vision of hell is even easier to identify. It actually is not a christian concept. In the earliest, most primitive cosmogony of the Greeks, or proto-Greeks, there were three levels in the cosmos--heaven, originally the abode of Uranus, the first Titan and the original primordial force, or deity, also known as the sky. Below that was chaos, for which the primordial deity was Gaia--identified as the earth. (That's more or less the story from Hesiod--the early mythology of the Greeks appears to be a mish-mash, not unlike the so-called bible, in which many traditions are included, even though they cannot necessarily be reconciled.) Below that, was the place of punishment and torment, which was called Tartarus--in some version, Tartarus was also a primordial force or deity, but he disappears without explanation.

Let's just assume that you're making progress here. Welcome to the Bronze Age!

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@fresco,

@fresco Let me first state that I'm not religious and am not any of the major religions. I'm giving my opinion on, if there is a deity, why there is so much "injustice" in the world.

I don't have answers to a lesson learned by that child. I can only rationalize that, if there is a god, the child must be serving a purpose. For example, in christianity, jesus died for humans sins. What happened to him in the bible was definitely unjust, but god let it happen right? And there was an underlying reason. In the same sense, a child on earth may be only a physical form of a deity sent to teach a lesson to someone else. Or IF souls do exist, and "free will" is a creation of god, maybe the soul made the choice to go through that life to teach a lesson. Maybe they're all angels. Who knows. I have no answers to that and no one does. I can only offer an alternative viewpoint.

I'm under the impression you don't believe in some for of deity. If that's the case, I'm probably not going to sway you either way and you'll likely be closed off from these views.

In terms of "evil", its what society views as evil and that exists on a spectrum. For example, is it evil to test animals for the benefit of humans? By your definition, yes. Does that stop you from using things that are derivatives of these exploits? probably not. Using your rationality, can I then classify you as an "evil" person? yes. Kind of like that moral complex where you kill someone you know to save many people or you save one person and kill many.

@setana
Not sure whether you're being sarcastic or not. but thanks for the history lesson.

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@crayon851,

You are correct that I am an atheist, but I also hold the view that trying to "make sense of life" is a futile occupation, That, and "religion" are part of the price we pay for being cognate animals with sense of time and "fate". I believe that ethical and moral issues are matters of relative social expediency which we acquire through socialization and group language habits. The "self" is essentially a social entity and all thoughts (which are couched in group language) about self integrity and self worth revolve around rosolving the issue of "living with oneself", i.e. resolving the inconsistencies we recognize in "self".

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@fresco,

@fresco i don't necessarily disagree with what you are saying. I was just giving a possible answer to the atheist questions that revolve around all the "bad" that exists in the world.

whats your reason for not believing in a higher being? how do you explain instances of ghosts and how people came up with the after life? how do you explain why chimps have not developed a religion or language like ours? they have certainly existed as long as we have.

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@crayon851,

No reason is required NOT to believe. The onus on "reason" lies with the believer.
Chimps are merely not neurologically or vocally equipped to handle what we called "verbal thought". To repeat, it seems obvious that "religion" is a psychological palliative which insulates humans from fear of events over which they have no control, and "events", "control" and "time" are all human intellectual constructs predicated on verbal thought (aka semantic constructs). They only have "reality" for humans.

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@fresco,

why haven't chimps evolved the same way as humans?

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@crayon851,

I repeat

Quote:

Chimps are merely not neurologically or vocally equipped to handle what we called "verbal thought".

Unless you are "believer" in a supernatural agent, it is not thought that evolution is"goal directed". It is a matter of chance mutations
If you like, they (or their like) DID evolve. WE are the result of a chance mutation of some ancestor of chimps and their relations, some say from the baby (hairless) stage.

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@crayon851,

If you live by virtue hell either needs an undertaker, who kills the murders, or a god needs to burry all the sinners in his back yard and be the undertaker. The moral of the story is sinners get no good things. They are not allowed to exist, they are not allowed to feel, even pain, they can't see think speak, they have no emotions, the undertaker takes it all alway from them. I personally believe the accuser satan is the undertaker and he wants nothing from God.

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If you believe in hell know it takes fallen angels for it to come to life. Life only through angels. For example people would be living in Hell, which is a angel. People would be there, they would feel pain but feel none the less another virtue. They would have emotions like hate and rage even though they are bad they are still emotions so its like angel and demon coinhabitating.

Hell needs to not exist. The undertaker I was talking about doesnt exist. God does the job the keeps them all out as non existent.

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@crayon851,

The meaning of the word 'hell' might shed some light.
It is the anglicization of the Hebrew 'sheol', meaning only 'grave'

When the King James Bible was translated, if you had told someone to go to hell, he would likely have gone to his root cellar. The similarity between the words 'hell' and 'hole' is no coincidence.

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@neologist,

Hell is the agent of hatred. We need it not. I call it tempt where love lives and hate is in the grave with hell stupidity and nothing all naturally done. If hell exist that means people are suffering in THIS WORLD a virtue God follows.

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@crayon851,

crayon851 wrote:

So, that leads me to my next thought. What if death is just gods way of taking you out of hell (earth) so that you can live in heaven and the only reason you're on earth is to learn a lesson or teach a lesson? This kind of answers the atheist questions of why there is pain and suffering. People suffer so that other people can learn from them. Once their job is done teaching/learning, they pass on to the next dimension (heaven).

Much of our speculation about heaven and hell comes from the Judeo Christian writngs. So perhaps we should return there for a moment: God told Adam in Genesis 2:17 that the consequence of eating the fruit would be death. Note that God's words before that promised indefinite life. So, would you not think that any additional punishment or reward would have been explained at that time?

Adam and Eve ate and died. Solomon explains in Ecclesiastes 9:5,6 that the dead are unconscious. All faithful Hebrews had to hope for was the promise that God would resurrect faithful ones and those who had not known him. The concept of heaven (for a few) was inttroduced by Jesus. But the majority of mankind continues to hold the hope of life on earth according to God's stated purpose to Adam and Eve as restated in Revelation 21: 3,4.

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Heaven, Earth, and Death

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