Happy Atheist Forum

Christians talk about "going to heaven" as if that offered the final solution to all their problems, if not their god's.

Uh, what if christians in heaven choose to rebel against god? After all, most christians have some kind of belief about how god created satan in heaven, satan looked around and then he told god to stuff it.

Why can't something like that happen again?

What practical difference would it make if it could.  Attributes of a place called heaven like happiness, joy, peace, etc. wouldn't cease to exist because free will is still a variable.  In fact, it is a vital variable in the equation.  Would joy, peace and happiness cease to exist because some chose not to partake or even rejected them.  Hardly a mind blowing question.

But if free will, and therefore sin (it is in our natures to sin, correct?), existed in heaven, what would be the point? Why couldn't we just go straight there from birth, considering it would be just like earth, sans nature?

Whoa. Leaps in the argument.  Lets' take these one at a time.  Free will does not equal sin, correct?  Free will exists in heaven.  I believe that even though we are there we can at any time choose to leave but does that make the leaving then a sin?  To answer your second question.  I tend to believe that there is a reason for mortal existence on an existential level that benefits us in one way or another.

There is also another theory that states that once lucifer fell, heaven was purged and thus changed.  Sin is no longer a reality in heaven as it was before lucifer fell.

If free will exists in heaven, anger exists in heaven, because it's a basic human emotion.  If anger exists, what's to stop people from harming others in heaven?

Quote from: "iplaw"Whoa. Leaps in the argument.  Lets' take these one at a time.  Free will does not equal sin, correct?  Free will exists in heaven.  I believe that even though we are there we can at any time choose to leave but does that make the leaving then a sin?  To answer your second question.  I tend to believe that there is a reason for mortal existence on an existential level that benefits us in one way or another.

There is also another theory that states that once lucifer fell, heaven was purged and thus changed.  Sin is no longer a reality in heaven as it was before lucifer fell.

If free will can exist without sin, why did god let sin exist on earth?

I think it comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of the term sin.  Not all acts can be categorized as "sin."  I can use my free will to chose between two alternatives and neither may be "sin."

You're gonna hate to hear me say this but it goes right back into the argument of what types of worlds allow meaningful interactions between people and societies and between people and a god.  I don't think I wanna go back there again though :wink:

All I know is that Brian Boitono, Chuck Norris, and Ninjas better inhabit heaven or else I don't wanna go.

Wouldn't Heaven get boring after a while? I mean doing the same thing all the time and never being able to really do anything "radical" or extreme like.....having clothing of two fabrics or eating an animal boiled in its mother's milk or yoking an ox and an ass onto the same yoke like a yoking yokester?

Jokes aside, Heaven and Hell seem rather odd extremes. No one really has committed something so heinious they belong in forever torment, I don't even think Hitler would qualify, as evil as he was. Not to mention a lot of decent good people would go to hell for merely not accepting Jesus as their savior. I find this rather odd when so many murderers, rapists, thieves, etc. suddenly find Jesus in Prison and are supposedly saved.

I don't know about ole Chucky.  But what would Brian Boitono do?

Quote from: "iplaw"I don't know about ole Chucky.  But what would Brian Boitono do?

He'd make a plan and follow through, that's what Brian Boitono would do!

When Brian Boitano was in the alps fighting grizzly bears...

...Wait, I'm getting deja vu. Didn't we already start with this song in the Jesus Dress-Up thread?  

Quote from: "iplaw"I think it comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of the term sin.  Not all acts can be categorized as "sin."  I can use my free will to chose between two alternatives and neither may be "sin."

You're gonna hate to hear me say this but it goes right back into the argument of what types of worlds allow meaningful interactions between people and societies and between people and a god.  I don't think I wanna go back there again though :wink:

*Ack* I thought you said you couldn't have a meaningful relationship without freewill and evil existing (in order for us to choose between good and eveil). I'll go back and check, but I'm pretty sure your position was that the world needed "bad" and ambiguity in order for us to have a "meaningful" relationship with god.
But, if heaven can exist with freewill and no "bad", how can we, under that assumption, have a "meaningful" relationship with god in heaven?

Wait a minute.  If you go to heaven you can get kicked out?

God can still threaten you with eternal hell-fire after you've lived a good enough life to get into heaven!!  

I'd rather burn in hell.








With the ninjas.

Quote from: "MommaSquid"With the ninjas.

I'm going to hell?

Oh right... I forgot for a second.

Quote from: "Big Mac"Jokes aside, Heaven and Hell seem rather odd extremes. No one really has committed something so heinious they belong in forever torment, I don't even think Hitler would qualify, as evil as he was. Not to mention a lot of decent good people would go to hell for merely not accepting Jesus as their savior. I find this rather odd when so many murderers, rapists, thieves, etc. suddenly find Jesus in Prison and are supposedly saved.

I think that they are odd extremes because they are simply concepts, not reality. Many words and their connotations are determined by relationships with other words. For example, love and indifference, dark and light, good and evil, curved and straight. Opposites are the most simplistic relationship, and it is obviously not the only one, because many words don't have opposites, like colors (except black and white). But you still only know what blue is in relationship to the other colors. Without the other color concepts in your mind, you could never discern blue from red.
Anyway, my point is that in order to understand our surroundings, human create these relationships, forcing things that they perceive toward one concept or the other. Heaven and Hell are the same. When humans dreamed up the idea of an afterlife, they eventually assumed that "good" people and "bad" people couldn't go to the same place. They had to be seperated. The opposite relationship is the only logical one that could be used to describe these two poles. In real life, however, things are rarely black and white; most things do not fit within an opposites only relationship. There are rarely all-good or all-bad people, but the only afterlife the human mind can (or could) grasp is one of two opposite places. We are, as I mentioned earlier in another post, limited by our language. Heaven and Hell are a good example of those limitations.

QuoteIf you go to heaven you can get kicked out?

Who said that?

I think she's referring to Court's preceding post.

QuoteIf you go to heaven you can get kicked out?

Who said that?

Court:
I think that depends on whether you consider choosing to not live in heaven as a sin as opposed to mortal unbelief.  Unbelief is certainly a sin, but a conscious choice to deny an eternity in heaven if you were there wouldn't be would it?

I think that the distinction becomes moot once you enter heaven.   There is no reason to reject God out of disbelief anymore and it purely becomes a free will choice on your part after that.  Of course this whole discussion is alleviated if heaven is fundamentally a different place than it was before lucifer sinned.

Quote from: "Aullios"If free will exists in heaven, anger exists in heaven, because it's a basic human emotion.  If anger exists, what's to stop people from harming others in heaven?

Quote from: "Court"But, if heaven can exist with freewill and no "bad", how can we, under that assumption, have a "meaningful" relationship with god in heaven?

Quote from: "MommaSquid"Wait a minute.  If you go to heaven you can get kicked out?

God can still threaten you with eternal hell-fire after you've lived a good enough life to get into heaven!!  

Maybe I got carried away, but I don’t think so.  


Anyway, this is all hypothetical.  I don’t believe heaven and hell exist anywhere but right here, right now.

Quote from: "iplaw"

QuoteIf you go to heaven you can get kicked out?

Who said that?

Court:
I think that depends on whether you consider choosing to not live in heaven as a sin as opposed to mortal unbelief.  Unbelief is certainly a sin, but a conscious choice to deny an eternity in heaven if you were there wouldn't be would it?

I don't know. It's not mentioned in the bible, which is the source of the idea of "sin." I personally don't think that following my rationality (which, if you accept that god exists, he gave me) to what seems to me the only logical conclusion (God does not exist) is a bad thing.

This is the problem I have always had with christianity, even when I was a Jesus-loving bible-thumper: It's too black and white. There's a right way, a wrong way, and nothing in between. There's Heaven, the all-good, all-wonderful, and there's Hell, the all-bad, all-horrible. There's goodness/purity and there's sin. Everything is forced into these opposite poles and it just doesn't make sense.
In real life, everything is a gray area.

Quote from: "Court"This is the problem I have always had with christianity, even when I was a Jesus-loving bible-thumper: It's too black and white. There's a right way, a wrong way, and nothing in between. There's Heaven, the all-good, all-wonderful, and there's Hell, the all-bad, all-horrible. There's goodness/purity and there's sin. Everything is forced into these opposite poles and it just doesn't make sense.
In real life, everything is a gray area.

This reminds me of the scene in the movie Donnie Darko where Donnie is explaining to the teacher that you can't lump all human emotions into the two categories "Love" and "Fear". I highly recommend that movie by the way, if anyone's looking for something really interesting to watch.

Donnie Darko... good movie, but I warn you, it's pretty fucked up

Court.

I don't see christianity this way at all.  There are a few non-negotiables black and whites, but for the most part I think life is lived in the gray and I am okay with that.  Like I said not everything is a "sin" or "holy," as if you can divide life into categories like that.  Most of life is lived in the gray but there are spiritual ways of living in the gray so as not to destroy our lives.

iplaw,

You have to admit though that Christianity (religion in general, really) still seeks to thin out the gradient between black and white. It is kind of a side affect of being based on supposed absolute morals from God without any wiggle room.

There's a lot more grey area subscribing to moral relativism.

Sure I agree, but I think that any gray area I give up is in response to a protective mandate to abstain from harmful behavior.  Truth by nature is exclusive so some issues remain black and white simply because they are and if you don't believe me just look at the law of non-contradiction and try to prove it false.

I always think of this passage from G.K. Chesterton when I hear the term "moral relativism.":

But the new rebel is a Sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it.

Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself.

A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts.

In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything

Even though I disagree with the author's message, I have to admit that it is a great read. Thanks for posting that, iplaw.

Wait, did I just prove what the author was pointing out with that? ^

If you are interested in the rest of the book here it is.  Chesterton is one of my favorite authors.

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.pdf (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.pdf)

Quote from: "MommaSquid"Wait a minute.  If you go to heaven you can get kicked out?

Why can't god kick you out? If god created satan with the foreknowledge that satan would rebel, he could just as easily let people into heaven with the foreknowledge that some of them will rebel as well.

Quote from: "iplaw"In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything[/i]

I've noticed that leftists do this a lot. Just off the top of my head:

1. We can't hold individuals accountable for their actions, because they behave the way they do in response to social and political circumstances. But we have to put, say, Augusto Pinochet on trial as an individual for his crimes against Chilean leftists.

2. Recreational drug use liberates the individual from the constraints of bourgeois morality. But a secret government conspiracy brought crack cocaine into the black underclass to oppress them.

3. We have to do something to raise the living standards of all the people on the planet who live off of the equivalent of a dollar a day. But we should celebrate and follow their example for living lightly upon the earth.

I suppose a conservative equivalent would sound like the following: My gas-guzzling SUV can't possibly hurt the environment -- but your stash of pot threatens the very fabric of society.

I think you missed the point.

This  poses the problem of Heaven: if we have free will but can do no wrong in Heaven, why not here without rationalizations and special pleading? If God would still kick one out because of rebelion, the difference is immortality.Why not here without all the pointless suffering? John Hick feels there could be heavenly analogues to free will in Heaven, so why not here?
 And show there is a soul in the   first place!

Now I see why others and, now myself, find Chesterton such a shallow thinker!  He makes such a straw man about skepticism.
     Now Barton F.Porter notes in "Philosophy...," ...[W]e may need partly overcast days to appreciate  brilliantly sunny ones, but we do not require  lightining storms  or torrential rains  that  precipitate floods. More precisely, contrasts can occur between good, better , and best; there is no necessity for crossing the line into  gradations of bad. The natural evils that occur, therefore, are hardly needed to accomplish the end of appreciation and are , in fact superfluous and unjustified."
    He also notes that theists claim we need good and evil to make choices in order to use free will, but that is "somethig of a straw  man....Not only are natural evils compounded beyond  what is required to ensure the existence of options, but in most cases natural evils do not permit any choices to be made." And he further notes that the soul- making argument is null ,because "most find that it undermines their character... A final consideration is that many great men in history seem to have developed outstanding characters without having endured great suffering, which implies that experiencing  natural evil is not a necessary condition for building character."