What is heaven like?

I think that scene from the movie Gladiator is a beautiful one. It's a gloriously sunny day, and Max looks out over a golden wheat field flowing in the breeze and sees his wife and child. He joins them.

For very many people, life beyond the grave is an impossibility. There is no scientific proof for it they say and so why bother? The skeptical part of me asks the same thing. But if there is no scientific proof of life after death, is there any circumstantial or otherwise evidence for it? 

Steven(YouTube) talks about his near death experience in 1965. Apparently NDE's have certain things in common, and one of them is experiencing standing near a stream or river and seeing loved ones. And there is some reference point beyond which there is no return to an earthly physical existence.

The coffee klatch guys down at Tim Horton's must think you're a genus. 

Actually, the whole notion of heaven as something unattainable here, and which is just a payoff after you die for which you must suffer and sacrifice here, is the ultimate swindle of religion.

Who said anything about scientific proof, Fidel? There is no scientific proof about any afterlife.

 I said I seriously doubt it. That is a personal opinion. And more importantly as I said in my last (cross-posted with you) comment. It doesn't matter whether heaven exists or not, because really its only purpose has been as a carrot to get people to follow organized religion.

You want heaven? Make it right here and now - unless you think the banks won't let you.

(edit)

And I am quite serious about the thread topic. As I said, I think heaven and and hell are states of mind.

It doesn't matter. It is all just a reflection of what we experience here and now, and it does not matter if it exists.

The point is, people who see heaven as a big retirement party and something unattainable in this life are just fooling themselves, and missing out on something important in life, IMO.

 (edit)

I think most of us have an understanding of perfect happiness, love and peace, at least in flashes, and that is heaven.

I sometimes wonder what I will come back as in my next life.  I spend as much time on contemplation of heaven or hell as I do in contemplating the nature of the divinity of a man supposedly born a couple of millennia ago.  Which is to say I never think about dumb ideas like those.

You cannot prove or disprove the existence of god or an afterlife.  I took a religious compass type test on line once and discovered my idea of god and the afterlife most closely resembles a minor buddhist sect.  They don't believe in heaven either.

Fidel wrote:

Okay we get that already. But try following absentia's suggestion for atheists in line one of post 1. Use your imagination. You do have one?

I don't need to use my imagination. When I am with my family; when I work in my garden; when I get glimpses of how incredible the wheel of life is, how the universe functions, and some of the selfless acts that people have done, that is heaven.

absentia wrote:

 I think most North Americans have some visual image of a heaven, some notion of how it's organized, who is allowed in, and even of what to expect and how to behave.

I think any that do are dreaming in Technicolor.  But then I know that most of the ones who dream of going to heaven when they meet me are convinced I will go to hell. But then they are only dreaming and it seems like fun to them.

Yup. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Or were we expecting cream cheese commercials?

If we are talking about heaven as a real thing, it has nothing to do with escapism, but rather finding where your home really is and how you really want to live.

Good topic, by the way. Thanks.

Talk about extremes?:)

[b]Materialism:[/b]

Quote:

[i]Basically, the view that everything is made of matter. But what is matter? Probably the most innocent and cheerful acceptance of it comes right at the start of materialism with Democratius of Abdera (in Northern Greece) in the fifth century B.C., for whom the world consisted entirely of 'atoms', tiny, absolutely hard, impenetrable, incompressible, indivisible and unalterable bits of 'stuff', which had shape and size, but no other properties, and scurried about in the void, forming the world as we know it by jostling each other and either rebounding (despite being incompressible) or getting entangled with each other because of their shapes. They and the void alone are real, the colours, flavours and temperatures that surround us being merely subjective. This model has lasted, with various modifications and sophistications right down to modern times, though the notion of solidity was causing qualms at least as early as Locke. But, in the last century, all has been thrown into confusion by Einstein's famous, E=mc2 and also by general relativity. Mass, the sophisticated notion that has replaced crude matter, is interchangeable in certain circumstances with energy, and in any case is only a sort of distortion of the space in which it was supposed to be floating. Photons and neutrons have little or no mass, while particles pop out of the void, destroy each other and pop back in again.[/i]'The Oxford Companion To Philosophy', edited by Ted Honderich. Oxford University Press, 1995

The point is I think, is in how we can create "our own despair" in our observation of the subjectiveness of our own Gravity? This then comes as a weighted part of our being in measure and moving in the world? What if there was a way to feel much lighter and weighing of these subjective things?

I'd like to believe in an afterlife, but I suspect that when we die, that's it.  Maybe there's a bit of a light show put on by our dying brains, but heaven as a reward for earthly suffering doesn't enter into my concept of the universe.

Earthly heaven is something else entirely.  Sitting in my yard reading a good book, while the cat plays with butterflies in the garden.  I remember a time when my most vigorous outdoor activity was walking to the food bank and not even contemplating having a yard, never mind the time to relax and enjoy a good book in it.  It's that difficult time in life that makes the simple things so sweet - that's heaven.  Pedestrian and bourgeois as it is, I can think of nothing better.

Winstanley's comment that priests had it both ways is true. Tibetan monks, for example, lived off the sweat and toil of peasants for centuries without lifting a finger themselves. And for centuries before Winstanley and the diggers, though, the abbeys, monasteries and friaries served to provide England's first social services to the poor. Scholars today mourn the loss of hundreds or thousands of books of antiquity with the sacking and looting that went on. But it started as a campaign by Protestants loathing Catholicism and aimed their anti-clerical rhetoric at mostly literate Englishmen who would benefit personally by the land grabs and looting of historical buildings and vast lands owned by the Church then. Much of the stone of the abbeys and priories went to building mansions for rich lords and dukes. Seemingly overnight dry stone walls and hedges were erected to cordone off the land from use by common rabble. Much hunger and suffering among English peasants was the result.

Quote:

If the heart was free from the impurities of sin, and therefore lighter than the feather, then the dead person could enter the eternal afterlife.

See that's the thing, no matter what you choose to believe, it is what you believe that sets the reality for you. That's just the way it is.

What is "your sin" and what is "your truth" and how are you living according to the things you weight in your own life according to that truth? Your conscience weights many things and is a really deep part of the soul?:) At night, you listen to it. At night, it creates realities for you? At night, you are a good predictor? You should listen:)

Spectrum wrote:

See that's the thing, no matter what you choose to believe, it is what you believe that sets the reality for you. That's just the way it is.

I "got" your post about materialism at #20 btw. I realize some people think of reality in the old scientific way. Newtonian atomic theory had to be scrapped sometime after turn of the last century. 

I think there are many possibilities for reality in the scientific sense. Apparently M-theory says there are 10^500 different universes, each with its own set of laws for the way things are. Could there be a god or god-like beings residing in one of them? Are we able to experience some of these parallel worlds by our dream states, imaginations, creativity and even on psychic levels as Fritjof Capra suggests? Apparently the possibilities are more than we knew. Atheists say no, but mathematicians and leading edge theoretical physicists say yes, it is possible and more probable than at any time since the overthrow of Newtonian atomic theory.

al-Qa'bong wrote:

Worms crawling through my eyesockets.

Ha!  That is almost precisely what I was thinking!

I have read some stuff on bio-centrism and I think the model they are working within is extremely interesting.  I believe that matter and energy are not separate.  What does animate all animals and life forms?  Does the energy that is a part of my whole exist after this body dies?  I think it is obvious that in a physical sense it does.  Heaven myths seem to me to all be attempts to capture that reality.  Although we die our bodies both as mass and energy get recycled in new forms. 

Quote:

In modern everyday life, however, we’ve come to regard space as sort of a vast container that has no walls. In it, we cognize separate objects that were first learned and identified. These patterns are blocked out by the thinking mind within boundaries of color, shape or utility. Human language and ideation alone decide where the boundaries of one object end and another begins.

Multiple illusions and processes routinely impart a false view of space. Shall we count the ways? 1. Empty space is in fact not empty. 2. Distances between objects can and do mutate depending on a multitude of conditions like gravity and speed, so that no bedrock distance exists anywhere, between anything and anything else. 3. Quantum theory casts serious doubt about whether even distant individual items are truly separated at all, and 4. We “see” separations between objects only because we have been conditioned and trained, through language and convention, to draw boundaries.

Now, space and time illusions are certainly harmless. A problem only arises because, by treating space as something physical, existing in itself, science imparts a completely wrong starting point for investigations into the nature of reality. In reality there can be no break between the observer and the observed.  If the two are split, the reality is gone.  Space, like time, is not an object or a thing.  Space and time are forms of our animal sense perception. We carry them around with us like turtles with shells.  Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

Where do we go from here? 

Biocentrism offers a springboard to make sense of aspects of biological and physical science which are currently insensible. Natural areas of biocentric research include the realm of brain-architecture, neuroscience, and the nature of consciousness itself.  Another is the ongoing research into artificial intelligence. Though still in its infancy, few doubt that this century, in which computer power and capabilities keep expanding geometrically, will eventually bring researchers to confront the problem in a serious way. A “thinking device” will need the same kind of algorithms for employing time and developing a sense of space that we enjoy.

Finally, one must consider the endless ongoing attempts at creating “grand unified theories.” Currently such efforts in physics have typically stretched for decades without much success. Incorporating the living universe — and allowing the observer into the equation as the late John Wheeler insists is necessary — will at minimum produce a fascinating amalgam of the living and non-living in a way that should make everything work better. It should provide stronger bases for solving some of the problems associated with quantum physics and the Big Bang. Accepting space and time as forms of animal sense perception (as biologic), rather than as external physical objects, offers a new way of understanding everything from the microworld (for instance, the reason for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the two-hole experiment) to the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31393080/ns/technology_and_science-science/t...

absentia wrote:

Spectrum wrote:

 It also present the opportunity for understanding a model of approach that is as old as time itself in terms of the densities of matter perspectives as a overarching description in the expression of the geometrical proponents of the Pyramid itself.

The earth discipleship based on the square and the direction viewed from above(triangle and arch), as to perfection within the body itself?

An ascent with mind as to what can transpire in reaching toward the inductive/deductive approach as to what can enter mind when raised from the lower centers of our evolution,  to avenues of mind with body.  Not just from reaction of body alone. This is an emotive correlation with overcoming this primitive based expressions,  as ever the struggle toward such perfection. No one is perfect, but of awareness about choice, then such evolution is of a choice recognized as being retained in our quest toward truth and understanding, allocates our place in the reality of our expressions?

Aside from "Huh?" in generaL, i have a question in particular:

"a model of approach that is as old as time itself"

Who was approaching and modeling at the beginning of time? Itself?

Omega Point   is a term coined by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) to describe a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe appears to be evolving.

David Deutsch(atheist) has done a lot of work with the Church-Turing thesis and has suggested that universal quantum computers exist at the end of space-time in every universe and operated/controlled by "sentient beings". Deutsch suggests that information, as opposed to raw data, is part of an ever evolving complex and increasingly conscious universe(s).

Oh believe me when I say that I only vaguely understand what they are talking about in general. They are only theories for now, but the math seems to be pointing them in the direction of Hugh Everett's multiple worlds theory. Deutsch and Greene and Kaku and Witten etc are people at the leading edge of theoretical physics. This string theory stuff used to be considered only at the fringes of theoretical physics back in the 1970s. Today it's mainstream. Standard model theorist Larry Krauss is one of string theory's biggest critics. He wrote recently, though, that it seems as if metaphysics is on the verge of becoming science WRT new discoveries at CERN and Hubble etc.

absentia wrote:

Heaven doesn't have a ruling class. No god(s), no seraphim or cherubim or saints. Pure, sweet anarchy. 

I don't know about that.  The last time there was a hint of revolt, we ended up with expulsions, eternal hell, and a talking snake that fucked us over royally.  The literature suggests somebody's in charge of something.

Fidel wrote:

[i]Apparently M-theory says there are 10^500 different universes, each with its own set of laws for the way things are. Could there be a god or god-like beings residing in one of them?[/i]

The probability outcome is a deviation from what was perfect(asymmetrical). You can call it heaven if you like too?:) In a Platonist kind of view. It is speaking to an outcome situated in the valley from such an expression, as to what can reside in that valley. Think of a pencil pointed standing on end and asking which way it will fall. It is a example of the geometrical demonstration of "degrees of freedom" as to the model of a calabi yau in expression. Which one?

Lard Tunderin Jeezus wrote:

Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens

Cool music. However, Michio Kaku(YouTube) says it's a foregone conclusion that we are not alone in the heavens. It would be supremely arrogant to believe that we are the most significant beings in the whole universe, or even just the Milky Way. Unfortunately even some of us lefties are not immune to thinking in terms of dominant culture and Euro-centrism on a more subtle level.

 Earth-centric thinking will one day give way to the realization that our own galaxy is teeming with life. Evolutionary theory now says that life proliferates in environments that were previously thought to be impossible for life. Sightings of visitors to the new world have been occurring for a long time. Like the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the new world, people all over the world have reported sightings of the newcomers' mainsails approaching on the horizon. 

Biologists visit CERN for help with the origins of life.

And, the evidence that we are being observed by extraterrestrial intelligence is everywhere all around us. There are photographs of UFOs which pre-date Adobe's line of computer based photo and video editing software. 

The problem today is not that people aren't willing to blow the whistle on every kind of written and unwritten government-corporate policy for secrecy and non-accountability to the public whom they serve - the problem is actually that of deep-seated corruption and lack of transparency and accountability in government and their corporate owners. The problem is a lack of democracy in countries professing to be the torch-bearers of democracy. The struggle for democracy and truth continues.

If I'm not mistaken, Gammy and Gampy will be there, and so will Rusty, who I haven't seen since he went to live with that nice farmer.  We'll walk on clouds and it's always summer, and everything smells like cookies.