What Is Heaven Like?

there may have been a person by that name, who was a great leader of the 'insurgancy' (people wanting their country back) against the roman occupation, who, for the last three years of his life, before he was caught and exicuted, taught and preached love and peace. was he channeling god/a god, those last three years of his life? does/did god/a god, even do that? i really don't think we can ever know that part of it. did he have a cadre of 13 close friends he associated with those last three years, four of whom were literate. quite possibly yes. does the possibility of his existence prove or disprove anything? not really.

as for returning from the dead, in a sense he was the 23rd return from the dead, at thousand year intervals, of who and what 'adam' actually was. and yes, in the two thousand years since then, there HAVE been a couple more (mohammid and baha'u'llah), and in another thousand we can expect another one. people have always expected the same crazy nonsense of them as they do now, and they've always been born, lived and died as more or less ordinary people though.

some great hurking wonder is not going to come floating down out of the clouds, and change the way the universe works.
(if it were going to, why would it choose our earth, out of all the universe, as the place to do so?)
we might end up destroying ourselves, by how we're treating our environment in less then a hundred years though.

christianity, though significant, is less so then the invention of agriculture and the atomic bomb, less so also, then the use of combustion to propel transportation and generate electrical energy. of those, only agriculture and electricity (but NOT the use of combustion to generate it) are positive. (mechanical transportation is also a positive, but not in the form of the automobile, nor again being propelled by combustion, as nearly all of it today is)

 

I'm sorry, what was that about the 23rd adam? It sounds like you are saying that of course jesus was not magical, nor would it prove anything if he were, nor will there be any kind of judgement day . . . and then you talk about 23 people returning from the dead at thousand year intervals.

 

Pain is so much a part of human psychology. I'm not sure what kinds of discussions you could have with people if there were no such thing as pain. What is "good" if there is nothing to juxtapose it?

 

heaven

 

humans do seem to have a perverted obsession with their own pain. i won't buy that its natural though. to be obsessed with it i mean.

i could certainly get by just fine without it though, if i didn't have to have a physical body for it to protect me from injuring.

conversation is not the end all and be all of my existence. i'm quite content to experience the non-human without having to attempt to express it.

 

themnax...I would think that heaven would be free of any kind of pain.

 

in the aligorical sense that it was intended yes. each of those 18 names in numbers, preceeded by adam and proceed by noah and abraham, making moses number 22.

what each were, was the begininnig of the span of time of a religious 'revelation' or dispensation. what would it mean if 18 goofballs about whom we are told almost nothing were to live for a thousand years all at the same time? just about nothing. what makes sense is taking them as thousand year intervals on end, as it puts adam back in uldivoi with lucy, which corrisponds with what we are able to know.

you speak of "judgement" as if our earth were somehow special to the rest of the universe, which makes no sense.

the only "judgement" is survival of humanity's near SELF destruction. which neither the most brutal, nor the most gentle, can entirely expect to. nor anyone for that matter, without a great deal of luck.

not magical? yes that is absolutely correctly what i am saying. the real magic, if you want to talk about that, is that we feed what we focus on.

 

yes, precisely, because it would also be free of the physical, which requires pain for its own self preservation.

yet there could be an experiential sense of the physical, as in forest and mountains, not physical of course, but like cg 3d, and changable in the same way.

at any rate, if there were only communication, that would be painful and hell to me.

 

my weed just isnt strong enough for this shit.

 

so, we die....and our energy floats around in all of the dimensions as there is no longer any mass to hold it back and grounded in this dimension....and we visit other dimensions and pick another one for anew home...how is that? We can always come back to this one, if that is what we choose, too....

Hey, just as good as any theory....

and I am not smoking any weed......lol

 

I fear we may have different conceptions of the word "sense" on what do you base this radical reinterpretation of scripture? If scripture is false about its central and most important aspects, surely we should not bother with its even more outlandish and fringe aspects (much less with an evil and backwards book like Numbers)

 

but there is infinity in numbers, right?.....so that could be applied to us....if we are to use mathematics.....

 

so why are you doing so?

i believe i explained my basis precisely within what i said.

where is your basis for what you are labeling evil?

how is a chronicle of the sequence of earlier revelations, any more "evil and backwards", then the "epistles" (correspondence) of the utterly misanthropic so called "saint" paul?

the only thing i call evil is to cause harm we can avoid causing.
i call aggressiveness evil because that is what it does. because there is no known force, more harmful or destructive in all of existence.

believe what you like to believe.

i believe what we leave behind when we die, has no more to do with our true self, spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it,
then what we leave behind when we go to the bathroom.

i do believe there are things we know nothing about, and that among them may be things which are neither physical nor imaginary.

my beliefs are not based on your 'scriptures'. i have beliefs ABOUT your 'scriptures'. you asked so i shared them.

where 'western' christianity went astray, was around the year 425, when it gave precidence over the supposed teachings of christ, to the corispondance of a roman magistrate by the name of saul of tarsus. who wasn't even born yet before the author of revelations was in the ground. if you are familiar with the text of that scroll you will perhaps understand the significance of this. and why the previous mycean council had labeled them the pauline herresy.

 

I think the whole thing, from start to finish, is bollocks. That is a summation of my beliefs of and about scripture.

 

I don't know -- I don't think there is such a thing as pleasure with no pain to juxtapose it. You would have to throw so many things away. Just think, you'd never get to snuggle next to a warm fire, because you'd never get cold in the first place. On the flipside, you'd never get a cold refreshing drink during the summer, because you'd never get too hot. Actually, there'd be virtually no reason at all to move from one location, doing one thing for eternity, because there would be nothing wrong to cause you to do so. Nothing has any flaws which can cause pain whatsoever, yet there is no such thing as boredom.

Conversation may not be everything, but to me interaction with other beings is probably the greatest joy of existence. I don't like this idea of Heaven where I'm just this anencephalous sponge soaking up radiance for eternity. Give me some personalities, please.

 

but what if scripture, any scripture, had bugger all to do with it?

 

To do with what? Religion?

 

My guess is he ment heaven.

The book of Numbers on itself is not evil. It is just a book for pete's sake. Your associations of how you heard (or maybe even seen) other people interprete and live by it make it evil (for you). That also doesn't make those people evil. Maybe their deeds (I'd rather use the word 'bad' then though). Thought I'd just point out the obvious again

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C10k2c2h44c

 

An inspiring conversion story, like so many I've heard. As a generalization, I wonder if it might be said that the leading cause of atheism is religion. This young man (he sounds young) fits the pattern to a tee. The guy grew up in Appalachia, in a culturally deprived environment. He was raised by Young Earth Creationists in a rigid fundamentalist tradition that taught him members of other Christian denominations were all going to hell. He assumed (incorrectly) that those other religions were teaching their members the same thing. Being naturally curious, he started asking questions: first about Santa, later about other things. And he was given unsatisfactory answers which he characterized as "Magic". Then he began to acquire information that seemed to contradict what he was told or picked up from the Bible. Why weren't dinosaurs mentioned in the Bible (since of course the Bible is a book about geology and natural history)? And why does the Bible "say" the earth is 6,000 years old (actually the Bible doesn't "say" that). And why is religion geographical, since different religions seem to predominate in different parts of the world? And isn't the Old Testament God a "prick"? And isn't Jesus more of a prick for coming up with hell, which isn't in the Old Testament? (We know He did that because Matthew tells us so). Our hero was already and "atheist" about Zeus, Shiva, etc., so (stealing an idea from Richard Dawkins) he just dropped one more God. (That concept of "atheism" is, of course, absurd, since if a person believes in any god at all (s)he wasn't an atheist, but it makes a good punch line). And he concludes with a testimonial about what an upstanding person he is--living a moral and prosperous life and giving to charity.

But we're supposed to be rational, skeptical people, right? Should we then swallow what is obviously a simplistic piece of propaganda? First of all, Young Earth Creationists aren't representative of "religion", just an "American Gothic" version of it. Mr. Writer would like to present this as typical of Christianity, just as he would like to present radical Islamism as typical of Muslims. Why? The answer is obvious. Because they are so obviously wrong and so easily discredited. Don't get me wrong. I know lots of atheists who got there from mind crippling churches. If we changed the scenario a bit, though, and had him growing up in an Episcopalian, Disciples of Christ, or Methodist environment, a lot of his early experiences would have been quite different. He'd be exposed early on to a scientific view of creation and geology. If he heard about Hell at all, I'm sure it would have been sugar coated, and wouldn't have been presented as a main point of God's plan. So the video isn't so much about "relgion" and "atheism" as it is about certain pathological forms of religion.

I could tell you another story about a young man attending a secular university where he was taught that the male has a biological imperative to spread his genes as widely as possible, that the universe is ultimately meaningless, and that everything is relative, especially morals. The workplace is a jungle in which the guy in the next cubicle is an enemy because he wants the promotion the young man does. The meaning of life, presented on television is to acquire all the consumer goods and status symbols possible so that the consumer can be accepted by his peers and neighbors. Meaning consists of a house in the suburb, a blonde trophy wife, good schools for the kids, and enough status symbols to keep up with the neighbors, if not surpass them.



And he comes back home at five-thirty,
And he's oh, so good,
And he's oh, so fine,
And he's oh, so healthy,
In his body and his mind.
He's a well respected man about town,
Doing the best things so conservatively.
Gets the same train every time.
'Cause his world is built 'round punctuality,
It never fails.

The Kinks A well Respetcted Man

And after enough of this, the young man asks himself "Is this all there is?" And then he starts reading books about comparative religion and spirituality and decides there's more to life than survival and material existence. I know this man well. He's me.