Lovely post, and on a subject most LJers wouldn't touch with a twenty-foot pole. I agree with you on most things, as usual, even though my religion of choice is Buddhism. (Very happy to hear you're a theist, by the way; I had been under the impression that you're an existentialist, which, from my one week's worth of experience, is a very depressing worldview.)
I came to the view that the mistake was to think of the infinite or of immortality as "more". We want life in abundance. But if that's just a long string of days do we really get abundance of life?
It really bothers me that this is the common perception of the Christian afterlife in modern times, and I can only suppose that the people who embrace it must be of limited imagination. I'll quote David Darling on the "string of days" concept (even though I disagree with him that that's the proposed Christian afterlife): "Yes, it would be nice to be in paradise -- for a while. The problem is, it wouldn't end. Days there would stretch into weeks, weeks into years, and years into centuries. The novelty, it seems, would be bound to wear off. And the centuries would become millennia, and the millennia would become trillions upon trillions of years, because this is the life-everlasting -- the endless treadmill of the hereafter. In our desperation for a dash of excitement, a bit of daredevilry, we might almost be tempted to side with Mark Twain: 'Heaven for climate, hell for company.' The problem is -- time; there's just too much of it in eternity."
Which is one of the reasons I'm more amiable to the idea of a heaven as you described it in your third-to-last paragraph, or of the Buddhist concept of reincarnation (with a special fondness for the river metaphor Herman Hesse incorporated in "Siddhartha", if you've ever read that).
You're absolutely correct that carpe diem is where it's at, what we do in the here and now. As Siddhartha Gautama put it: "I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand."
I think the only thing I would disagree with is that the annihilation of consciousness is not a terrifying thought. There is nothing to be feared in non-being once you're there, but aren't you afraid of entering that state of non-being? I think it was joe_sweden (Wolfie Gilmore, if I'm not mistaken) who said that while the prospect of being dead is not terrifying, the prospect of dying is, which, yeah. ...I don't think that's what happens at death either, though. I even think Stephen King had a point when he said that it's "spiritually impossible to believe" and "logically, it is laughable -- the idea that we simply flick out like a light bulb and nothing happens".
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Date: 2009-06-03 11:54 pm (UTC)I came to the view that the mistake was to think of the infinite or of immortality as "more". We want life in abundance. But if that's just a long string of days do we really get abundance of life?
It really bothers me that this is the common perception of the Christian afterlife in modern times, and I can only suppose that the people who embrace it must be of limited imagination. I'll quote David Darling on the "string of days" concept (even though I disagree with him that that's the proposed Christian afterlife): "Yes, it would be nice to be in paradise -- for a while. The problem is, it wouldn't end. Days there would stretch into weeks, weeks into years, and years into centuries. The novelty, it seems, would be bound to wear off. And the centuries would become millennia, and the millennia would become trillions upon trillions of years, because this is the life-everlasting -- the endless treadmill of the hereafter. In our desperation for a dash of excitement, a bit of daredevilry, we might almost be tempted to side with Mark Twain: 'Heaven for climate, hell for company.' The problem is -- time; there's just too much of it in eternity."
Which is one of the reasons I'm more amiable to the idea of a heaven as you described it in your third-to-last paragraph, or of the Buddhist concept of reincarnation (with a special fondness for the river metaphor Herman Hesse incorporated in "Siddhartha", if you've ever read that).
You're absolutely correct that carpe diem is where it's at, what we do in the here and now. As Siddhartha Gautama put it: "I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand."
I think the only thing I would disagree with is that the annihilation of consciousness is not a terrifying thought. There is nothing to be feared in non-being once you're there, but aren't you afraid of entering that state of non-being? I think it was