I have been doing some reading on Jesus

submitted by [deleted] from self.whatever

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

Would a lifetime with boring people in Heaven not be hell though?

[–]iamonlyoneman 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

Have you ever been amazed by the beauty of anything and it was cool for like 3 seconds?

Imagine being in the presence of something so amazing that it's amazing forever. That'd be God.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

You can already talk to God at any time and feel his presence, although some people say that's just ASMR.

What kind of Heaven wouldn't let the interesting people in though, it'd be a shitty club. Sitting there and getting your asmr feelies from God for an eternity sounds awful af.

You're really selling me on Hell here. Although I think that's just a lie we tell ourselves because we fear death. Our continuity comes from our children and maybe even the people's lives we have positively impacted.

[–]IridescentAnaconda 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Consider that iam is correct in a fashion, but in a weird and not entirely Christian way: when you die, you go to Hell, but you don't know you're in Hell. It looks like something you're already familiar with: the world you just exited. Well, not entirely. You're a little different, you have to start from scratch. You have to learn to eat again. You have to learn to walk again. You have to learn a lot of social things again. You have to go through puberty again. Etc. etc. This is God giving you another chance to get it right.

This is actually what some branches of Buddhism believe (taking some poetic license in the telling).

[–]Vulptex 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

That's...actually exactly what I was going to say, of course it pops up the second I think about it. There are no coincidences in The Matrix.

The only thing I'd say is this crappy reincarnation process is run by demons and not God. They're the ones who use guilt as an excuse to enslave people, and they also own this place. I bet the demons aka archons are identical to the gods of the pagan pantheon.

[–]IridescentAnaconda 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I bet the demons aka archons are identical to the gods of the pagan pantheon.

I think reasonable people can disagree on this last point. The ancients had different conceptualizations of the metaphysical layer of reality. In my opinion, it was more nuanced, but I get that modern Christianity works for a lot of people.

But, yes, in general, reincarnation is supposed to be a curse, not a blessing. If the Christian conceptualization of God is correct -- that He truly loves His creation -- then the only concept of eternal damnation that makes sense to me is reincarnation: it's as eternal as you choose it to be.

[–]Vulptex 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

The pagan gods were all a bunch of psychopaths and exactly what you get when you give a human too much power. The Old Testament mixes them up with God, because the ancient Israelites were pagan Canaanites but later didn't want to admit it, so they took all their pantheon traditions and attributed them to the new monotheist God that had been brought to them. I suspect the slaughter of every single person in Canaan was also a story they invented so they could claim to be the originals with no connection to the pagans before them, because biological descent mattered a lot to ancient cultures.

[–]IridescentAnaconda 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I tend to view the pagans as archetypes and thus aspects of God (or aspects of the human psyche, which is a much lower frequency of God, "created in His image"). Yes, of course they are psychopaths because they represent purified essences, and any behavior taken to an extreme is going to be psychopathic. The point isn't to worship a single deity, it's to understand how they function together to make a unified whole. It's a mirror of own own psyche, and thus a mirror of God.

Christians seem to function without this (well, not Catholics: they reproduced the whole idea with the saints). I don't really understand Protestantism, so I can't comment on it. I grew up Roman Catholic and ported my belief system to Buddhism (which makes more intellectual sense to me) and a form of paganism that makes more emotional sense to me, even as I still use Catholic prayers as part of my spiritual practice.