It's a choice - eviltoast
  • undergroundoverground@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Ha, yeah, the format did feel very fitting.

    Oh, don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of time to catch up and hang out with whoever you like. In fact, you could spend at million years with everyone who ever existed, individually, and you would still have plenty of time left over…

    because its eternity

    Then what?

    I didn’t mention all the things a person could do but that wasn’t meant to indicate that they couldn’t do other things with their time as, ultimately, they would end up at the same place. Please feel free to swap them out with anything you like.

    Fair enough but neither of those match what bible says. It just says heaven is “where gods praise is eternal” which is pretty ominous, if taken literally.

    If heaven existed, there’s no reason the presume purgatory must also exist. Especially as purgatory was just made up by medieval monks looking from a new revenue stream. There’s no purgatory mentioned in the bible and only one ruler in heaven.

    To me, the version of us that would be ok with eternity would be so far removed from us as to make the line “you will go the heaven” a lie.

    Mostly, people find problems with it as they can’t yet fully let go of eternalism.

    • Laurentide@pawb.social
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      1 month ago

      I’m aware that Purgatory isn’t scriptural, and the community I was raised in believed a lot of stuff that wasn’t found in the Bible. (It’s one of the reasons I left.)

      The point I was trying to make there is not “What is Heaven according to scripture?” I was speculating what heaven would need to be for me to consider it a paradise. And the answer I came to is that no place can be a paradise as long as I’m in it. Not because I think I’m a bad person, but because I have so much trauma and other mental baggage that I would be bringing with me. I would be too suspicious of a place with nothing bad in it to be able to enjoy it. I would unintentionally hurt those around me because of the pain I’m in. And those people would hurt me, and each other, because how many people actually manage to reach a state of complete emotional health before they die? No one is ready for paradise.

      There would need to be a place and a time for healing the traumas of life before we could enter any kind of heaven. For this I borrowed the name Purgatory, because it seems to me a similar concept. And maybe the person who emerged from such a place would be so different that you couldn’t really say they were me anymore, but I think I’m okay with that. I don’t want to stay the person I am now; I want to become something better.

      I guess that doesn’t have much to do with your original point about people not understanding eternity, other than being in agreement that it wouldn’t be a fun thing for humanity as we know it.