On Heaven

Philosophies of heaven are interesting - it says a lot about somebody, what they think will happen to them when they die (and of course what they think will happen to other people, but we'll get to that later).  Obviously, if you don't believe in an afterlife, it's a bit moot, so you could just think about your ideal society instead.  But there are some key things about Heaven that make it particularly intriguing to try to describe:

a) Everybody's dead, and getting a fresh start of sorts.
b) It's FOR-EV-ER.
c) You're face-to-face with your deity.

     Even setting aside Purgatory and reincarnation-until-nirvana for the moment, there are obviously a lot of ways for heaven to look, but I've found the following ideas (pulled from various sources) to be worth dwelling on, both for what they say about my hopes for the afterlife and for their implications in the here-and-now.


To be fully known.

     It is no secret that everybody has secrets - shame, and feeling unloved are common.  So in thinking about heaven, one appealing bit is the idea that your whole life might be known and understood... and that you might be loved regardless.  Most people know the feeling already of having loved someone else enough to overlook whatever they might do badly, or to want to be with them even in the midst of hard circumstances, but it's difficult to see oneself in that same light.  So to have that affirmation on a big scale, start-to-finish of how you lived your life, would be pretty amazing.  And not just from another person, of course, but from everyone, and above all your deity.
     Some would have it go so far as to actually merge consciousnesses - to be so connected to others as to start being pretty indistinguishable.  Me, I'd be OK retaining some autonomy, which brings us to the next bit:


To be fully yourself.

     This is a hard one to put into words, but I'll give it a shot - the concept of heaven being a place where not only are you free from negatives like shame, above, but also now have the freedom and power to act on all your best desires with nothing holding you back.  Personally, I imagine it like being able to actually follow up on all those silly hypothetical "get-to-know-each-other" questions from summer camps - "Assuming you could talk to anybody from history, who would it be?"  "Assuming you could go anywhere instantly, where would you visit?"  "Would you want to have wings or a tail if you could, and if so what kind?"  That sort of freedom would be great just in itself - and so to add on a level in which you could also BE, and not just superficially, always true to yourself, would be a big component of paradise, I think.


To have time.

     "Always true to yourself" also highlights the central concept of heaven as eternal.  For some, this means everything would kind of blend together, making it effectively a static, timeless, place.  Others would want to basically become little gods, themselves - ruling over a planet in sort of a "Civ. V"-style playground.  Regardless, this new immortality lets you end up spending time the way you've always wanted, without that meddlesome death business.  In my own thinking, I'd veer a little more towards Heaven as process rather than Heaven as static, though I'm humble enough not to think anybody would ever let me rule a planet.  But I like the idea that in heaven, if you want to paint a painting, you might be able to just snap your fingers and have it appear... but you might also just be able to learn to paint.  Same goes for studying - you could presumably make the trip out to NGC 6302 when not bound by this current earthly body, rather than just looking at the Hubble picture - but the joy of discovering that sort of thing is something I think heaven will include, and not spoil by having everybody just learn all about it instantaneously Matrix-style.  And moreso with discovering cool people.  OK, last attribute for now, since our own time is still limited:


To see God.

     This is kind of a tricky one, since not everybody even believes in God, much less the same one.  So YMMV with this point.  But I think that, one way or another, we'll all want to settle the question definitively in the afterlife, of what was going on down here on Earth, and the why (if there is one).  The search for meaning is huge with humans, and so in heaven, it'll be good to finally get some answers.  To provide the requisite pop-culture references for this section: it's always intriguing to me when shows like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones have the characters deal with the "Problem of Evil."  It's very understandable for them to question the amount of meaning or goodness in their world, since their deities are the likes of Grr Martin.  The real world can also be pretty evil and question-provoking, which is why we relate to such shows so readily, but the bottom line is that the high expectations we had for a meaningful ending for, say, Lost, are nothing compared with what most people expect God to be able to write for our current existence.


     Anyhow, all this to say, these aspects of heaven highlight hopes for the future, but also hopes for the present.  I think pretty much everybody wants to be loved for who they are, be a more consistently awesome person, have time to explore and do the things they've always wanted, and of course to see good come from our struggles and meaning from our suffering.  I can hope the afterlife does these things, but I also hope it'd just be a continuation of the trends established down here.

*****

This post is dedicated to my friend Lizet, who, as of today, is finding all this out first-hand.  Peace, sister.

Example 1: Fate vs. Free Will

Last week, I posted on the phenomena of artificially binary debates, "false dichotomies," if you will.  Which brings us to today's post: an example of a common one.

Fate:
The world is deterministic.  Your path was chosen before you were born; you were predestined by a higher power; chemicals in your brain and genes make all your choices for you.  It's a common belief, more so than one might think - you and your S.O. were meant to be together; all things work together for good for those who love God and have been called according to His purposes.

Free will:
The world is what we make of it.  Each of us chooses our destiny, and can change the world.  As the great philosopher Sarah Connor put it, "the unknown future rolls towards us."  Skynet is not a sure thing.


So that's a long-running schism-starter in a nutshell.  Now, if one can think of a case in which it could be "both" or "neither" of the above, rather than either/or, then we will be starting to think perpendicularly.  Philosophies such as the Blind Watchmaker tend to avoid the dilemma by taking elements of both, for instance - in the moment, we have free will, but back in the day there was a Creator who started everything running.  Similarly, many Christians (and Hindus, etc.) would put this in the aforementioned category of "mystery" - deities know what will happen, but we don't, and thus we have free will and responsibility for our actions, and yet can also rely on not being able to really catch the higher powers unawares.  (Of course, I must acknowledge that this conflict wouldn't be such a big deal if not for the plenty of other Christians (and Muslims, etc.) over the years who have taken a more hard-line Fate approach, coming down on the side of Predestination emphatically.)

The above syncretic systems are a good start.  Even more purely perpendicular is the common "who cares?" approach of agnostics - if we don't have free will, it sure still feels like we do, and we should just act with what we know even if everything winds up having been fated.  Another perpendicular one is the hypothesis of multiple universes: everything can happen and is happening somewhere, so the illusion of choice (whether by fate or by you) is only an artifact of us having ended up in this particular universe.

Quantum mechanics indicates that the future arrives as probabilities resolve, as we observe it - so personally, I'm agnostic about the existence of other universes, but what's interesting about that is that our universe is not really knowable.  When observed, it is deterministic... until then, it behaves as though both options were equivalent.  Now, I know many have used the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as pop psychology, as if to say that all knowledge is thus impossible, when that's really way beyond the scope of a little equation talking about position and momentum.  But when we are talking about determinism in particular, it's relevant, I'd say.  And sure, maybe all that is too small a scale - God or Fate may operate at a more macro level of physics, right?

Anyhow, all this rambling is just to explore a popular conflict, and try to make a case for nuance.  Many folks I've met will pick sides quite readily on this point, but worse, will assume anyone not in full agreement is secretly working for the other camp.  This may be the real danger of false dichotomies.

Perpendicular Thoughts

Debates tend to be viewed subconsciously as a line or continuum - there's the left-wing, the right-wing, and a string of points between.  There are those who "Strongly Disagree," "Disagree," are "Neutral," "Agree," or "Strongly Agree" with any statement, right?

But just as any survey can skew its results by the manner it asks a question, it seems that a lot of issues in politics and theology can wind up getting logjammed into eternal non-productiveness merely by virtue of how the questions have been framed.  People fall on either side of an issue in a roughly 50/50 split for many reasons, but often it is because the question is too abstract or too vague, or too binary (a false dichotomy).  And this includes many debates that have gone on for centuries or even millennia: fundamental divisions in society.

So how does one break out?  If this is the line along which people place themselves (left, right, or middle):

_________________

Then we need to make sure we aren't missing something out here:

             X

_________________

Thus, we need to make sure we're thinking in a perpendicular fashion to the original framing of the debate, and not just back-and-forth along the line.  Remember Star Trek II?  Khan forgets that space has up-and-down as well as left-and-right, and it's his undoing.

As a  real-life example, here is an interesting set of survey results:

It's very encouraging to me that 43% of Americans already kinda get the idea I'm talking about.  If someone asks, "Are you Pro-Choice or Pro-Life?" the expectation is that you'll pick a side in this epic conflict.  Given the option, though, 43% will answer, "Both," to some degree.  (If you're wondering, the extra 7% not shown on the graph answered, "Don't know" or didn't answer at all, which I'd also consider perpendicular thinking of sorts.)

And that's the point of this post.  I want to make sure that I'm not needlessly propping up divisions between people and taking sides using prefab labels, because 

a) Jesus said not to do that, 

b) my job is to describe reality better, and let data speak for itself,

c) I have an iconoclastic streak a mile wide, and 

d) I believe it lets real truth shine through into a debate.

This last point is worth dwelling on.  In church-talk it's often referred to as "mystery," meaning a paradox that is true despite the seeming contradiction.  For example, Jesus is both God and human; people are simultaneously saints and yet still sinners.  The mystery helps people understand that the reality is often more complex than our words are good at describing, or our brains are good at comprehending.

And to the degree that that keeps us humble, it puts us on the path to wisdom.

Checking in...

seeing if anybody is still subscribed and/or randomly clicking through to here...  I've been wanting a space to jot down some thoughts and decided I might brush the dust off this ol' blog.