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So...how is this handled in terms of our late woman in heaven? Has she not been looking forward to a post corporal reunion with her loved ones? Is the fact that they went to hell kept from her? To sustain her perpetual euphoria, is she made to forget that she ever had loved ones?
Or if she has awareness that her family members didn't make the Big Cut, is she just so giggly goo all slap happy that she doesn't care?
I think your average theist would lump this in with the story of the trick question the religious teachers had for Jesus, about a woman whose husband had died and she had passed to his next eldest brother (women being mere chattel in those days) and then that one died and so on until all 7 brothers had passed. Lastly the woman herself died. Whose wife will she be in heaven?
Jesus gave the answer that in heaven "they are neither married nor given in marriage, but are like the angels". In other words in heaven you are so busy playing harps and praising god that such temporal nonsense like your past relationships are completely irrelevant.
In other words in heaven you are so busy playing harps and praising god that such temporal nonsense like your past relationships are completely irrelevant.
If that constitutes heaven, then why are we so harsh with drug addicts here on Earth? They are merely going for an early achievement of that post corporal paradise....a continuous state of advanced euphoria where all outside stimulation is irrelevant.
If that constitutes heaven, then why are we so harsh with drug addicts here on Earth? They are merely going for an early achievement of that post corporal paradise....a continuous state of advanced euphoria where all outside stimulation is irrelevant.
Good question. Another good one is if temporal relationships are so unimportant in heaven why are they important here? So important that it's shameful to cheat on or divorce your spouse or neglect your children?
The old hymn, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus stated that if you kept your eyes on Jesus, "the things of earth will grow strangely dim". So that was claiming that temporal concerns are unimportant even in THIS life. Presumably if the wife is dying of cancer and the kids are doing drugs, you just don't let that take your eyes of Jesus.
Maybe that is the bottom line ... just stare, trance-like, at Jesus, in this life OR the next, because that's all that matters.
Good question. Another good one is if temporal relationships are so unimportant in heaven why are they important here? So important that it's shameful to cheat on or divorce your spouse or neglect your children
The old hymn, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus stated that if you kept your eyes on Jesus, "the things of earth will grow strangely dim". So that was claiming that temporal concerns are unimportant even in THIS life. Presumably if the wife is dying of cancer and the kids are doing drugs, you just don't let that take your eyes of Jesus.
Maybe that is the bottom line ... just stare, trance-like, at Jesus, in this life OR the next, because that's all that matters.
I think that the above phenomena flows from a part of Christianity which modern Christians very much wish to neglect, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who told his audiences that the corporal world would be ending within their lifetimes. It is the only possible justification for Jesus going about telling people that nothing was more important than following him. He really went against existing customs when he told fathers to abandon wives and children, workers to abandon their jobs and careers, completely forsake the temporal world in favor of devoting themselves to preparation for the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Thus the admonition to 86 your family and take up the mission does enjoy a supporting basis in the gospels as the legitimate teachings of Jesus. Of course it was all invalidated when the corporal world had the bad manners not to come to a crashing halt in the first Century CE.
I think that the above phenomena flows from a part of Christianity which modern Christians very much wish to neglect, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who told his audiences that the corporal world would be ending within their lifetimes. It is the only possible justification for Jesus going about telling people that nothing was more important than following him. He really went against existing customs when he told fathers to abandon wives and children, workers to abandon their jobs and careers, completely forsake the temporal world in favor of devoting themselves to preparation for the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Thus the admonition to 86 your family and take up the mission does enjoy a supporting basis in the gospels as the legitimate teachings of Jesus. Of course it was all invalidated when the corporal world had the bad manners not to come to a crashing halt in the first Century CE.
Some modern Christians are still very much into the apocalypse (and not the Zombie one, either), even more so than in past centuries. The saying is that Christians used to spend centuries building grand edifices for the ages (cathedrals, etc) and modern fundamentalists slap up pole barns for their churches. The former, because the prevailing idea used to be that it was up to Christians to bring in the kingdom of God on earth through the preaching of the gospel; this was thought to be a long range project and they built accordingly. The latter, because the prevailing idea in fundamentalism is that "Jesus is coming soon" so they just need a quick infrastructure for heralding the End of Days. It's a question of whether, as a Christian, you believe the cavalry was going to ride in to rescue you momentarily, or whether you ARE the cavalry.
Of course, I over-simplify; cathedrals were also, pragmatically, a way to concentrate and flaunt the wealth of the institutional church, keep money flowing into the coffers, and to just generally impress the heathen (and the faithful; think of the impression such an edifice made on a medieval peasant; it was like a visible expression of the power of the church and its sacraments). Fundies like to think they avoid all that excess, but I recall visiting one of those "pole barn" churches once only to find a fully decked-out Corvette Stingray driven by its young pastor.
Grandstander, oh, so right on! Evil arrives by necessity naturally so yes, we try to overcome it. Ti's not we the naturalists who demand paradise but theists themselves. The recently late John Hick makes a straw man out of the all or nothing fallacy and the slippery slope one- three fallacies from that ever-ready rationalizer! He claims that we want paradise but that boomerangs on him as theists demand that. We just take their assumption for the sake of argument, running with it to overcome theism. No, with Burton Porter, we would find good, better and best as the rational contrasts instead of good and evil. Some people are superegotary- doing more than required- that we ask, why not everyone then. Hick finds no ending point for the amount of evil for that straw man, but any four year old could, because a hurt toe is not too much, Use your imagination. He rationalizes that perhaps in Heaven there will be heavenly analogues to virtues but why not here in the first place? He rationalizes that perhaps a kind of purgatory exists and that anyway, as a universalist, he finds that we all end up in Heaven anyway. Why not in the first place. His free will and soul-building theories then fail, as the problem of Heaven implies. Why would omniscient God need those tests anyway, and we have determined volition, not free will anyway! Hick's refutation of natural/rational theology succeeds, whilst his defense of fideism utterly fails!
No such problem exists for naturalism as we naturalists note that is what one expects of Nature without a supernatural boss! That supposed narcissistic God would have no right to demand any relationships with us as the evil overthrows that twaddle. What really counts is how such a being would treat sentient beings instead of His mere desires! We are not pottery to which He grants purposes, and He is not our potter to permit harm to. Theists are as battered spouses and children, defending the indefensible, with their love of power. They superstitiously want Him to fulfill their wishes, yet claim success with what they think are answered prayers but which are only the post hoc fallacy- coincidence, and then rationalize about phony unanswered ones. Yes, that Stockholm syndrome enters the equations. They are the Patiricia Hearsts, cooperating with superstition! Confirmatory bias and cognitive dissonance enters the territory of reasoning when people ought to look as objectively at the evidence as possible. Theists are so wedded to their abuser that they prefer the well-trained eyes of faith to reality. Haughty John Haught avers that why, faith envelopes the whole being to grant us trust in Him, whilst Dawkins' nemesis, Alister Earl McGrath avers that why, first the believer gathers the evidence and then uses faith as certitude. Either way, faith keeps people enthralled to their batterer! And then to those two's protestations of faith as blind faith, it ends up as such! This is why and how they rationalize unrequited evils! They use the argument from personal incredulity that Nature explains why evil with their argument from ignorance with that Grand Mystery, that superfluity, that obscures instead of explaining. So much with that twaddle! Yes, we naturalists do have that confirmatory bias of wanting evidence and do not have cognitive dissonance with our pellucid naturalism.
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