Question 6 for Christians

Libsmasher

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What is the nature of heaven? Does anyone ever have fun? Go out for a pizza? Have sex? Or do they just float around in a gauzy sense of happiness? Life there is supposed to be forever. But what happens forever? Suppose after, say, a trillion years, someone says it's been fun, but I want out. Is he allowed to end his life?
 
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What I find more interesting is that even a really good Christian is going to have negative aspects in their personality, and some people who scrape it into heaven will probably have a tendency to be complete bastards.

What happens to their personality so everyone lives in harmony? Sounds like we are going to loose our free will once we get up there.

I suppose a Christians answer would be we just don't know... have faith. As in, follow our word blindly and irrationally as the obvious truth. No thanks.
 
What I find more interesting is that even a really good Christian is going to have negative aspects in their personality, and some people who scrape it into heaven will probably have a tendency to be complete bastards.

What happens to their personality so everyone lives in harmony? Sounds like we are going to loose our free will once we get up there.

I suppose a Christians answer would be we just don't know... have faith. As in, follow our word blindly and irrationally as the obvious truth. No thanks.

Yes, but do we really have a choice? I don't know anyone who has been there and returned other Jesus. And please don't give me an argument on this one. We are entilted to our beliefs, in this world that is all we have left.
I really don't think I was taught that you can just "scrape" into Heaven lol.
You can speak up, oppose, object and deny while you are still aive. Sorry, but I think that choice may be gone after you die. So, speak up now or forever---- well you know the rest.
 
I think I can answer this one, actually, as there is a metaphysical explanation for it - Heaven would be the concept of "ultimate positivity" - a subjective, individualized experience that induces feelings of perfect comfort and happiness. There is no pizza or sex or even "fun" in worldly sense; there is just an everlasting feeling of complete contentment.

This poses problems, however, as everlasting contentment and the complete lack of desire for anything else technically qualifies as sloth, a sin in Christianity.

It would not, however, constitute the end of free will; the institution of absolute perfection, however, would be unresistable. The perfection of that happiness would preclude all things that might cause a desire to leave; such as the knowledge that friends and family are still alive (and not happy). The desire to return would be quashed somehow, although not necessarily forcibly; anyone who has not consciously decided to reject heaven purely because of what it is can be convinced to stay. I'm going to go out on a theological limb and say that no one who would consciously reject heaven would ever be let in to begin with.

So that's heaven - the concept of perfection to the human mind (or the human soul, take your pick). You don't get in if you're predisposed to reject the concept of it. If you do get in, any desire to leave is quashed by the perfection of the place, making the desire to leave unfathomable, even for the best of reasons. The trick isn't to remove free will - only to make all other choices look completely idiotic.
 
What is the nature of heaven? Does anyone ever have fun? Go out for a pizza? Have sex? Or do they just float around in a gauzy sense of happiness? Life there is supposed to be forever. But what happens forever? Suppose after, say, a trillion years, someone says it's been fun, but I want out. Is he allowed to end his life?

It is the reward consequent to doing a moral good.
 
Kantian through and through aren't we nummy?

Its the most logical ethical theory, don't you think?

It is simple, straightforward, and it speaks from human experience. Furthermore, it is the best counter-point to all the humean clutter being proposed in this forum.
 
It doesn't really take into account what happens when someone else does something wrong and breaks a rule, leading to consequences which put 'duty' and the categorical imperative in peril.

For example, Hitler killing the Jews. You decide to hide a Jewish child in your house during the purge, and the Nazi scum come knocking on your door demanding that you turn over any Jewish people in your posession.

If you lie... that is not the moral thing to do, and it is your 'duty' to tell the truth. But turning over an innocent to a concentration camp... no thanks.
 
It doesn't really take into account what happens when someone else does something wrong and breaks a rule, leading to consequences which put 'duty' and the categorical imperative in peril.

For example, Hitler killing the Jews. You decide to hide a Jewish child in your house during the purge, and the Nazi scum come knocking on your door demanding that you turn over any Jewish people in your posession.

If you lie... that is not the moral thing to do, and it is your 'duty' to tell the truth. But turning over an innocent to a concentration camp... no thanks.

It is not your duty to observe an irrational law. In fact, it is your duty to resist it.
 
It is not your duty to observe an irrational law. In fact, it is your duty to resist it.

Do you think Kant would agree with that? That the duty of resisting irrational laws overtakes the duty of telling the truth?

How do you choose duties? Doesn't that become subjective and an appeal to emotion a lot of the time, contradicting the very idea of a purely logical ethical system?
 
Do you think Kant would agree with that? That the duty of resisting irrational laws overtakes the duty of telling the truth?

How do you choose duties? Doesn't that become subjective and an appeal to emotion a lot of the time, contradicting the very idea of a purely logical ethical system?

In your example, telling the truth fails the criteria for determining moral worth since:

- the duty to tell the truth contradicts the categorical imperative of treating all rational beings as ends in themselves and;

- the duty to tell the truth pre-supposes a law that applies to one person and not the other.

The above represents the two-fold test that differentiates a categorical imperative from a merely hypothetical imperative.
 
In your example, telling the truth fails the criteria for determining moral worth since:

- the duty to tell the truth contradicts the categorical imperative of treating all rational beings as ends in themselves and;

- the duty to tell the truth pre-supposes a law that applies to one person and not the other.

So the ultimate duty is to treat humans as ends not means in accordance to logic?

Kantian ethics fail to take varying cultures into account though - where sometimes one moral standard is acceptable somewhere but not acceptable somewhere else.

Who's right is it to say that one is wrong and the other is right?
 
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So the ultimate duty is to treat humans as ends not means in accordance to logic?

Kantian ethics fail to take varying cultures into account though - where sometimes one moral standard is acceptable somewhere but not acceptable somewhere else.

Who's right is it to say that one is wrong and the other is right?

"13. Kant shows the basic identity of the first and second formulation of the categorical imperative. Those actions that, on the first formulation, cannot be universalized without contradiction (for example, committing suicide or refusing to help the needy) will be seen on the second formulation to be inconsistent with the idea of humanity as an end in itself."

Great Traditions in Ethics (ninth edition)
Denise, Peterfreund, White
 
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