Serious Forever and ever

[chimp]

Hello everyone
This thread may seem kinda deep for a post on a pokemon website but I have no where else to voice myself so here it goes.
I'm a Catholic Christian, and of course I'm NOT trying to start a religious debate or anything, that is not the point of this thread. Basically, I mention my religion because we believe in the afterlife, namely Heaven and Hell.
Heaven sounds pretty awesome to be completely honest, the concept of a paradise that is greater than you can even imagine is just downright cool. However, Heaven is eternal. It will never ever end. And that freaks me the fuck out.

I mean, basically everything we know about existence comes to an end eventually. People die. Empires fall. Even STARS eventually die and explode and form a black-hole that not even light can survive in. But in a way that is kind of comforting. After death comes life. Yes, people are dying every day, but at the same time babies are being born. Somewhere, maybe thousands of thousands of light years away from earth, wars are being fought, treaties are being signed, natural disasters ravage the landscape only for it to all grow back again. New beginnings are everywhere. I look at my life and think "soon I will be dead, and after that... who knows?"

So maybe thats why the concept of eternity is so scary to me. Heaven goes FOREVER. It will never cease. Nothing comes after it. There is no beginning because there is no end. And the thought of being there FOREVER just makes me disproportionately nervous. And its even scarier because I WANT to go to Heaven. It sounds like a great place. God is a pretty cool guy. Especially considering its major competition is Hell which is even worse because it has all the aforementioned freakiness on top of never-ending suffering and unquenchable fire.

Additionally, I keep thinking about all the world has to offer. I mean, all the possibilities that we may never experience. For example, I will NEVER know what its like to grow up in another country. For the most part, boys will never know what its like to grow up as girls and vice-versa. I may never know what its like to be a Major League Baseball player, or to write a best-selling novel, or go to the moon, or swim the English Chanel, and I'm sure all the soul hanging out in Heaven don't care about those things.There are so many experience we will NEVER know about, and it kills me inside.

I'm having trouble putting my thoughts into words, I guess. I was gonna post this in Theorymon's thread but I realized that I'm not afraid of death. I welcome death, I just want to know what happens after we die. Don't get me wrong, I'm NOT suicidal, but I just can't stop thinking about what comes next after our final breath. How do I deal with these thoughts? It hurts to think about it because I know we will never have an answer until its too late.

Anyway, thanks for your time. Im sorry if this post was creepy/weird or anything, and I'd appreciate any feedback.
In case this thread gets morbid or too dark here is a picture of a baby kitten: http://icons.wunderground.com/data/wximagenew/g/Groundhog2Day/45-800.jpg

 

[KM]

i would just comment on the baby kitten but then i'd feel like an ass so

there's nothing weird or creepy about this post. uncertainty and apprehension about anything after death is entirely natural for humans, whether or not they're religious. I imagine that there are very few people who never worry about this sort of stuff, and it's certainly a valid worry to entertain

you touched on how we'll never know - and this sort of highlights the entire thing. Humans can't really fathom eternities (whether they exist or not), which makes stuff about the afterlife intangible and sort of immutable. even if you're religious, like yourself, heaven is nothing more than a vague promise of an undefined spirit world that even the church can't make up its mind about (do people in their entire bodies go to heaven? is it just their souls? what age do they go there? etc)

so then my advice or feedback would be just to realize that these thoughts are entirely natural and human and there's no harm in entertaining them, but there is harm in letting them consume your life. given its immutable nature, there's not a whole ton that you can change about what happens after your death, so you should spend most of your focus on living a fulfilling and worthwhile life.

 

[Sam]

I think an important thing to understand is that the purpose in life isn't to experience everything. Life wouldn't be very fun if everyone experienced the same. You don't need to know what it feels like to be a baseball player, a girl, or anything else. You have a unique experience in life and that is what's important. You create your own experience and make the most out of life. I don't really care what you're view on afterlife is, the fact of the matter is you have a finite time on Earth. Per your beliefs, you have no control what happens after that time, you can only control the time that you do have. Make the most out of it.

 

[Myzozoa]

It might seem that death is a state characterized by a lack of sensation, at least at some point before a body ceases to be animated. Accordingly, the 'hedonist' Epicurus argued that death should not be feared because it is never experienced, hence there would be no pain or pleasure experienced once one is dead.

Yet, in another sense, death isn't feared because of suppositions about how dying will feel, but rather because the world will go on without you after you die. And it is easy to imagine dying before all obligations and duties to others (such as families or children, etc) have been fulfilled. Further, one might worry how others will carry on in their absence, as one's death seems to be most acutely felt by those left behind, who live with that absence (especially in cultures that emphasis the losses entailed by death, over the celebration of life). Lastly, as dying necessitates the end of one's experience, it is understandable to be jealous for the experiences you won't live through.

Additional anxiety comes from the fact that, under the common assumption/observation that death is the end of experience, no one can inform us of what death will be like. What comes after, if anything, is simultaneously thought of as mysterious, and in another way mundane. It seems difficult to understand what it would be like to cease experiencing anything (this is why death has been closely associated with sleep, though things ARE experienced in sleep), as thinking itself is a sort of sensation or experience. At the same time, to simply not have experience and be nothing at all doesn't seem all hard to understand: your corpse will be like a rock, and your consciousness will no longer be, your 'self' will be nothing at all. I find this simple and mundane, and I believe this is what death will 'be like'. Many conceptions of an afterlife seem simple too, because under the assumption that there is an after life, experience does not cease at all and you will continue to have consciousness as before.

 

[Codraroll]

My personal views of heaven and hell is that they're just extrapolations of what we experience in life.

Heaven would be the idea of "good times" lasting forever, while Hell would be the concept of misery lasting forever. Good times and misery are well-known concepts, as is the idea of eternity. Somebody combined the ideas once, either in consolidation or fear, and people started believing it. I mean, how many times haven't we all been happy/miserable, and thought "what if this would last forever?" It's not hard to imagine, but that doesn't make it any more real. If I fill a teapot with water, and slowly empty it again, I can easily imagine the idea of water forever running out of the spout, but it's not a likely scenario to ever happen, and no religions speak about the eternally emptying teapot. Or, well, the story about Sarepta in the Bible is kind of identical, and I suppose it's based on the exact same premise: "What if there was always some flour to be found at the bottom of the pot?". The afterlife, likewise, is just an exaggeration of life. The idea that there is something more than what we have, and that somehow all our current problems will be insignificant there (either because afterlife is infinitely good, and you have no problems, or infinitely bad, and your current problems will be trivial in comparison). In short, a phenomenom is observed in life, and believed to be exaggerated in death, as if the end of life marked the beginning of something bigger.


I see death as the end of all experience. We fear it because it's unknown, and by definition we can't find out exactly what it implies for us (science's best guess so far seems to be it's simply the end of all we are and all we experience). You will never experience being dead, though you may experience dying. Depending on the circumstances, I guess it wouldn't be worse than passing out, the difference being that you don't wake up again afterwards. After life, there is no consciousness, because the necessary infrastructure to support consciousness isn't working any more. It's like the productive output of one of those abandoned factories in Detroit, or the character development in a soap opera taken off the air. After death, no system exists to support consciousness, and there is nothing left.

And what is there really to be afraid of? I mean, technically you've experienced it before. Most of the matter your body is made up of wasn't there when you were born, and most of the matter present at your birth is long gone. So are most memories, sensory experiences, and so forth. Your mind undergoes maintenance continuously, matter is shed, neural bridges connected and lost, and you wake up every morning with your mind (and body) a little bit different from the day before. In ten years, most of what you are now will have been replaced, and so it has always been for most multi-celled organisms. Life as a complex organism is about parts being replaced, and the old parts go lost and disappear without any fuzz (and that includes everything falling under the domain of the "soul", if your beliefs are so inclined). The "you" of today will be mostly gone in a few years anyway, no matter how much alive you stay. Death just means the replacing doesn't continue (as well as decay happening a lot faster, again, because the infrastructure shuts down).

So, yeah, that's life. Try to make the most out of your stay, instead of focusing on what isn't available. Your mind has the power to imagine most of that anyway.

 

[mattj]

I had to read your OP a couple of times because I didn't understand it. To me, the idea of an eternity on a new Earth and a new Heaven is fantastic. I'm looking forward to no problems, peace, perfect bodies, a stunning, new universe to explore, and more than all the time I could want to do pretty much whatever I want (depending on your reading of the Bible).

But then again, I have phobias that many people wouldn't understand. For one, I have an irrational aversion to dark or murky water. Not even deep or dangerous water but even foot deep water that I can't clearly see through. This is a practical problem for me because I absolutely love the outdoors and spend tons of time on rivers, lakes, and ponds. This morning I went fishing in what is effectively a swamp. I had to reach out of my kayak and grab a few jug lines to check them for fish. Even though I knew for a fact that the water couldn't have been any deeper than 2 feet in that area, it took a lot for me to reach out and grab those milk jugs. So even though I don't understand why you fear eternity, I know what its like to have a fear that is a practical problem for you.

I don't believe yours is a theological or philosophical issue. I think its mental, or psychological. A few months ago Richard Dawkins said in an interview that he feared the concept of a conscious eternity. He said he believes that its because people's brains aren't wired to comprehend it. I would suggest that many people's brains are wired to comprehend it, but I can understand how some people could have some kind of mental problem with it, just as I have a mental problem with murky water.

My aversion to murky water used to be much worse. I used to not be able to step foot in, or be in a boat on water that I couldn't see far through. Its still a problem in the sense that I'm still physically nervous when I'm boating on it or swimming in it, and I can be quite frightened when I suddenly fall into it (which happens more than I'd like to admit). But today I do swim in murky water, and I do boat on it, whereas before I never would.

What helped me was a few different things. Encouragement from friends, thinking and discussing how safe it actually was, and, finally, repeatedly jumping right in, facing it head on, and realizing that its not something to be paralyzed about. Having friends there helped a lot too.

It might seem that your situation is a bit more difficult because eternity is abstract while murky water is concrete, but you could probably approach it a similar way. Talk with your religious friends about it. Study it. Immerse yourself in the subject as much as you can with people you're comfortable with. Also, if you google it, there are much better guides to overcoming phobias out there.

Good luck, and don't give up.

 

[capefeather]

What you've described is very similar to my thoughts about heaven as mentioned in Theorymon's thread. When I was a child, I had books with answers to Christian children's questions, and one of the answers stuck out to me a lot. I don't even remember what the question was, really, but the book talked about how you'd eventually get bored of every activity and move on from every tragedy (like, say, friends and family not making it). I think it had something to do with trying to justify a heaven where you worship God forever and ever. I just find this a really unsatisfactory answer and a sad aspect of the idea of a Christian/Muslim afterlife. Though, it would still be over a decade before I'd realize I wasn't a theist by any useful sense of the word, so take from that what you will.

 

[chimp]

Thanks, guys. This thread has been very helpful. I think most of the problem comes from my own interpretation of the afterlife. I mean, I'm sure it is way way way different then we can even begin to comprehend, so most of my thoughts get stuck somewhere in our limited knowledge of what the afterlife and the concept of eternity actually is.

 

[Professor Birch]

I just came across this thread and you just reminded me that I used to be like this. Currently, I am 15 years old(16 in about a week) and I used to constantly think about the afterlife when I was 8-11. Being at a younger age made it even harder to comprehend the idea that we will live forever and this would often keep me awake for many nights. The issue I had was that if we live forever after life on Earth, what is there to live for? In order to stop this, I would just enjoy the life I'm living and you should do the same. Realize what you have done in life and what makes you happy. Then, when the time comes for death, you will be ready for it and will embrace chilling with God. Not sure if I helped in any way. By the way, I am a Roman Catholic and also do not fear death, more of the thought of what happens afterwards.

 

[Flaccus]

In this year of our Lord, MMXIV,

Please, forgive me, friend, if I am entirely too late to your post to contribute to you in a meaningful way, but pray that whatever it is that I do indeed contribute here is worthwhile, though these few lines might more be marginalia amidst your more poignant questions.

I'm a Catholic Christian

Even before my conversion to Christ and His Church, I was overwhelmed by the seemingly illimitable depth of the Catholic tradition and the finding that that depth was not strictly on account of the span of time in which She has subsisted, but that in every age the Church has had a rich depth of tradition. Perhaps one of the most striking facets of that tradition are Her saints, who in every age since Her institution by Christ have been marvels especially on these questions of last things but also on these questions of the things of this world. Yes, the Church has her armies of theologians, each ready to expound his system of dogmatic inquiry, but the Church has not been without her share of philosophers, who themselves are ready to investigate this world.

I mean, basically everything we know about existence comes to an end eventually. People die. Empires fall. Even STARS eventually die and explode and form a black-hole that not even light can survive in.

The student of nature, which we would hope to be, does indeed note that he resides in a world that is composed both of generation and corruption, of beginnings and ends, for whatever is immediately experiential is finite, and finite things are composed, of act and potency, and it is that play between potency and act that is the very ground of generation and corruption. If a thing were not composed of this potential and actuality, this potency and act, then there would be no mode in which it could be that it were not nor a mode that it is that it could not be, but these are what are precisely necessary for our experience of these things.

Though the student of nature finds these things in his immediate experience, reason leads the student to a thing that is beyond generation and corruption, to the cause of all, that is itself without that composition, and it is there that the student finds eternity. Eternity, that existence which is itself pure act without potency, that impassibly is without corruption, is discovered in a posterior way by first knowing corruptible things.

A good introduction to these things might be found in the writings of two of the Church's great doctors, Augustine and Aquinas. Augustine's City of God begins with many of these questions. Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles all the better expounds them.

Heaven goes FOREVER. It will never cease. Nothing comes after it. There is no beginning because there is no end.

This source of all finite goods, of all generations, and subsequently, but only as a remedial cause, their corruptions, this Eternity too would be the source of Heaven. Insofar as it is chiefly the beatific vision of the faithful, we say that it is created; Heaven too is finite. Insofar as it will be world without end, that it will not see corruption itself, we say that it is eternal, and sometimes even call it eternity itself, but only by way of analogy.

. . . but I just can't stop thinking about what comes next after our final breath.

In a way, this is quite good, especially in the context of the Christian tradition. Christians are frequently exhorted to meditate on the four last things (Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell) in order to better refine how we live now. When we dwell on the end of things, especially our own ends, we tend to better execute the means.

may Truth and Love prevail.

 

[Superpowerdude]

I have skimmed through the comments but the way I see it is, we can't even fathom what heaven (or afterlife if you want to call it that) actually feels like so I don't think we will get bored of it, it's just that we don't understand it now.

My main concern is apparently not having my human body with me in heaven, like it feels like me and being a spirit without a body if that is the case would feel so foreign lol also like being around people in heaven not in their physical body would seem a bit awkward, for those that have wives/husbands and believe in an afterlife don't you think it would be weird being able to recognise them without their human body?

Idk all this stuff seems weird for us now because it is so foreign, I'm sure when death comes it will somehow feel natural

 

[TUO]

I had a really shitty Christian Living teacher, but she said one good thing. "The idea of god and heaven is above us. Because of that, we shouldn't try to fit it into our brain." or something along those lines. I don't believe Catholic Christians should be concerned with what happens, but just use Heaven as a goal to be the best versions of ourselves. Don't try to comprehend it, just believe. But yeah, outside of that my teacher was really shit

 

[Shiny Magikarp]

I had a really shitty Christian Living teacher, but she said one good thing. "The idea of god and heaven is above us. Because of that, we shouldn't try to fit it into our brain." or something along those lines. I don't believe Catholic Christians should be concerned with what happens, but just use Heaven as a goal to be the best versions of ourselves. Don't try to comprehend it, just believe. But yeah, outside of that my teacher was really shit

I'm not trying to belittle anyone beliefs so I will keep it brief but, this outlines my problem with most religions. They tell you to forgo logic and critical reasoning you have be endowed with and tell you to just believe. Humans are naturally curious; they wish to know what they do not. The thing is we do not know if we even have a soul; if there is an afterlife that includes heaven and hell, reincarnation and nirvana, something we can not comprehend, or in the end, a state of nothingness. And who is to say the afterlife is the end? There could be a after-afterlife for all we know. Advances in biology could bring a state of immortality to this life so you never have to experience an afterlife. There is only one thing which we are certain of is you are currently living the one life you know you have, use it wisely.

 

[Flaccus]

In this year of our Lord, MMXIV,

Please, pray that my comments here contribute what is worthwhile, edifying the readers.

I have skimmed through the comments but the way I see it is, we can't even fathom what heaven (or afterlife if you want to call it that) actually feels like so I don't think we will get bored of it, it's just that we don't understand it now.

While the theological traditions out of which these questions arise would admit that these things are beyond the power of our intellect to know as they are in themselves, as is admitted by any of the articles of faith (those dogmas that must be revealed in order to be professed), there is an underlying notion to the entirety of holy religion that man might come to understand something of these things by way of analogy, that is in likeness to what we do know.

For all things that are have at least in common that they are, and from that likeness, others are found to be, and those likenesses offer to us a way to proceed from what is known to what was previously unknown.

My main concern is apparently not having my human body with me in heaven, like it feels like me and being a spirit without a body if that is the case would feel so foreign lol also like being around people in heaven not in their physical body would seem a bit awkward, for those that have wives/husbands and believe in an afterlife don't you think it would be weird being able to recognise them without their human body?

In the revelation of Heaven from our Lord to His holy apostles and from that revelation to the development of doctrines flowing from it, as we have come to understand it more clearly, the Church teaches that Man in his nature is composed of body and soul. The Catechism of the Catholic Church promulgated after the Second Vatican Council puts it this way: "The human person . . . is a being at once corporeal and spiritual (CCC No. 362)" and again "The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the 'form' of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature (CCC No. 365)."

"Form" here is used in that classical philosophical sense, that it is the underlying cause of the matter to be this body or that body.

That we possess but one nature, not two, leads the doctors of the Church to teach that the soul when separated from the body yearns for that union. Take for instance what the angelic doctor says in the tertiary part of the Summa Theologica in his question on whether the happiness of the soul will increase by its union to its body after the resurrection.

Now every imperfect thing desires its perfection. Hence the separated soul naturally desires reunion with the body and on account of this desire which proceeds from the soul's imperfection its operation whereby it is borne towards God is less intense.
[St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III, Q. 93., A. I., respondio]

may Truth and Love prevail.