a cheery thought on the bus
I was sat on the bus today, thinking. For some reason I got to thinking about afterlives.
Pretty much any concept of the afterlife is bearable except hell.. I know that's fairly obvious, but there you go. I'm a fairly obvious kind of guy.
Think about it..
annihilation - wouldn't care would cease to exist
joining a greater consciousness/god/whatever - weird but again would cease to be self-aware so dealable with
reincarnation - pain in the ass going through life to get to the fun bits again but again, wouldn't realise I'd already done it and you get to try some different stuff to what you tried this time round
heaven - best of the bunch. Or else it wouldn't be heaven
All good and well. The beliefs essentially stack up as don't carry on, carry on in a new form, carry on in the same form in a different place. But hell is unthinkable. I think someone once conceptualised hell as being like here but going on for ever (basically saying that that would be hell). That's dumb. Sometimes life can be a chore here and life going on for ever here would be an eternal chore but there's so many opportunities to take joy in small pleasures - a glass of wine, laughter, a mountaintop etc etc - that you could deal with it. Now imagine the worst parts of life as we know it and imagine that there could be no respite from them. Gah.
Oftentimes when I start things like this, I have no idea where I'm going. This is no exception.. ha.
Often people questioning beliefs in a deity of some description will say, "how can you believe a good being would send people there". I would tend to struggle with the same question, although I still believe in God. But I can't help but wonder, what if there was such a place and you went there of your own choosing?
Frightening.
Pretty much any concept of the afterlife is bearable except hell.. I know that's fairly obvious, but there you go. I'm a fairly obvious kind of guy.
Think about it..
annihilation - wouldn't care would cease to exist
joining a greater consciousness/god/whatever - weird but again would cease to be self-aware so dealable with
reincarnation - pain in the ass going through life to get to the fun bits again but again, wouldn't realise I'd already done it and you get to try some different stuff to what you tried this time round
heaven - best of the bunch. Or else it wouldn't be heaven
All good and well. The beliefs essentially stack up as don't carry on, carry on in a new form, carry on in the same form in a different place. But hell is unthinkable. I think someone once conceptualised hell as being like here but going on for ever (basically saying that that would be hell). That's dumb. Sometimes life can be a chore here and life going on for ever here would be an eternal chore but there's so many opportunities to take joy in small pleasures - a glass of wine, laughter, a mountaintop etc etc - that you could deal with it. Now imagine the worst parts of life as we know it and imagine that there could be no respite from them. Gah.
Oftentimes when I start things like this, I have no idea where I'm going. This is no exception.. ha.
Often people questioning beliefs in a deity of some description will say, "how can you believe a good being would send people there". I would tend to struggle with the same question, although I still believe in God. But I can't help but wonder, what if there was such a place and you went there of your own choosing?
Frightening.
Labels: musings, pretentious crap
