Hi fellow Hiveians,
Today I wanted to talk a little bit of religious philosophy in terms of the world we live in!
Is This Heaven?
I had a thought in my mind a few weeks ago.. and it's been a bit for me to be in the right mindset to flesh it out!
Are we in heaven now? Is this a place where we can learn great lessons and grow?
Do we have the concept of heaven wrong, based on faulty interpretations of text and skewing of historical record for political reasons?
These are some pretty heavy questions! I don't know if I'll be able to eloquently convey what I was thinking when I originally wrote the thought down, but I'm going to give it a whirl!
A place that is completely free of need, hardship and other things like that sounds pretty boring, in a lot of ways. Not to say that hardship like seeing someone stabbed in front of you is not a terrible thing and as many people as possible should never see that type of thing, but a place where normal hardships such as loss of a job or something are not utterly avoided. I kind of think of it like a tree in the wind. There have been science experiments where trees are given as much sunshine and nutrients as it possibly needs, BUT it is never exposed to wind and they keep it sheltered away from it. The tree gets to be a few years old, and 10 or 15 feet tall or something and they take the wind-protection away. The tree has never experienced the hardship of those types of elements and in a light breeze, the tree falls over because the structure of the tree hasn't been conditioned to support itself in the face of wind.
I think of this in a similar way to adversity and hardship in life - if we have zero hardship or adversity, how are we supposed to excel and grow in life? Trust fund kids, and the kids of ultra-wealthy people are often pieces of shit because they have absolutely no sense of the real world since they've been sheltered completely in a bubble their whole lives. Not always, but very often. This is similar to the tree where it is never exposed to a slight breeze from something it isn't used to, so in the face of adversity it collapses.
Why would we think that a place like Heaven, where there is supposedly no adversity, complete peace and all that crap, is not only a legitimate place, but a place that people would desire to go to? It almost seems a little bit like the ultimate casino of cardinal sins. You can indulge yourself all day, every day and have no consequences. You can never commit to doing something challenging because you have no hardships or adversities since everything is taken care of. The list of variables there goes on quite a way! A place like that sounds far more like a place of sin than a place of ultimate good.
I wonder if where we are living now, for most of us, is really what we could consider "heaven" in the biblical sense. Earth is a fantastic place, squished between all kinds of insane bits of chaos in the universe. The golden zone in the sun, as well as with the other planets taking the gravitational pull for the comets and shit out there. In so many ways, where we are living right now for sure sounds like it would be Heaven.
We know that history is written, and rewritten based on who is in charge at the time. It's pretty insidious and fascinating at the same time because we quite literally just lived through one of the most substantial historical events of the last hundred years with the Flu that shut down the whole world. The narrative was one way, it turned out it was proven false and then everything is trying to get rewritten as if it didn't happen the way it did and the crimes against humanity were not committed despite the fact that they did.
This goes to the thought that the Bible, which is full of historical information, was written quite a long ways away from the actual events and since it was first written there have been many rewrites of it. Then we have the example of the King James Bible where it was written in a specific way that the King of England decided to influence his particular reign.
This isn't necessarily a challenge of the religious faith of Christianity but rather a challenge of the underlying power structure that rules it such as the Church, which is just like a government. They are incredibly corrupt and many times don't even have the best interest of the people that it serves, but rather it tries to maintain control over the power it exerts and has. Knowing the corrupt things they have done, it would not at all surprise me to learn the frequency of things they have intentionally modified in the Bible to fit their narrative, and then locking away the previous version from being accessible to others, to keep their narrative intact.
It could very well have been that this "heaven" concept is essentially what we are living in right now, and that we are truly in the best place, but it was struck out from the Bible.
For me, it goes back to the foundational corruption of the power structure. I know that there are a lot of things that those in power have changed because they didn't like it as it challenged their grip on power. The Christian church has been in a position of incredible power and influence for many hundreds of years, dating back to the 1200's roughly. The information they have at their fingertips is vast, and a key theme for them over time is that they needed to exert as much control over their subjects as possible. Many that challenged their specific power were killed from it. Not in the terms of Persian challengers, but people from within that challenged the dogma.
What if we really are living in Heaven right now, and we don't know it?!
It was a really fun thought experiment, because there is certainly a lot of possibility to it! We have a beautiful world, full of good when you remove the outliers. In a lot of ways, I would consider where we are right now to be Heaven!
What about you, do you think there is some validity to this trail of thought? Let me know in the comments!
-CmplXty. Real human written content, never AI. All pictures are mine unless otherwise stated
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I think that what determines whether a realm is heavenly or hellish is based on what kind of beings are there, not just on the external world. So I would disagree with saying that we are in heaven and exclude the opposite and the contrast that we can see. Although there are those who say that the whole universe is perfect and heavenly, in their own way, and there are also those who see the opposite.
Nor do I believe that we need difficulties to give meaning to our lives. I think people think that heaven is boring because they tend to look for happiness in external things. But when you have no desires to satisfy externally, you can realize that you can be happy just by being. When you are satisfied you may not feel the need to do anything because it is futile. You already feel good as you are. We are so caught up in desires that we believe they are in control of our happiness.
If you look in the Bible (and I may not be the best exegete) we can see how when Adam was in paradise and felt a desire - which was caused by his feeling of loneliness - he was automatically satisfied with the creation of Eve. So it's strange to think that it would be boring in a place where we can have basically any desire or need satisfied. If you think of it this way.
However, I reiterate that when one is well inside, desires are not in charge of making one happy, but one is already happy. Desire fulfillment does not make us happy, but only leaves us in the same state we were in before we had a problem. If desire fulfillment is the solution, then the problem is the desire.
No desires, no problem. At least some see it that way.
But the best for you. Best regards!
At the very moment that the feeling of boredom arises, something may simply appear out of thin air that makes us be amused, so to speak. For example.
I definitely think so. Had similar thoughts visit me every now and then, especially the part on how Heaven is generally described as this promised land full of all the good things Earthly life has to offer without any of the bad. I think the narrative may have some missing pieces because given enough time, a good and easily life leads to entropy. No challenge, growth and development. Super boring, also. What would we spend our years doing Heaving when the welcoming fun ends and we got used to the place :)
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