Quick side note. Had a thought. Wanted to say something. But I aknowledge the importance of the essay that's due tomorrow. I was just talking to a friend who *casually* mentioned heaven as a sub-plot point to a story. And I sort of glazy-eyed responded that I "don't like the idea of heaven." This is a sort of boring, ill-thought-out, response to a someone deep idea. Well. I percieve it to be a fairly surface level issue, but that's just my agnostic upbringing. Anyway, it's deep to may americans. Right. So to elaborate. I present you with two (2) issues with the general concept of heaven, emphasizing things that make me generally uncomfortable about it (aside from monotheism, ignorance, christian-right, etc.)
(1) Mind Body Seperation
Obviously a critical component of heaven, being that our bodies *tend* to stay on earth (exluding the scene in Jesus Christ Superstar, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, wherein Jesus speaks to his father ("God") about some sort of acent - wait - he doesn't actually rise in the musical - I don't remember - a beautiful song is played after the scene though) and this is important to note because mind-body seperations are hard to come across. Actually. Not too many well documented cases exist (exluding drugs). In *fact*, I would go so far as to say that a seperation of mind and body is impossible based on two (2) things: (1) There is no evidence to support the mind as physically seperate from our nervous system and (2) self identity is complicated and I don't think the mind controls the body - I think the body has created what we consider to be the mind, or spirit, or id or whatever the fuck - Also, I don't actually think the "mind" is legitimate, but rather a word to explain a complicated neural system that (seems to) over-analyze certain aspects of our existance.
(2) Infinity/Eternity
There is a maximum quantity that humans can conceptualize. It's difficult for us to mentally realize numbers in the 100,000s, millions, billions, etc. Think of 2 people you know. Now think of 10. Now think of 100! It gets difficult, and we sort of just start to lump large numbers together - so when someone says '3000 people were killed today' we sort of just conceptualize it as one large unit, rather than the actual quantity. With that being said, it is impossible for us to handle the concept of infinity (side note: this is an interesting aspect of Syntax, which is an infinite system in itself, yet we have a pretty good cognitive handle on it). So! Temporally speaking, the idea of "enternity" is just a representation of infinity, but in terms of time. This is impossible. At least for us to wrap our brain around. Heaven is viewed an eternal state. And we (as humans) are *so* casual to accept this as reality - its difficult for me to accept this idea, especially when factoring in the seperation of my "spirit" or "mind" from my biological self - which is, by the way, the only self we possess - spirt and mind are branches from our neural mainframe. We built spirituality.
Obviously my arguements are more ranty and quantitative than intellegent and qualitative, but it is how i feel.
