Heavy Thoughts

Tonight OSU's Socratic Society was offering a debate from two scholars regarding Heaven, Hell, and the afterlife.  I was interested in going to it.  I went to a debate offered by this group about a year ago that was debating the existence of God.  That was a pretty interesting and well done debate.  It raised some interesting points to ponder, although it didn't really settle the debate on the subject in my mind.  I probably should have gone tonight but as you must have realized by now I didn’t go.  Mostly I knew that if I came home I was going to be here alone (Kris is at a fraternity meeting) and would probably pretty much just watch TV all night.  That seemed pretty pathetic and I thought I ought to get out there and do something.  But the debate started at 6:30 which I am not saying is late, but that wound have meant I would have to find something to do in Corvallis for an hour and half to kill time and the guest arguing against Heaven and an afterlife was an atheist.  I would have been a little more interested to hear a perspective of someone who just has a different point of view but still believes in some greater power.  I feel like my belief and the questions I ponder regarding the subject aren't with the existence in general of God but are more related to what IS God.  I feel that there are many different paths to and understandings of God and I would be more interested in reflecting on that subject.  I guess the Socratic society offered a debate on this subject in October but I didn’t know it was happening then and I missed it.  Anyway I got in my car and rather than going somewhere to burn time I just went home.  I did get the dishes done and the mail cleaned up so it wasn’t a total bust of accomplishment, but I was headed for the couch to relax and decided in place of being there this evening I would do a little of own research on the subject of heaven and hell and the afterlife.

I do try to pay good attention to what website I look at.  I want real information not gossip, but sometime subjects like this are not so fact based anyway and I found some interesting sort of blog entries and personal commentaries.  The first website I found that was more commentary was helium.com.  They had a sort of vote going on about the topic of heaven as a place or a state of being.  One entry really caught my eye because it was pretty much exactly what I have always thought and wondered.  I added the entry which is by esmani.  I have had this same view since childhood; the part about hell and how it could exist if there was a good was one of the first things that started to turn me away for the traditional thinking about God and religion, no one at my church seemed to ever answer that question and I couldn’t rectify the issue in my mind either.

As a child I often spent sleepless nights wondering about physical aspects of god. Is there a physical god sitting on a throne somewhere in heaven watching us? If yes where in the universe is this heaven? How big is our universe? No matter how vast it is, it must have a border. What is beyond the border? I never got an answer from anyone. As I pondered over the question for many years I realized you cannot apply physical limitations to spirituality .The soul cannot have the same physical limitations as our body. Our consciousness can transcend our physical state.

The notion of heaven and hell as a place you end up in death has been told time and again to justify moral and ethical obligations. And yes, it might even be described in scriptures to further strengthen the impact. But if heaven is physically real than so must hell. Therein lies my problem. I cannot accept a God that is capable of physical torture even in the name of retribution. Even I can find in me to forgive those who have done harm, what more an all loving, all forgiving almighty. The idea doesn't hold water with me.

Heaven is state of our consciousness being bliss. If heaven is a physical place than God might as well made it right here. We cannot look at creation as a flawed production line where afterward God separates his good and rejected products to heaven and hell bins.

I guess I am on the being side of the argument. I think that God and heaven is more of a state of mind than a reality.  I think it all fills a need, and if believing in something makes us better than it really doesn’t matter if you call that energy God or Allah or whatever.  I do think there is something more than just you and me in the world, but I am not sure if I think it ends in a blissful state of mind, a pearly gate, or ashes in the ground; or maybe we are all reincarnated and go on as some other energy, that is the mystery and so when someone dies they have found the answer and now they know the secret.