Yesterday I wrote:
The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?
At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.
As a reader points out, something like this thought is already to be found in John Henry Cardinal Newman, Heaven is Heaven Only for the Holy. Excerpt:
If then a man without religion (supposing it possible) were admitted into heaven, doubtless he would sustain a great disappointment. Before, indeed, he fancied that he could be happy there; but when he arrived there, he would find no discourse but that which he had shunned on earth, no pursuits but those he had disliked or despised, nothing which bound him to aught else in the universe, and made him feel at home, nothing which he could enter into and rest upon.
One might even go so far as to say that heaven would be hell for the worldly person. And what the worldly person imagines heaven to be might reveal itself as hell, as in the Twilight Zone episode, A Nice Place to Visit.
I see that London Ed has some thoughts on the topic. I agree with him that 'the objection from boredom' is no good. I'm never bored here, why should I be bored there? Never bored here, only tired. But that's due to the bag of bones and guts that makes up my samsaric vehicle. Free of crass embodiment, things might well be different on the far side.
You say I'm speculating? True enough, but if a philosopher can't speculate, who can?
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