I’m guessing only Christian’s were interviewed… I will never go to heaven as there is no such place.
Okay, but, irrefutably faced with “the option”(accepting the offer by way of accepting whatever dogma, after death), would you refuse?
The way its written(judgement is full of people who don’t understand why they are getting in, as well as those who think they should have, and don’t), that’s pretty much what it would take to end up in the other place, and you’re right, its stupid they ask people the “will you” question, rather than “do you want to?” Oh, and, “do you understand even the most basic premise of your professed beliefs?”
I would dearly love to believe that there is something other than oblivion waiting. However I know that my yearning for this doesn’t make it true, and that yearning is probably the source of the fairy tales everyone tells about this.
If I had proof that the afterlife existed and I faced either eternal joy or eternal suffering based on some dogma I had to obey…? Fuck that’s oppressive. Makes me feel like some cosmic kid’s action figure. What does my choice matter with that kind of coercion? Maybe oblivion isn’t so bad after all.
The only thing I really believe about the ‘afterlife’, or whatever you want to call it, is that what we observe as ‘reality’ is only the tip of the iceberg of actual reality. In practice, it’s unknowable and therefore not worth worrying about. What’s happening right now is the only truly knowable thing, and right now I need to get off my arse and go to work.
Yeah I’m not fool enough to call myself a gnostic atheist, and I do agree that there is much we don’t know. Recently I’ve thought a lot about what a narrow band of sensory experiences we rely on to perceive a vast and complex world around us. So I think what you say is true even in a very literal everyday kind of way. We barely have a pinhole to look at this universe through. Science is all about working around that so we can understand more.
Sadly, I would assume oblivion was no longer a choice at that point, but yeah, given the choice, reincarnation or oblivion for me, or I’mma at least ask them to let me see what hell’s like before deciding.
Frankly I find heaven the greater mystery. I can imagine many forms of eternal suffering. But perfect bliss? That’s really not in our nature. I’m not sure there is any version of that where I would be “me” anymore.
Maybe it’s just hell or oblivion.
Heaven is spending eternity singing “glory, glory” to a narcissist. So it’s just a form of hell.
Valhalla sounds OK, though: fight all day, drink and fuck all night, no negative consequences. Though I suppose there’d be a point at which it becomes boring. But it’s not for eternity, since in the Norse world view, the whole world including the gods gets destroyed.
Exactly my thinking on the matter.
Can’t refuse something that doesn’t have a basis of believing. But if presented with something substantial to sway that opinion (God would know what would work, presumably) I’d accept, with conditions. First being the ability to opt out of eternity at some point, because even total bliss unending could be torture if you’re aware of that sense of time. Second, I’ve got a few questions for this supreme being about his past work and moral choices.
If it ended like in Heinlein’s “Job: A Comedy of Justice” I’d be okay with both the eternity and the answered questions.
So you don’t believe you’ll go to heaven.
Seems to me that the survey could easily include people like you and me.
Muslims believe in heaven too.
The rapture probably already happened
Nobody was chosen
That’s gonna be my go-to line from now on whenever someone uses hell as a threat.
My girlfriend got Raptured. God even took all her clothes and the cat. I just hope she’s waiting for me
Grant Imahara.
Except DB Cooper.
Article does not mention what percent do not believe they will go to heaven simply because it does not exist.
I definitely do not believe half of Americans would go to Heaven. And basically none of the half that thinks they will.
“I don’t know if half of you will go to Heaven half as well as I should like; and I’d like less than half of you to not go there half as well as you deserve.”
Based on the voting record most of the people who think heaven exists aren’t very good Christians. So I think the number is much lower than half.
it’s what respondents ‘believe’. and most of them will believe that despite the actual odds being so far against them that they’ve already got their non-refundable one-way reservations for the bad place.
Makes sense given the Rapture is a fringe belief.
An itinerant revival preacher made it up in the 1800s. “Can you point to the Bible, chapter and verse please, where I can learn about the Rapture?”
And that’s why I don’t argue with Christians. I hit 'em hard, below the belt, don’t leave them an out, don’t concede anything. Not a great way to argue unless your goal is to send your opponent into a blathering fury.
I love using this tactic. When I was in the scouts, my troop was attached to a church like many are. One day we were going into the church to do a merit badge class, and the scout leader who hated me (because I was basically him at that age) told me to take off my hat.
Of course, being a teenager who loved challenging authority, I asked why. He said because it was disrespectful to God. I asked him who said it was disrespectful, and he told me it was in the Bible.
I picked up a Bible, handed it to him, and asked him to show me the passage.
I didn’t get to do merit badge class that day.
Oh yeah? So I guess that’s why Jews take off their yarmulkes when they go indoors or are in prayer, right? Oh, they don’t? That’s strange…
Whole huge wide swathes of what people insist passes for modern Christianity are basically what amounts to fan fiction. Dumber people will fight you tooth and nail insisting that various culturally ingrained tropes and details really are in the book when in fact they’re not, but you’ll find that the religious apologists with a little more brainpower at their disposal have instead invented an array of tricks and deflections to downplay or just outright dismiss these discrepancies.
A few of my favorites:
The big one, of course, is that pretty much the entire modern interpretation of hell, including what it looks like and how it works, is taken entirely from the Divine Comedy. Particularly Dante’s Inferno, and to a lesser extent John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The bible itself is actually curiously silent on the location, mechanics, accessibility, and even temperature of hell. The Book of Revelation does make a reference to the “lake of fire” multiple times but it’s not actually outright stated that this is hell itself, merely where the devil, the beast, and the false prophet will be cast after their final judgement.
While we’re at it, it’s the Book of Revelation, not the book of “Revelations,” plural, no matter how many times you’ve watched the Matrix trilogy.
How many wise men visited Jesus in the manger? Wrong! The bible never actually specifies, not even once. Three gifts are mentioned, but the number of magi bearing them is never referenced. The only thing we know is that they were plural, so it must have been at minimum two. It’s only assumed that there were three, one per gift. Further, the now traditional names of Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthazar are extrabiblical fabrications that stem from the Excerpta Latina Barbari which was an 8th century Latin translation of a Greek compilation from some 200 years earlier, but still well after the heyday of Big J himself, not to mention anyone who could have been a living eyewitness. At least they managed to make some cameos in Chrono Trigger, though, so we got something out of the whole debacle.
Also, only the gospel of Matthew mentions the magi at all.
Infamously, in 1 Kings 7:23-26 as well as a reiteration in 2 Chronicles 4:2-5, the bible describes in some detail a presumably circular cauldron which, if we believe the dimensions as stated, would force pi to be equal to three. No mention is made as to the involvement of Bergholt Stuttley Johnson in all of this, but in light of that maybe we can’t rule it out. Either way, the notion that pi is in fact not equal to three is obviously thus an extrabiblical interpolation in and of itself, never mind the fact that it’s part of the math that makes the modern world work and, among other things, keeps satellites from falling out of the sky.
The notion that “Lucifer” is one of the names of the devil is also a modern-ish misunderstanding, and the story that “everyone knows” (possibly courtesy of the Spawn comics, or Jay and Silent Bob) about the devil being a rebellious angel who was cast out of heaven by god and cratered so hard he landed in hell is not really supported by the bible and is probably a myth absorbed from other nearby cultures. The name is only mentioned once in the entire bible, in Isaiah 14. It’s never actually said that whoever Lucifer may be was actually an angel, and in fact it’s understood that he is actually supposed to be the mortal king of Babylon at the time. Nor anything about how he might have became the devil after falling from heaven. Ezekiel 28 is also trotted out as allegedly being the other half of the Lucifer/casting out of Satan story, but the object of god’s ire here is the King of Tyre, also a mortal as explicitly mentioned by god twice. Halfway through god starts calling the dude a cherub and claiming he was present in the Garden of Eden, so suddenly mid sentence he’s talking about somebody else? This is god, right, an entity to famously direct he blows up entire cities because a couple of their residents piss him off? And on that note, god clearly burns whoever he’s talking about to a crisp and kills him very dead by the end of the passage so that doesn’t make any sense either, even if all the purple prose about cherubs and Eden and blamelessness and so forth weren’t just mockery for getting ideas above his station (which seems a bit more plausible). So even if said entity were the devil he’s not ruling in hell; god killed him.
Revelation is no help there, either. The devil is just there already by then, with no details given on where he came from.
We could go on like this forever.
Dante’s Inferno, and to a lesser extent John Milton’s Paradise Lost
Took so many words out of my mouth! :)
Grew up in a white-bread Presbyterian church, nothing crazy, but I know enough to ask hard questions. Fucking enrages Christians.
“You drive a huge SUV. Why?”
“Makes me safer.”
“Yeah, but you’re making everyone smaller less safe. What do you think Jesus would say about that?”
“Shut up Shalafi! Not doing this with you.”
And it’s not like we ever argued religion in the office, that was a one-off.
keeps satellites from falling out of the sky
Clearly Satan keeps the satellites up in order to deceive us into thinking that science works.
An itinerant revival preacher made it up in the 1800s.
Kind of like Christianity, but more recent.
Didn’t you guys get Raptured the other day? Oh man, it was incredible. Guess you weren’t Godly enough. Heaven is even better than they said it’d be. So long, suckers! I’m off to smoke a blunt and play some poker with Jesus.
What’s the fun of poker when the other player’s omniscient?
To be fair if you actually pay attention it is either not something you can know and/or is extremely unlikely to happen. The people assured they will go to heaven might not because of their pride.
it is either not something you can know and/or is extremely unlikely to happen
The former refers to the end of the world “I’ll come like a thief in the night.” Hopefully not on my sheets like that other thief did.
Do I want to? Versus what other options? Even against in the demiurge, escaping this reality is low on my list of priorities, at best.
I’d pray I don’t, but it seems counter productive.
I’d like to go to Valhalla, but chances are I’ll be washing up on the shores of Despond in Avernus like everyone else. :P
Let’s dance, Elohim
I think there’ll be more Chinese people in heaven than Americans
Will they have time to get all the way to Yaughton when the rapture starts?
