JackDaydream wrote: ↑February 12th, 2022, 8:58 am
I am raising this question because it seems to be an underlying idea of religious thought. I was raised in a Catholic background and grew up with a great fear of going to 'hell's. Having read many different perspectives, I am interested in that of Buddhism, but have been aware of the idea of heaven and hell being part of this. One image which seems to stand out is, 'the hell of hungry ghosts'.
In the various traditions of religion, the idea of heaven and hell stand out. The street preachers speak of hell as something to be feared. Psychedelic rock often speaks of the heaven within. The concepts of heaven and hell have been explored by Aldous Huxley in his discussion of hallucinogenics and states of mind, and William Blake spoke of the perception of heaven and hell, especially in his 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell'.
The area of philosophy debate appears to me to be about to what extent heaven and hell are social constructs or states of awareness. Also, to what extent are they are about life in an afterlife or in this life? So, I am asking about how the concepts of heaven and hell within religious thinking or other perspectives may be understood philosophically.
The concept of Hell is a major source of early cognitive dissonance I had with my childhood Christian religion (which I ultimately turned away from).
I've always found the concept of infinite punishment for finite crime to be a ludicrous notion in the face of a deity that ostensibly values justice. I know there are different theories of justice and retribution theory is one of them, but it's never personally sat well with me: two wrongs don't make a right, as it were. I'm human like anyone else and it's conceivable that I could lash out at someone that wronged me, but my personal ethic (at least while not emotionally flustered by some great harm) is that I would rather not hurt someone just because they have caused hurt (and while I agree with the existence of prisons, ostensibly that would be for rehabilitative theory of justice and for the truly hopeless to protect society more than hurting the wrongdoer).
I would consider any deity that utilizes infinite punishment, even for absolute garbage like Hitler, to be an irredeemable monster.
Similarly I've always had a hard time coming to terms with what heaven even might be like. I can't imagine existing for an infinite amount of time without growing bored: perhaps an omnimax deity would have some solution to this, but it feels like there are still only a finite amount of things that would entertain me for a finite amount of time. In order to get around this, I would have to substantially change what I am; but then it wouldn't be
me that's in Heaven. That's a conundrum to me.