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No

Only Judeism

Only Islam

Yes to both Judeism and Islam

[freeformschooler]

Also, while I'm here - and not to distract from the current discussion re: morality etc. I have been wondering for a long time what various Christian peoples think about Hinduism. The reason being is that the Hindu religion, unlike its safe for export (?) cousin Buddhism, actually proposes the existence of a surpeme god like figure much like YHVH. However, there are some big differences in the religion itself:

1. not monotheistic
2. people of India do not seem have, on average, the same kind of belief in separation of culture and religion that christian peoples often have which leads to interesting things like a large population of atheists who identify as hindus
3. less followers, but still a significant amount of the world population

And yet I have never heard it mentioned in churches, even when other religious identities or non-identities ie satanism, atheism, islam, judaism are brought up and bashed. It's not so surprising that you don't hear Shintoism or Zoroastrianism brought up - neither are on Fox News - but near everyone's seen the ladies with bindis or heard of Bollywood and sacred cow marriages. The religious thing is just a part of the Indian stereotype, so why is it an untouched subject? Is this exclusive to protestants in the sticks, or is hinduism ignored in european catholic churches as well?

[Il Palazzo]

But Roman Catholics are just as capable of saying those things, too.

No mate, we don't have those here. While everybody is capable of saying anything, and there's always a bunch of extreme cases in the tails of the bell curve, those are just below the detection limits.

Now, killing homosexuals - that can be sometimes heard.

[DeKaFu]

Also, as to entrance into heaven, that leads to an interesting point: Are you still you when you go there. Your belief, I assume, is dualistic. The Body and Soul are separable. But your soul is not you as you are now. Your bodily capacities and your mental abilities define who you are. Lose the body, lose the self. Same thing. You'd go to heaven to find you are not you...it's like if someone hit you quite hard on the head, and you developed a different personality.

See, this is why I've always found the idea of heaven intensely creepy. I just don't believe the human mind is compatible with eternity. Can you imagine doing anything, even your favourite thing in the world, for 100 years without it starting to get to you, wear away at you, fray you around the edges? Maybe? How about 10,000 years? 100,000, 10 million, a thousand times that? Because that's what heaven seems to be promising. It works the other way too... If you were in tortuous pain for 100 years, it wouldn't be torture anymore, it would be normal life. Humans are inherently adaptable. Never mind the next 100 billion years after that. You can't even say "well maybe you'll experience time faster so it won't actually feel like that long" because it's infinite.

The only way that I can reconcile that is if the thing that carries on after you die does not think and feel in the same way as a human being. And isn't that also terrifying? All bets are off then. At that point heaven and hell could be exactly the same place, populated by those who only feel pain and those who only feel joy and love, regardless of all other factors. Robot souls. Whatever it is, it wouldn't be human and it wouldn't be you.

I'm an ignorant atheist anyway (sorry) so it's all just thought experiments for me, but I've always been curious how believers conceptualize the afterlife.

[Frumple]

As for Greatorder: The basic idea is that the Atman (soul) gets "Karmic Fruits" attached to it, and is recycled until it achieves enough realisation to go to nirvana and go to Brahman.

There's more to reincarnation than eastern traditions, teedo

Probably the more popular, these days, but the belief's popped up in places all over the world, and in sects of most religious traditions. The basic idea's just that the soul (well, some sort of non-physical transferal medium, anyway) comes back, and, well, re-incarnates. Nothing else to it. Sometimes stuff comes with it, sometimes it doesn't. Varies by the tradition.

[Phmcw]

Also, as to entrance into heaven, that leads to an interesting point: Are you still you when you go there. Your belief, I assume, is dualistic. The Body and Soul are separable. But your soul is not you as you are now. Your bodily capacities and your mental abilities define who you are. Lose the body, lose the self. Same thing. You'd go to heaven to find you are not you...it's like if someone hit you quite hard on the head, and you developed a different personality.

See, this is why I've always found the idea of heaven intensely creepy. I just don't believe the human mind is compatible with eternity. Can you imagine doing anything, even your favourite thing in the world, for 100 years without it starting to get to you, wear away at you, fray you around the edges? Maybe? How about 10,000 years? 100,000, 10 million, a thousand times that? Because that's what heaven seems to be promising. It works the other way too... If you were in tortuous pain for 100 years, it wouldn't be torture anymore, it would be normal life. Humans are inherently adaptable. Never mind the next 100 billion years after that. You can't even say "well maybe you'll experience time faster so it won't actually feel like that long" because it's infinite.

The only way that I can reconcile that is if the thing that carries on after you die does not think and feel in the same way as a human being. And isn't that also terrifying? All bets are off then. At that point heaven and hell could be exactly the same place, populated by those who only feel pain and those who only feel joy and love, regardless of all other factors. Robot souls. Whatever it is, it wouldn't be human and it wouldn't be you.

I'm an ignorant atheist anyway (sorry) so it's all just thought experiments for me, but I've always been curious how believers conceptualize the afterlife.

Well it could just turn the "pleasure" and "satisfaction" dial up to eleven. Like a perfect heroin and cocaine mix whose high last forever.

In DF term, put the dwarf in a nice little room with the "hapiness" maxed.

[TD1]

And rip out the boredom meter.

In other words, rip out humanity. I don't want to be on constant high.

[mastahcheese]

@Dwarfy: My personal belief (which in no way coincides with any particular religion) is that:
1: We're put in the universe (earth is too small) for the purpose of learning.
2: It is physically, mentally, and spiritualy impossible to learn everything there is to learn in a single life. (Hell, gender alone makes that impossible, you can't experience both in one life)
3: God is benevolent, and would therefore have the patience to grant us as long of a time as we need to learn.

There's more to it, but I'm busy.

[TD1]

Memory makes the person.

You wouldn't be you. Sure, you'd have the same basic foundation....but life events like culture, and even year of birth, can effet who and what you are. If you were reborn into a good-looking billionaire's body, you could be a self conceited jackass that no one, even your present self, would like.

It's not really you being reborn, just...I don't know, a maybe of you.

@Dwarfy: My personal belief (which in no way coincides with any particular religion) is that:
1: We're put in the universe (earth is too small) for the purpose of learning.
2: It is physically, mentally, and spiritualy impossible to learn everything there is to learn in a single life. (Hell, gender alone makes that impossible, you can't experience both in one life)
3: God is benevolent, and would therefore have the patience to grant us as long of a time as we need to learn.

There's more to it, but I'm busy.

Thanks for the time put into telling me. It does me good to be able to argue what people believe.

[TD1]

I didn't like the younger me. Younger me was fairly stupid. So the thing you said is rather standard in a single life, too.

True-but, barring amnesia, the person you are now was built on the foundation of younger-you.

You wouldn't be you without younger-you. Rebirth takes that away...your past life has absolutely no bearing on your future one.

[penguinofhonor]

Also, as to entrance into heaven, that leads to an interesting point: Are you still you when you go there. Your belief, I assume, is dualistic. The Body and Soul are separable. But your soul is not you as you are now. Your bodily capacities and your mental abilities define who you are. Lose the body, lose the self. Same thing. You'd go to heaven to find you are not you...it's like if someone hit you quite hard on the head, and you developed a different personality.

See, this is why I've always found the idea of heaven intensely creepy. I just don't believe the human mind is compatible with eternity. Can you imagine doing anything, even your favourite thing in the world, for 100 years without it starting to get to you, wear away at you, fray you around the edges? Maybe? How about 10,000 years? 100,000, 10 million, a thousand times that? Because that's what heaven seems to be promising. It works the other way too... If you were in tortuous pain for 100 years, it wouldn't be torture anymore, it would be normal life. Humans are inherently adaptable. Never mind the next 100 billion years after that. You can't even say "well maybe you'll experience time faster so it won't actually feel like that long" because it's infinite.

The only way that I can reconcile that is if the thing that carries on after you die does not think and feel in the same way as a human being. And isn't that also terrifying? All bets are off then. At that point heaven and hell could be exactly the same place, populated by those who only feel pain and those who only feel joy and love, regardless of all other factors. Robot souls. Whatever it is, it wouldn't be human and it wouldn't be you.

I'm an ignorant atheist anyway (sorry) so it's all just thought experiments for me, but I've always been curious how believers conceptualize the afterlife.

This is two steps off from "Hell can't be torturous for that long because the fire would kill your pain receptors". If an omnipotent God existed and he was willing to fully use his powers to reward his followers in heaven, I think he'd be capable of making an enjoyable afterlife without this weird Stepford Wives heaven atheists seem terrified of. Sure, it seems impossible to make people happy for eternity, but it also seems impossible for a guy to die and come back to life three days later.

[TD1]

Sure, it seems impossible to make a human race with free will, but which will always choose good....

It's God, right? He can do it, if he can make a place where pain is eternal and always as if the poker had just touched your skin...

[Il Palazzo]

What's this free will you're talking about?

[Frumple]

... huh. Y'know, with some cursory re-prodding, m'kinda' forced to ask (probably again, it's been a fair few years since I last prodded actual theology texts and whatnot) if the bible actually says at any point mankind was given free will. Seeing plenty about choices, but very little about them being free and a fair handful of stuff that's in complete contradiction to the concept.

Someone remind me where the free will tradition sprung up from?

[Arx]

If I remember correctly, the main basis starts from where God didn't make it impossible to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

[penguinofhonor]

Sure, it seems impossible to make a human race with free will, but which will always choose good....

It's God, right? He can do it, if he can make a place where pain is eternal and always as if the poker had just touched your skin...

That's a logical contradiction, like saying God could move an unmovable object or could create a dog that wasn't a dog. It's an inherently flawed idea.

This heaven thing is based entirely on presumptions of how humans perceive eternity and heaven, from someone who doesn't even believe in heaven. It is not a logical necessity that eternity will eventually become agonizing, or that human minds can't be happy forever given infinite resources. They seem impossible in practicality, but you get to throw out practicality when you've got omnipotence on your side.