OK lets deal with it or or you go hide in your shadows?!

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I want to know, What you expect out of heaven! when you die, what is it you want!
or are you going to be a blind dog accepting anything that comes your way?!
are you Coward to answer the question first for your self then to others?
deal with it!, answer the question!.

do you expect someone to tell you what you will want or like for eternity like it or not?
do you expect bliss from sex or harmony of nature?
what are you expecting from a faceless god?!
for him/her/it/ to choose everything for you and expect you to like/want it?
I am willing to bet, most are going to be cowards to answering this question honestly and hide behind saying nothing or just attack with no real answer to say.
drink from the fountain of eternity, answer the question or be slave, or be your own evil.
you have no idea of what my god would be, it would far excel yours.
rock me!! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !!
prove me wrong!
what? evading any chance to make things right? even if your wrong? how selfish?
save your self, even if your wrong.
I am your evil, I dare to question your GOD!. or worst yet your faith!
not up to the challenge? failure in your part I say! I do not question the words of your bible, I question what you expect in the end.! just for one thing, I want an answer I can accept!
A heaven that all would want. a heaven that I would want, not just what you expect, screw eternity if it is slavery!
something even the angels would want, something perfect, in the beginning some of the angels revolted, why? i want perfection!.

You know the idea of living for eternity never really sounded appealing to me. But most people seem frightened by the thought that they might cease to exist.

Buddhism makes this all very clear. Individual existence is a sham and a delusion. Emptiness is perfect and eternal.
Emptiness just sounds too drab and boring to most people, and the Buddha says that's why we keep ending up here.

Wow! Aspergian_Mutant, are you a bit angry? geeezzz . . .

I think that heaven and hell are both dervied from a person's inner desires and nature - heaven is all you personally could ever want and hell is the worst possible thing for you personally . . . I've always thought that the idea of heaven being sitting around on a cloud strumming a harp and hell being spending eternity with devils poking you in the butt with a pitchfork wasn't terribly creative . . .

The fire and brimstone version of hell and the eternal city in heaven presented in the Bible are just examples to give us the idea that nothing is impossible in either place . . . it can get as bad or as good as we can imagine . . .

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

~Edvard Munch

I am atheist. Just bury me in the earth and I turn back into flowers and other plants or bugs and rodents and animals and dirt, itself. Yes, that's all I ask. A slightly romantic idea, true, decaying body and all. But I will think it since I won't be aware to experience it.

But don't lock me in a coffin that will never degrade. A nice pine box is good enough for me.

I think I'll go to heaven, I'll tell you that.

You serve in heaven, I shall rule imperially in hell.

I find both Hell and Heaven incredibly illogical and have since I was 11.

Though I must admit, Heaven is a nice and comforting idea. I wish I did believe in it. It would no doubt make dying all the more easier; to think that death wouldn't be the end of my awareness.

I don't want it to end here...it would be nice to know that there is something and somewhere afterwards.
With all the goings-on in our house recently, I can't but think there has to be...

But I ask you all, what if it never ends???
Doesn't that just sound tiring?

Maybe I'm just lazy.

I know I was being kinda gruff with this last post above,
It seems when I just ask what seems to be a simple question that I am highly curious about no-one even tries to answer it like there afraid of it or something, so I was trying kind of a err bullying approach to see if I could get some egos flared up enough to actually answer the question, I know it was a bit unorthodox, sorry about that, but I got more out of you guys so far then I have ever gotten before when asking such a thing,
for the most part I always been curious as to what people get so fired up about that they would go out and die even to get to this place called heaven, like what are they really expecting to find? whats the big hoopla?
I want to understand it, I want to dissect it and understand what others see as its value besides the faith in the god in its self, I want to know what is the value and desire about the place, understand? make sense?
I also want to understand what people envision in their hearts and minds about the place that could drive them to such frenzy's, what are they expecting? what do they think is in it for them selves? what do they think they will get out of it? etc etc etc.
what? to live forever? (boggles) you have to die to get there in the first place, and to top it off science is getting to the point that soon death will be a thing of the past except by accident or something like that, no more dieing from old age and the like, seems people would let that drive them instead of a fantasy or trying to believe in something that you cant see or prove, and to add thats not a place, its a state of being to be eternal, so once again, whats the big deal about heaven? to see our dear departed ones? if we could live forever then we would see them all the time! now thats something to rage for without dieing in our world, what? to avoid hell? this always stumps me, I wouldn't want a bully God that tells you its his way or deletion to a hell, why would I want to believe in such a being boggles me, what? love him or goto hell? thats not love! to me this God that people seems to fancy seems kind of primitive thinking to me.

Of course religion is primitive - it is one of the first things a culture develops - if you look at religion at its most basic it is just a way to explain why strange things happen . . .

I'm not a Christian anymore, but back when I was, I thought heaven would be a chance at immortality. I would never have killed myself on Earth to get there sooner though. I looked at it like this: If heaven exists - great, then by believing in God I can go there when I die and my consciousness won't be destroyed. If it doesn't exist, then I haven't done myself any harm by believing it it, cause I won't be around to know that my beliefs were proven false.

Sounds like Pascal's Wager.

Aspergian Mutant
Comparitive religion is really something I think that everyone should be required to study. When you see all the angles from which different cultures have approached these questions, then you can begin to see the essential teaching. This is called the "Perenial Philosophy" There have been many great books on it. Check out Aldous Huxley or Huston Smith.

These ideas that seem so irrational to you, and so many other people are simply misunderstandings that have been passed along. Most of the problems arrise due to the anthropomorphizing tendency of the average joe, and a lot of proselytizing by people who only halfway understand what they are selling.

Like the concept of God punishing you because you don't believe in "him".
This is purely a case of attributing human traits to a phenomenon that exists outside of human affairs.

God does not "punish" anyone, anymore than Gravity punishes people.

For eternity to really be happy you'd have to take away all the competative factors, all the sinful factors, and if it's kneeling in Heaven worshipping God the father for all of eternity then the only way that would actually be heaven is if we were so emotionally high that it was like being on 2 or 3 rolls of E at all times and having it heightened by prayer and reverence (ie. all agitation, baggage, curiosities, and anything that would make eternal prayer unpleasant would be completely cut loose). I'd love to think that the spiritual body lends a non-naive sense of elatedness where you feel extremely happy and at peace but, again, in a way that's empowering rather than making you feel vulnerable. Personally I have a hard time telling whether I'm really a christian or buddhist at times but then again with buddhism being more a science of mind I can see where they do overlap in some of the more abstract and spiritualist ways. If nervana or a state of nothingness could really be bliss then I have no qualms with going there, I just have to remember that if it is really bliss that I really would be in a state where everything in me now that would fear or dislike that would be removed anyway - I'd have no needs, no desires, and nothing to make me unhappy with that state.

I don't believe in an afterlife.

I'm not sure that a state of eternal happiness could be possible without fundamentally changing the structure of cognition. I am my awareness, and my awareness is unbreakably linked to the way I receive information, and the way I think and process it. This includes memories, "baggage", and the awareness of pain. Without these things, enough of my identity would be stripped away that even if I was in "heaven", it wouldn't be me experiencing it. Not to mention, would bliss still be recognizable as bliss after an eternity of experiencing it? Or would it come to seem normal and leave one's consciousness asking for still more?

I once read about a cult whose members trained their minds to induce a drug-like euphoria at will. They became addicted to their own manic states, and their lives collapsed around them as they tried to spend every possible moment in their "natural high". Yet even while nearly constantly euphoric, they slipped into suicidal depression and some did kill themselves.

I've experienced extreme highs. They lose their value without the memory of shadows to compare them to. Therefore, I don't see how heaven or nirvana could be possible. I'd much rather have a life on earth (or an eternity, if at all possible) which covers a wide scope of emotional experience. So long as you can arrange your life so that the highs outnumber the lows, could it really get any better than this?