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Originally Posted by lawdude
Fret:
1. Are you seriously claiming that the only ancient peoples to ever claim the promise of an enjoyable afterlife were Egyptians? No indigenous American groups ever did? No Nordic groups? No others? Really?
For one, the article, and your response, clearly refer to a judaeo-christian kind of heaven. So, whether nordic people believed that the afterlife would be eternal glorious pillaging and walrus slaughtering is fairly immaterial. Needless to say, if they did, it'd also undermine the premise of the article that afterlife would be boring. For two, you're certainly welcome to convince me otherwise.
Also, getting your terminology straight wouldn't hurt. I've clearly not said that "the only ancient peoples" - unless for you, somehow, ancient times stop at roughly 400BCE and everything before that is bronze age.
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2. Why do you think that heaven was "created" during a short period of time in the middle east? These stories go back and evolved over thousands of years.
Yeah, links please.
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During many of those periods life was nasty, brutish, and at least short-er. And it was extremely unjust.
I don't object to shorter. I also don't object that WE think living then must've been hellish. You'll have to convince me, though, that it was seen as generally "nasty and brutish and extremely unjust"
in the eyes of the ancient contemporaries (only then you can get to some sort of link with "that's why they invented heaven"). For all the supposed hardship, ancient texts deal with that sort of thing fairyl little, comparatively speaking. The fact that concrete accounts of how an afterlife would be structured emerge relatively late, supports that: IF life was so hellish, surely it should've been accordingly
more hellish the further back we go. How come, then, that ideas of an afterlife emerge relatively late?
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3. You have decided to miss the point of the video game analogy, which is fine.
(a) Apparently you don't know what an analogy is. The author states: "What people really want is not a conflict-devoid eternal life, but unlimited lives in which to refine their performance in the struggle. This struggle. O
ur games, it turns out, reflect a very different fantasy of the afterlife: reincarnation." Ostensibly, he's doing quantitative research: deriving conclusions about hour views of heaven by extracting similarities among the "entire" body of computer games.
(b)There
was no point. The guy was either stoned or brainfried from too much coding. By doing his "quantitative research", he neglected that he was looking at a product which explcit purpose it is to (1) provide CHALLENGES, (2) emulate alternate WORLDS and who (3) are catered to a certain clientel within a specific age bracket. This tells us nothing at all about how we, as a species, much less as religious beings, conceptualize, or feel comfortable with, heaven.
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That's what Christians have to do- deliberately miss a lot of points so they can continue to falsely believe they are special and never have to get snuffed out like the insignificant clumps of matter they are.