Nice article:

http://www.kenyonreview.org/2013/08/...-and-religion/

If heaven were boring then it wouldn't be heaven. And the rest of his surmises are no less stupid.

"So we see how many of these game elements consist of the high-fidelity replication of the appearance and conditions of the real world. The main changes made to the real world are the cutting-out of death and uncertainty (religion attempts to do the same thing, notice, through low-tech linguistic means). 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. Our games, it turns out, reflect a very different fantasy of the afterlife: reincarnation."

This got to be a level, right?

I dunno, I've always thought the idea of an immutable blissful eternity was sort of hard to wrap your head around. Both in terms of being blissful and in terms of reconciling the idea of conscious experience with immutability.

This is reminiscent of another "heaven" post he made:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/13...awful-1156795/

Cannabis, tho.

*nods*

it seems like most of the criticism, based on that other thread, is that people don't take those sorts of descriptions of heaven literally. And I guess they don't. Fair enough :P

I think the problem is that "heaven" was a concept that arose from bronze age humans living miserable existences in conditions of war, famine, inequality, etc. They comforted themselves with the notion that all that unfairness would be remedied in the next life.

So the descriptions of heaven that made it into religious texts were basically a reaction to that rather than a carefully thought out disquisition of whether, and if so, what sort of eternal existence would be desirable.

So the modern believer has to either not think deeply about what heaven is really like (so he or she can accept the traditional definition), or needs to change in the direction of vaguer, more abstract definitions such as "perfect" or "close to God" which have no content to them.

Leaving aside the factual questions of Christianity (i.e., whether Jesus really died and then woke up again and whether, if he did, that event actually said anything about whether humans can have eternal existence), the very notion of some sort of "eternal life" is actually a concept that doesn't survive much thought, both in terms of whether it is even plausible and whether if it were plausible, you would really want to experience it. (I posted another problem with it a few weeks ago, which is that none of us existed before we were born so why should our existence be finite on one end but infinite on the other?)

There’s not just one way to look at existence. For instance, with Thomistic metaphysics God isn’t in existence; God is existence and people are in existence or in God. So a Thomist might say: people are not existing, existence is people-ing; a tree is not existing, existence is tree-ing. So technically, as a biological entity in existence, lawdude does have a finite life. But you have eternal existence like you’ve always had, because you’re not the reflection (lawdude, the biological entity) in the mirror. It’s not so much a cognitive understanding, like I said it’s really another way of looking at existence, or really looking from it, i.e. same picture, different perception.

This is mostly wrong/naive-ish.

- Just about the only bronze age humans having a concept of heaven in association with afterlife were the Egyptians. They weren't living "miserables existences", and that conception didn't make it into the judeo-christian world-view.

- After-death conceptions of other mediterranean cultures included Hades, Sheol and similar constructs (see above), none of these were primarily construed as "happy places". For the longest time, the jewish conception was no more advanced than dying in the land of your fathers and being buried among your ancestors. Jewish conceptions of an afterlife in qualified sense didn't emerge until perhaps the 4th century or so.

- war, famine inequality, "miserable existence". Here's a list of historical famines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines The greek/romans were quite the chatter mouths, so the fact that there's exactly one minor famine recorded for all of the roman-hellenistic period, in addition to no recorded famine prior to the CE in the entirety of the levant should give you pause.***

And this conclusion we reach by looking at the sort of alternative realities video games provide...


***I should mention that the list is somewhat incomplete. There was significant starvation within Jerusalem, for example, during the time of the babylonian siege 587/6bce. Perhaps that doesn't qualify as famine.

Clearly the author never played a rogue or hunter or Mage in WoW. Vanish/feign death/invis - no death - no repair bill.

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?

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. During many of those periods life was nasty, brutish, and at least short-er. And it was extremely unjust.

3. You have decided to miss the point of the video game analogy, which is fine. 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.

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.

Yeah, links please.

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?

(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. Our 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.

This assumes that boredom is a sign of a lack of stimulus, where as the opposite could be true and boredom is a negative addition to an otherwise content state.

Or in other words, my observation would be that boredom is a psychological condition of the social conditioning of this world.

On a similar note, I lost interest in video games when I realized all in all they are just a programmers way of providing a certain level of challenge. Too much and the game is frustrating and not enjoyable, too little and the game is too easy and just as unenjoyable. The best mix would be that which is just hard enough to stimulate our desire for challenge, but easy enough to gain progress that give as a satisfying feeling of self accomplishment.

In that we might ask if life's purpose is to provide just the right amount of stimulus to keep our mind in a perpetual state of rest through 'unrest'. Then if we are able to shut off the 'desire' to 'not be bored', and become content with, say, raking a rock garden, or 'eat sleep move bowels', we might see what happens when such a need for stimulus is eliminated altogether: does the video game of life remain when we are indifferent to the stimulus it provides?

Let's assume that is true. Does the concept of an eternal, blissful afterlife make any sense within that model? Is it consistent with specific descriptions of heaven that appear in religious texts?

I like it, on the basis that he tries to say something rather than win something.

I think he stretches his conclusions thin, but using games (and one can go beyond computer games here) as a reference for "what we want" is actually damn clever. I think where it collapses is that you can't really use it to reference "all we want" or "what we want all the time". But that games can say something about our desires, ambitions and which kind of situations attract us... that I think is true. Games also distill these things so it becomes simpler to see exactly what factors attract us. Again... quite clever.

Well if we keep in mind that these words were written in a 2000 year old context, and in a completely different language, eternal bliss doesn't seem so far from peace and contentment. I'm not sure humans can be trusted to project their own understandings of 'eternal, bliss'.