Originally posted by TekNo88
Originally posted by lilblam
And yes, you CAN know if there's a Hell or a Heaven for sure. This requires knowledge of other information about reality and the world that will
automatically lead to certain realisations and understandings, one of which being the nonexistance of Heaven and Hell in the form they are portrayed
by religions.
I really dont think you CAN know for sure if there is a heaven or a hell, I think it would be more of a belief as you mentioned before. But you do
make good points, and I understand what your saying.
Lemme give you a hypothetical example.
If you know for sure that there is no God, wouldn't that automatically mean that there is no Heaven or Hell, as those are creations of God?
How could you know for sure if there is a God? Well, just like the previous hypothetical example, certain understandings lead to other realisations
automatically, as they are all connected and depend on one another for existance, like Hell depends on God to exist.
I'm not at this point saying anything for or against the existance of God, but the point is that you do NOT have to ascertain a specific thing to
know whether it is true or not. Instead, you can understand something else that the other thing DEPENDS ON for existance, and you'd know for fact
that the other thing also does NOT exist or DOES exist.
One must be careful to not draw false connections, however. For example, if I know that God doesn't exist based on knowledge of other things that led
me to this understanding, would that also imply that Heaven/Hell do not exist? Well, in THIS case it would simply because Heaven and Hell are
creations of God, and if there is no Creator, there is no creation.
This would then lead to the question, what would fall under the category of Heaven or Hell? For example, could our present human existance be
relatively Heaven for say, some alien planet where great pain is experienced daily by all as natural part of their lives. Also, comparitively, we
could be Hell in comparison to some possible utopia-like alien worlds.
Therefore, only the existance of a religions ultimate God-created Heaven and Hell would be terminated, not the relative interpretations.
EDIT: When I say if you eliminate the creator, the creation goes with it, that could be misunderstood. For example, if our existance is applied as a
direct result of God creating us, if God didn't exist, neither could we. But this would simply mean that we CAN exist without God, if we could show
that he does not.
But the question is then, could Heaven and Hell exist without the existance of God? Well, the religious versions could not, but relative versions in a
sense yes, like that example with the alien worlds.
And no, even if I know that God doesn't exist, it by NO MEANS implies that the Chaos theory is somehow true. There is a higher power at work in all
of existance, it's just not what religions would lead you to believe. But this is for the individual to understand and discover, not for me to preach
[Edited on 23-2-2004 by lilblam]
