Wednesday, June 11, 2008

heaven and hell

I was thinking about heaven and hell today. Not about whether they exist - for that is relatively pointless to consider, as they can never properly be proved or disproved - but rather what they are.

Recently I went back to my door...
I'm sorry, let's try that again.
Recently I had quite a revelatory thought. The universe is the way it is - which is that it can always get better and always get worse - because of the battle between the possible and the impossible. If there was only possibility then everything and anything would be happening, and if there was only impossibility then there would be nothing. But we have a deadlock as it stands, with possibility and impossibility forever canceling each other out (it's possible that it's not impossible but it's possible that it's impossible as well) and so we are left with this middle universe. Sorry for the overuse of the word possible but other words don't really work.

Anyway, this train of thought sorta got me to thinking. Heaven (with a capital H), by definition, is a place where no thing can be better. And on its opposite, Hell is a place where no thing can be worse. But how can either of those be possible? If you take any situation there is always something that can improve or worsen it. So logically Heaven must be everything all at once always, as then nothing can be added to it. But then there's a problem. There are many painful and sorrowful things in life; and often there is also an upside to these things.

So how can you include or not include these things? If you include them, there will be a painful bit that makes things worse than the best - but if you don't include them, the situation could be better by their inclusion. And you cannot separate the good part from the bad part, because often the bad part is what makes the good part good.

So a Heaven like that cannot exist.

I have said in a previous post that heaven is nothingness, and it is a reasonable point. But to me it does not ring fully true, as real perfection would include this viewpoint of nothingness as well as everything else. So have I disproved heaven? Where have I gone wrong?

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