Heaven must be boring

"Heaven must be really boring, if you think about it logically, all the angels must be snoring, who could stand perfection for eternity...not me... Heaven Must Be Boring by George Hrab.
According to Mark 12:18-25 18 "Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. 19 "Teacher," they said, "Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. 20 Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. 21 The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third. 22 In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. 23 At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?" 24 Jesus replied, "Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? 25 When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven." (This woman must have been like Blanche Taylor Moore a convicted serial killer who is on death row in North Carolina she was convicted of killing five men, this woman out lived seven husband, I would not want to eat her cooking.)
If we are going to be like the angels, which the passage does not clarify what angels are like, other than they cannot marry. However, can they have sex? If the sons of God in Genesis 6 are the same as angels it does seem they would be capable of having sex, because one can infer if they can impregnate the daughters of men. According to Baker's Evangelical Dictionary Angels "The Apocrypha In the late postexilic period angelology became a prominent feature of Jewish religion. The angel Michael was deemed to be Judaism's patron, and the apocryphal writings named three other archangels as leaders of the angelic hierarchy. Chief of these was Raphael, who was supposed to present the prayers of pious Jews to God ( 1 Tobit 2:15). Uriel explained to Enoch many of his visions (1 Enoch 21:5-10; 27:2-4), interpreted Ezra's vision of the celestial Jerusalem (2 Esdras 10:28-57), and explained the fate of the fallen angels who supposedly married human women (1 Enoch 19:1-9; cf. Gen 6:2). Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and Uriel (1 Enoch 40:3, 6) reported to God about the depraved state of humanity, and received appropriate instructions. According to contemporary thought, Gabriel sat on God's left, while Michael sat on the right side (2 Enoch 24:1). The primary concern of these two angels, however, was supposedly with missions on earth and affairs in heaven, respectively. In rabbinic Judaism they assumed a character which, while sometimes dramatic, had no factual basis in divine revelation" This is why Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 say angels were held in dungeons in hell because they married human women. However, Jesus who is supposedly god incarnated says that angels are incapable of marriage or sexual intercourse. So what are humans going to do for eternity? If you read revelations you are going to be professional ass kissers for at least a thousand years, then another war, and finally you get to live in Jerusalem forever (wow, can you feel my sarcasm?). It is interesting after everything goes down it seems like for all your suffering you get to live a city, where you cannot have sex, and where you are a robot, so much for freewill...Think about it.

History

What is history moving us towards or what is the meaning of history? My question implies that there is a point that history is moving towards something significant that is a point, a reason, a purpose, or an end to the story. I was recently watching Countdown to Armageddon on the History Channel International as I watched it, the thought came to me the idea of the end of the world is this innate desire for this life to point toward something that is an end to a story. However, maybe that’s what the bible is a story with an ending that has nothing to do with reality. If I wrote a book and some events in real life happens that was written in the book, this does not make my book a book of prophecy, it was a book written to entertain, to tell a story, I feel the bible is the same, it is a collection of books that some people have mistaken for reality. In Christianity the point is to either be in heaven with Jesus or to return to a new Earth with Jesus. There is suppose to be a new Heaven as well; where God, his angels, and those who were righteous but not a part of the body of Christ will live. From my understanding the bride of Christ who is the Church of God will be the ones who will rule with Christ on Earth. My question is; then what or what is the point of that? Is nothing else going to happen? We want an end, but an end means a stop in evolution or change, no more development. When a book end there may be a sequence but eventually the story should end. Analogy would be Harry Potter will grow up and the story will get stale, in other words, there are only so many plots you can write before you have to come up with something new. J. K. Rowling must feel like she is stuck writing Harry Potter books. If she writes something other than Harry Potter whatever she writes will be compared to Harry Potter, sometimes success is not what it seems. Back to my point, the problem of accepting a story or a series of stories as a point of our existence is that there is nothing that you can do to convince a believer that another story is possible or in other words, religious believers accept that their myths are reality when it is not, it's just a story people used to explain the unknown, nothing more. Therefore, does history have an end? I hope not, this means we no longer exist. Furthermore, with our species still evolving and changing who knows where we will go, in other words, an open-ended history, our potential is unlimited and thus history is not a story it is reality and it can be whatever we want it to be. Think about it...

Fallacy of Judeo-Christianity Freewill

I am thinking about freewill. I have been listening again to an audio book by Dr. Bart D. Ehrman a professor who teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill, he has written several books about the New Testament, but he wrote a book called God’s Problem: How the bible fails to answer our most important question Why we suffer. He wrote something I never considered before, and it was about freewill. Often theist use the argument that we suffer because we have freewill. He mentioned that this argument fails because if heaven exist, and if a being have freewill in heaven, there exist a place where a person can have freewill and there is no suffering. I thought about this deeper, for example, if Satan rebelled against God and took a third of heaven with him (see Revelations 12:6-9), then he and the angels he convinced to join him, had freewill, if not then they could not have rebelled. Furthermore, when mankind supposedly ate the forbidden fruit, The Lord God said, “Mankind has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, we must remove him from the garden, less he should eat from the tree of life, and live forever" (see Genesis 3:22), therefore the Lord God must have knowledge of suffering and yet the Lord God lives in a realm where suffering does not exist i.e. heaven, and if the Lord God could create a place where suffering does not exist and where beings exist with freewill, then he could have created us with freewill without suffering and therefore the whole garden incident was totally unnecessary. On a philosophical idea of freewill, does it exist or are things causally determined or is it both? I am a soft-determinist, I think our nature (environment) and nurture (social training) seems to be causal but our behavior or how we react is up to us. If we are not free to a certain degree then how do we learn new reactions or learn something new? Think about it...

Assumptions

On the way to work this morning I had a thought on some assumptions that are essential for Christianity's existence. I would call these assumptions the pillars of the faith. According to The Oxford Pocket Dictionary and Thesaurus American Edition (The World's Most Trusted Dictionaries) (a statement I am somewhat skeptical, on whose authority is this statement based on)., back to my definition; assumption is a noun, which is defined as 1. Assuming 2. Accepting without proof 3. Arrogance and 4. Reception of the virgin Mary bodily into heaven. I am using the second definition of accepting without proof. Christianity accept without proof 1. There is an afterlife, I don't mean our matter-energy will be absorbed back into the ecosystem, but there will be a life after this one that is similar to this one but in a different realm or invisible to our senses. The second assumption that Jesus of Nazareth, which Christianity believes is the promised Messiah or Christ, physically rose from his death and afterward broke the laws of physics and ascended up to heaven to the right hand of the father. ( According to Luke 24:51 ironically this is the only gospel that makes this claim, since Mark 16:9-20 was not in the oldest reliable manuscripts, therefore we can disregard Mark similar claim). This leads to the assumption that heaven exist, which has conveniently turned into a realm invisible to our senses, but not according to the bible it was a place where Stephen saw Jesus (See Acts 7:55) and where the people of Babel could build a tower to in Genesis 11. The assumption was it's a place were people could see or reach if not why would Yahweh come down and confuse the languages or Stephen, who was still alive although being stoned could have not seen it. The biggest assumption which I think is the foundation of Christianity's existence and therefore upholds it is; there is a god who is involved in human activities and is personally involved in human affairs. Yet there is no physical evidence at least today of a god like Yahweh, the God of the old testament, Yahweh did miracles, he stopped time, parted seas, fed and clothe the people of Israel and so forth, yet this don't happen today where everyone could see instantly on worldwide news. Is there a god who is actively involved in human affairs. Think about this, as I typed and edit this blog which took me about 45 minutes and in this time 781 children have died from starvation and hunger related diseases, (approximately 1,042 children die every hour) because on average 25,000 children die every day from hunger and hunger related diseases (see globalissues.org). This is neither including the 2700 who died from Malaria today (see http:/.cdc.gov/malaria/facts.htm) nor the 100's of people who died from typhoons and mud slides. As a result, if god is actively involved in our lives, I think maybe we would be better off if perhaps he wasn't involved. Therefore, these are assumptions in which there is no evidence today or reasonable evidence that these things are true. ... think about it....

The next leap forward vs fear of spiritual authority

I think we live in fear of going against authority because authority had evolutionary advantages. In other words, we have an innate, natural abhorrence of going against authority because for most of our species history (approximately 3.5 million years ago until recent times i.e. founding of democratic secular societies, we lived in patriarchal or matriarchal hunter-gatherers societies in which there were an Alpha male or female, as well as their individual parents, who led our prehistorical ancestors. For example, if we look at our ancestors prior, to the introduction of agricultural which occurred approximately 9 to 10 thousand years ago, they were all hunter-gathers, and they may had supplemented their meat diet with wild fruits, berries, and proto-agricultural vegetables. Then someone had the idea instead of us going hunting why don’t we domesticate the food we have been hunting (the idea of domestication may have come from our experience of domesticating wolves into hunting companions, then they eventually became the common dog, and the livestock need food so the idea of planting grass and wheat to feed the livestock came into existence which then led to domesticating the wild fruit, berries and vegetables. This new adaptation led to a stationary lifestyle from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. During our hunter-gathering days, we lived in close family units like the African San-bushmen, African Pygmies, and South American native tribes do today, they live in small family units, and so authority was important to survival. We are one of a few species in which our young are helpless until they reach at least adolescences, and some adolescences and even adult are still helpless (how many 30 to 40 years old are still living with their parents when they don't have to). In other words, Homo Sapiens-Sapiens don’t get up and immediately walk like the gazelle or zebra on the African Savannah, that is we are dependent on our parents for a long time and so we take authority figures seriously in our lives, and we assume they are telling us the truth until proven otherwise. As Daniel Dennett or maybe Richard Dawkins may have brought out that when the village elders, shaman, priest told us to kill a goat or if our parents told us not to go to the edge of the water or a crocodile may get us, and if some Johnny-come-lately disobeyed their parent and became crocodile food we had an immediate reinforcement to what was said and so when ever the parents who gave up their authority to the village shaman who was most likely an elderly family member we got use to our elders and shamans telling us things based on authority. Therefore, I think we have a difficult time going against the authority of our families and if your family are Christians or whatever religious faith your family has adopted, there is this evolutionary fear of going against the authority of our parents and religious authorities. We seek out authority, even in science, we name drop (just like I did in mentioning Dawkins and Dennett), for instance we say Einstein said such and such, or this famous scientist said such and such, it is a natural innate drive or desire to seek out authorities, this is why science is often peer-reviewed, we seek out authority, that our hypothesis is right or wrong. Therefore authority acceptance and seeking is a natural thing. Yet when we decide to think outside our narrowed tribal, religious views, our families think we are moving into dangerous territory, like the child who goes to the waterside after they been told not to, they fear for our "eternal souls", we have broken the taboo. However, I begin to think about courage to go against authority, may sometimes be necessary for the survival of our species. Someone in proto-homo Sapient society had the courage to step down from the tree and walk on two feet, someone had the courage to stand up to the leopard, lion, and sabre tooth tiger, and other predators, someone had the courage to migrate out of the African Savannah to populate the world. I know there were deaths in some of these steps of courage. To give you an analogy, during the civil rights movement, Rosa Park refuse to give up her seat, she lived a long time, however Dr King was assassinated, Medgar Evers was murdered, some freedom riders in Mississippi were murdered and many others died fighting for civil rights, as a result today over 40 million people of color have more rights than they had because someone took a courageous stand. Freedom and progress takes courage, and if our species is going to survive it is going to take courage to move pass religion, race, and other differences. It will require us to take another great leap forward and we are going to have to fight our evolutionary fears of going against the things that divide us and may have had a survivability or evolutionary purpose, but they no longer do and these things need to start in this generation if we are going to do something about climate change, exploration of space, and move on to the next evolutionary step in our species.

Black Socrates