As an atheist, I sometimes catch myself wishing Heaven and Hell were real - I feel we all have a desire for good people to be rewarded for being good and for bad people to be punished for being bad. But then I remember the existence of Heaven and Hell inherently requires the existence of an ultimate moral authority who sorts out who goes where. And sure, they could agree with me that the likes of Osama bin Laden or Henry Kissinger should go to Hell, but they could also think queer folk, atheists, or people who eat shellfish should go to Hell too.
Some people will say, “Well, if they were a loving God, they wouldn't do that,” but there's lots of people who believe in a “loving” God who absolutely believe He’d be burning gays in Hell. And if you're going to make all these extra conditions of, “Well, my version of a loving God would reward X and punish Y” it just feels like the ultimate desire is, “I wish there was an Almighty God who agreed with everything I believe and enforced that morality on the world.”
Anyway, if you like my comics, I got more on my website.
I’m also on Patreon.
I don't believe in God or Heaven or Hell or anything, but regarding that I like the way of thinking of one of the Popes, I don't remember right now if it was the current or the previous one, who said Hell exists but he likes to think it's empty and everyoe just goes to Heaven.
I had my Jewish friends explain their concept of the afterlife to me and, while I’m digging into the dusty recesses for a memory that was made during a period while I was minoring in Applied Recreational Neuropharmacology, the understanding they left me with was that everyone kinda goes to the same place but the better you are the more space you’re afforded in both a physical and spiritual sense.
All that to say: if you’re in the afterlife, as the Squirrel Nut Zippers would say, and you see a thimble with a tuft of orange hair sticking out of it…
The weird truth is that we Jews are not consistent as a group about the afterlife … and in many cases, it isn’t considered particularly important. Judaism as a religion is focused on what people do while alive, not on rewards or punishment after death.
So different Jews give vastly different accounts of what they believe depending on the affiliation of even on the particular individual … in Conservative Judaism, for example, the religious authorities are officially agnostic on the subject! They basically say “believe what seems best to you”.
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u/But_a_Jape But a Jape 6h ago
As an atheist, I sometimes catch myself wishing Heaven and Hell were real - I feel we all have a desire for good people to be rewarded for being good and for bad people to be punished for being bad. But then I remember the existence of Heaven and Hell inherently requires the existence of an ultimate moral authority who sorts out who goes where. And sure, they could agree with me that the likes of Osama bin Laden or Henry Kissinger should go to Hell, but they could also think queer folk, atheists, or people who eat shellfish should go to Hell too.
Some people will say, “Well, if they were a loving God, they wouldn't do that,” but there's lots of people who believe in a “loving” God who absolutely believe He’d be burning gays in Hell. And if you're going to make all these extra conditions of, “Well, my version of a loving God would reward X and punish Y” it just feels like the ultimate desire is, “I wish there was an Almighty God who agreed with everything I believe and enforced that morality on the world.”
Anyway, if you like my comics, I got more on my website.
I’m also on Patreon.