week 14 discussion posts #1-3

Slightly altered for the purposes of this blog


So Ashleigh wrote:

If you believe in them, what is your picture of heaven and hell? How did you get this picture?

I don’t know that I believe in them, but the image that I have of heaven and hell stems from storybooks from childhood and things I heard from others when younger. The classic white, bright and soft place above the earth for heaven and a fiery, hot and smoldering dungeon of a place for hell.

When it comes to my concept of Heaven & Hell, I'm much the same as Ashleigh - I'm influenced by childhood images and the media's representation of the pearly gates above and the pitchforks, horns and pointed tails beneath the earth.

I also like Stuart's idea of what lies beyond our current life on Earth. He wrote:

I do believe in there being something after death, and I guess in a way it is either heaven and hell, but tey are both the same. What I think is that when you die you will be surrounded by all that was important to you in life and everything you succeded in. Therefore, if you lived a good, fulfilling life, you will be much happier than the person who wasted their life and fell in to bad habits who would be surronded by a hellish environment.

- to be surrounded by all that was important to you throughout your years, it's a nice thought. That said, I personally have difficulty in believing that the 'afterlife' will be like that.

The more I think about it, the more I feel that it's not possible for there to be anything left for us after death - even if we were to transcend into a new dimension for the post-Earth way of life, doesn't that mean there must be trillions of now-dead people living in this alternate realm? So Victorians would converse with ancient Egyptians who in turn may converse with Bill Gates, and so on and so forth.. can you imagine the incompatibility and intense difficulty of communication these people would have, coming from different periods of time?

I feel that as the concept of time is a human creation, so is the concept of eternity. Neither are necessarily true; they are just a form of measurement, a yardstick of sorts..

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I'd have to agree (to an extent) with Ariella & Priyanka here, and say that the task of determining the 'one true idea' of the end of the universe is important if it leads to methods of prolonging the end.

That said, my thoughts are probably more absolute, in that I think it's a fairly pointless pursuit in any case, because if we DO manage to figure out which way the world will end, we're going to spend all our time trying to avoid it, and/or once the end arrives it's not like we'll still be here afterwards (in which case it *wasn't* the end, was it?) to say 'Yes, we were intelligent enough to accurately predict our own demise' or 'Damnit, we were wrong! If only we'd noticed [X] in the [nth] quadrant in the galaxy,' etc.

To respond to Larissa's question of "What is the aim of science anyway?", the pursuit of science, in my opinion, is to be able to explain things in logical/mathematical terms, that seems more reliable than 'Because God said so'. Of course another aspect of science is the ability to make educated 'guesses' or predictions based on the cumulative evidence, which is great for understanding how many years it will be before Antarctica disappears, but realistically anything could happen between now and next week that nobody could have ever predicted..

A bit of a dark post, but this is a rather dark topic of conversation methinks! :)

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Danielle, I agree with on your response to question two. I think the media focuses on the idea of "living in the present" and "do what you want, when you want".. the idea of respecting your elders, or saving for your future (i.e. house, family, etc) has taken a bit of a back seat in today's society, from my observations.

I remember when I was watching an afternoon kids' show back in primary school, they presented this 'wacky fact' that in 2050 or so, kids born around that time would live to 150 years on average. But considering today's 'typical' lifestyle of 'go hard' (huge generalisation I know), I'm not sure if that fact still holds..