I recently came across this article on heaven and hell and wanted to ask you guys what you thought about this. Do you believe in life after death? Heaven and hell? Where do you go after death? Or is death the end...?
If you believe in afterlife then... According to the dictionary: Heaven is an afterlife concept found in many religions or spiritual philosophies.Those who believe in heaven generally hold that it (or hell) is the afterlife destination of many or all humans. In unusual instances, humans have had, according to many testimonies and traditions, personal knowledge of Heaven. They presume this is for the purpose of teaching the rest of humanity about life, Heaven, and God.
Various religions have various versions of heaven, but primararily it's the place where one unites with God and everything is pure and everyone is happy. To a layman it's the place where you have wings and harps playing music... you know, sitting on the clouds with halos on your head??
According to Hinduism, Heaven is a stop between one life and another. Where one rests before he/she takes another form, man or animal or anything depending on ones karma(deeds, good and bad), and comes back to Earth. People of this religion strive to achieve Nirvana or Moksha... that is, freedom from this cycle of birth and death and rebirth.
Christianity on the other hand professes Heaven to be a second Garden of Eden. Any person who sincerely has faith in Christ and asks for God's forgiveness will automatically be granted forgiveness for their sins and has the assurance of going to Heaven. Heaven is an especially interesting doctrine in Christian thought, which has the resurrection of the body dominating the concept of afterlife.
According to the Quran Heaven is described by the following lines..
"The parable of the Garden which the righteous are promised! Beneath it flow rivers. Perpetual is the fruits thereof and the shade therein. Such is the End of the Righteous; and the end of the unbelievers is the Fire, wherein a person dwells forever"
The highest level of heaven is Firdaws, which is where the prophets, the martyrs and the most truthful and pious people will dwell. It is said that a martyr is rewarded by sex with 72 virgins. Much controversy exists on the "number" mentioned. A scholar clarifies, that the number was never mean to be taken literarily but as an indication of a surfeit of this kind of delight.
And so it goes on... a thousand religions and a thousand different heavens... To some it's dancing around trees in the rain in transparent saris and bell bottomed pants and to others it's brownies served with ice-cream. While some look for people whose horns support the halo others don't believe in it and call it mumbo jumbo.
So... what's your personal choice of heaven?? Other than, of course, visiting this place :) Ok. Put those stones down. I take back my words... Now, let's have it... What's heaven to you.. Be as obnoxious as you want ;)
I donno abt wht happens after life but one thing i am sure they are wht u make out of it in this life U can make ur living a pradise or living hell
And all the bestfor the exams when everit is postponed to
but tell me, how do the authorities in "heaven" keep a continuous stock of virgins??
heaven and hell for me are concepts that were brought about by people long long time ago to force mankind to o good acts.
i'd request people to read Philip Pullman's DARK MATERIALS TRILOGY to get a whole new version about afterlife (fiction though)
pfff.
sletpeywg.
pah.
this is aas creative as you can get???
now, you guys didn't answer my question... what's your personal heaven??
sigh. let ur hair down. kick up your heels!!!
@viewer: totally agree with you. thanks for the wishes, i have english tm :)
@navneet: lol..that's the first question that popped in my mind too. And I will get hold of it, once im done with my sem.
Thanks for visiting guys! lotsaluv.
@bangaloreguy: yeah, they do get sent there, but not forever. you probably get converted to a smily creepy crawling insect according to the amt of bad stuff you've done... I looked it up. read abt it. And then wrote this. You keep coming back to earth, until your slate is clean... and then you attain Niravana.
Thanks for visting!
ok so here's my version of HEAVEN...
a place with lots of hiking trails, a humongous library, a river of chocolate, one single intelligent being to share views (any being will do), an internet connection.
i could keep going ad infinitum, ad nauseum but this is what the basic stuff my heaven must be made of.
i have already seen heaven...... when a bunch of us were camping at glacier national park, i woke up early in the morning and hiked about 2 miles just to watch the sunrise...... that was heaven for me.
what i saw that day, even the "heaven" that people and books mention can never be.
also, watch "21 grams" if you get a chance
Heaven is sleep. It's almost become a salable commodity in the last three months for me...
@navneet:
In firdaus, I think they keep a continuous stock of virgins by hiring those plastic surgeons that are becoming more and more common...you know, plastic surgery to fool the guy that the woman is a virgin...and if a woman gets sent to firdaus, well it's tough to say if a guy is virgin, right?
Incidentally, the diwan-i-khas of the Red Fort says:
Agar firdaus bar roo zaminast
Haminasto Haminasto Haminast
That's supposed to mean "If firdaus is anywhere on earth, it's here it's here it's here.
Now, I've been to the red fort and the diwan-i-khas is quite an open area...that shah jahan mast've been one big pervert...
Preetika, good poser! Hmmm... now let me think. Heaven is too good an abstract to be attributed to just one place, feeling or thing! More often, heaven is my 'home' and I think it need not necessarily fit into the specifications of a luxurious, over-fitted or architecturally splendid construction. Home is home, period! Its where I 'Live', laugh, cry, hide, snuggle, dream... Yes, one of my heavens is probably my home.
I luv this saying.. "Life is pleasant and death is peaceful, it's the transition that sucks."
According to me though, when you die, the energy that ur made of leaves your body and goes on to create some new form of life... because energy is neither created nor destroyed, its only changes form.
and as for heaven... yeah rite!
hehe.. exams done yaaay... :D// and heaven?? heh... rite now.. heaven is a place on earth.. basically i'd rather rot in my grave rather than sit in a place where everyone's happy all the time.. i mean it'll get boring after all wont it..
@homicidalmaniac: now i know why they built such large halls :p
but i wonder, how do the plastic surgeons get access to the place?
@navneet: They don't 'get access' to the place. They just die.
oh, me believe death is the end...first want to live, though, then think abt the afterlife...
There is a heaven alright. It may or may not have God/s and Virgins. You dont necessarily have to die to go to heaven. You dont have to go to heaven alone, you can take people with you.
For people who feel that heaven is imaginary because they havent seen or experienced it,well here's news: Have u seen the equator? Is it imaginary then?
all you need to do is allow urself to see the equator and bob's ur uncle, the equator couldnt get clearer.
best of luck for ur exams preetika!!
@ all:
On a lighter note:
------------------
Only the good women and nuns make it to heaven.
I have confirmations of women who are yet to make it to hell, beleive me more than half of Hollywood's hotties have booked places for themselves in hell.
Lets go there...whaddayasay???
@navneet: hmmm.. .hi tech stuff. but i see it...
@aytida: im loving it.that's is soo cool.
@aash: aaah.. sleep. bliss. yes, of course. As to the rest of your philosophy.. interesting. i see the effect board exams have been having on u.
@ravi: home. hmmm. heaven? yeah, as long as im nt there :)
@t: shame on you. chocolate? sleep? deserted island with ur lv? oldest t-shirt and ice cream and movie?? tsk tsk
@vishal : yeah what wud we do without a cause to be miserable?? i mean imagine a world without a PDS exam!! it'd be... heaven.. :)
@nav: now i know why your knees hurt!! you think too much...!!!
@anjan: long time no see!!! where've you been... guys will always be guys. sigh.
:)
@aash: what DID you have for breakfast today??
@the monk: aah. simplicity. im liking it. what's your idea of heaven, though?
@sujay: best of luck, i need. thank you. Bob's my uncle ain?? oh yeah!! correct. he married my mum's sis's daughter's neice's maiden aunt's first grandchild.
*hiccup* tha... thank.. thankus for *hiccup* bis..bistiing.
hug..hugs n kissys *hiccup*
yours chuly.
Where did my comment go? It just disappeared!
Kaushik
I came to your blog through a link.
Hope you don't mind me posting a comment, but anyway...
This may initially seem irrelevant, but first of all, humans, like all other matter in the universe are made of atoms.
Secondly, how does "vision" work? When light (ie, photons) enters the eye, it comes in contact with the photosensitive chemical rhodopsin.
Now, this rhodopsin has a unique property that, it decomposes when it is exposed to light because light causes a physical change in the 11-cis-retinal portion of the rhodopsin, changing it to all-trans retinal isomer.
This isomer breaks down into several intermediate compounds, but eventually forms metarhodopsin II. This chemical causes electrical impulses that are transmitted to the brain and are interpreted as light.
That seemed heavy and pointless didn't? The point is, that all of these steps, are essential for vision to work. Even if one step, one compound is absent, you won't be able to "see" (which experimentally verified).
So, when you are dead, and your body decomposes, where are the compounds which are essential for vision to work? How can you see without your "eyes" which have decomposed?
Similarly, how can you think, or exist when your brain doesn't exist?
I believe that humans are nothing more than a collection of atoms which are arranged in a wonderfully fantastic way so as to conciously interact with the world around them.
So, believing science, logic and reasoning, which has brought our world to where it is today, do you think concepts such as life after death exsist? Every person is entitled to his own opinion, but I don't believe in 'after' life or heaven.
Also, being pedantic for the equator question, Of course the equator is imaginary!
From wikipedia,
The equator is an imaginary circle drawn around a planet (or other astronomical object) at a distance halfway between the poles.
You want us to believe entirely in the science that can't explain black holes, the bermuda triangle and big foot?
@The Serpent of Silver Plumes:
I was waiting to stumble upon somebody as 'scientific' as urself.
I have a few questions, which I beleive u can easily answer.
"1.If I borrowed a cell of shakespeare and cloned him and just waited...would the clone grow up to write 'Macbeth' again? "
2. "If I took two cells and cloned two shakespears from the adult shakespeare and placed them in a cage under same conditions...soon we'd have 2 clones with exactly same chemical structures...doing the exact same things...and they couldnt be different at all; right?"
3. If u claim that with the same chemicals and thingamabobs, people can be different, then do u suggest people and their characterisics are determined to an extent by things beyond human perceptions? If not, then the two that are caged should be practically same since everything their senses are exposed to is the same"
@Preetika: visiting ur blog was nice, its mental floss out here.
homicidialmaniac:
First of all, I don't compel you to entirely believe in anything! You can believe in whatever you want.
I just want to point out that the world as we live in it today, with all it's luxuries and commodities which most people have taken for granted, has been a direct consequence of advancements in science.
The diodes, transistors and IC circuits in your cellphones, Computers, TV's and other electronic devices, are a direct consequence of Quantum mechanics.
Similarly, efficient Internal combustion engines used in automobiles, refrigerators, heat pumps and compressors are a consequence of advances in Thermodynamics.
There are numerous other examples. So it seems more common sense to me to believe in science, which can explain the world around us by logic, when compared to the blind faith of various religions.
Of course, all this is just my personal opinion, and I'm not claiming it's right.
And science does explain black holes. For the other two, I refer you to the wikipedia article. It has a scientific explanation of this.
sujay sukumar:
1.
Probably not. This is because, the interactions with the environment will be completely different. Humans, like other species, are dynamic creatures who adapt to their surroundings and whose behaviour is complex and results due to the various factors like genetics, social interaction, etc.
So even if you had the exact same "copy" of a person, how he behaves, what he writes, etc, will depend on his surroundings. And the world now is vastly different from the world shakespeare lived in.
2. Nope, I don't think so, for the same reason as above.
3. In fact, you don't even need a clone. Look at identical twins! They have identical DNA but differing environmental influences throughout their lives affect which gene is more active.
Preetika..ppl hav told me that u passed out from BVM last year..so do you no Shraddha and Santosh of your batch??
@koze: disappeared? u mean like vanished? u mean like gone? u mean u dint post it. pah.
@the serpent: phew. that's a lot. its a nice theory. i dnt necessarily believe in it. i am a sci student. believe in phy. logic. all that. i jst dnt like applying to every aspect of my life.. 'cuz then i'd be crazier than i am.
@ sujay: compliment??
@aash: yep, phy has explained those.
@praddy; i do knw shraddha.. but santosh who??
thanks for visitng guys!! I don't MIND any of your comments. In fact, i love them, thankus.
lotsaluv,
yours truly.
@pree: hey, who told you that i got weak knees? au contraire...i was a weightlifter (in my previous life that is :D)
@the serpent: all i say is, we need something to kid our imagination apart from science...hence the deviations, our knowledge of the brain is yet in its infantile stage, hence it is best that we employ its worthiness before we get disillusioned about it as well :)
*splash*
:)) I'm not gonna answer ur question because my descriptions get long and boring.
It's funny. One of my guy friends told me that he was worried that his future-wife would be a virgin. Yes, worried. He said he didn't want her to be. Because of the blood. And the pain for her turned him off. And also because she'd be inexperienced. I laughed my guts out at that. But think about it, 72 virgins?!?!
@triya: lol im laughing too.
thanks for dropping by!!
lotsaluv,
yours truly.