What Will You Miss In Heaven ?

[ardillacid]

lilla, I thought you were opposed to the use of schedule I psychadelics

 

:coffee:

[Lilllabettt]

hey, its not crazy, it's science.

time is most likely an illusion, probably a mirage produced by the limits of human neural capacity <-----currently prevailing scientific orthodoxy, given that the prevailing orthodoxy also firmly embraces relativity. Remember, time flow is incompatible with relativity. 

+

belief in God, faith that He intervenes in the affairs of men, rejection of Calvinistic predestination 

=

My Thoughts

 

 

[PhuturePriest]

I remember reading something to that effect as well Ash.  That would sadden me. (think 'what dreams may come')

 

It has been explained to me by theologians and priests that you don't feel sad if loved ones are in hell, because first of all you are in heaven and are incapable of sadness, and secondly you fully understand that they chose to be where they are, so you do not feel intense sadness or remorse about it.

[PhuturePriest]

well, people in Heaven are outside time. That's what "entering eternity" means. We become like God in being outside of time.  Once you're in heaven your will is totally aligned with God's. The choices you made in life that don't give glory to God, maybe He would want you to change them. The choices you made that did ultimately give Him glory - whether they were "bad" or "good" choices - maybe those he would want you to keep. St Paul had a "thorn of the flesh" and Jesus did not want it taken away. 

 

The thing is, when time is rewritten and changed, its not like anyone notices. If for example, Divine intervention rewrote time to prevent the Holocaust from taking place -- no one would realize that anything changed. The Holocaust would just vanish from human memory and experience and we would never realize it was missing.

 

There may be all kinds of awful events that did happen but then didn't happen. Remember that plague in 2012 that wiped out 50% of Latin America's population? Me neither. Maybe somebody's prayers were heard, time was rewritten, and now it's like it never happened. Because it didn't. 

 

This is very theologically incorrect.

 

Once you are in heaven or hell, that's it. When you are God-willing in heaven one day, you can't go back in time with God and make sure your friend didn't do x or y so they can get out of hell and go to heaven instead. Once your judgment has happened, it is permanent and unchangeable. This is the teaching of the Catholic Church and must be held by all Catholics.

[Anomaly]

It has been explained to me by theologians and priests that you don't feel sad if loved ones are in hell, because first of all you are in heaven and are incapable of sadness, and secondly you fully understand that they chose to be where they are, so you do not feel intense sadness or remorse about it.

That is the sickest thing. Imagine not missing your spouse, child, or a loved one while knowing they're in hell. Imagine not having any sense of self or your life because you've been integrated into the Borg, I mean God. So your loves of this life on earth are now meaningless, but you will burn in hell for eternity if a bus hits you on a Sunday evening that you just didn't feel like going to Mass that day so you can sleep in.

[PhuturePriest]

That is the sickest thing. Imagine not missing your spouse, child, or a loved one while knowing they're in hell. Imagine not having any sense of self or your life because you've been integrated into the Borg, I mean God. So your loves of this life on earth are now meaningless, but you will burn in hell for eternity if a bus hits you on a Sunday evening that you just didn't feel like going to Mass that day so you can sleep in.

 

To be in heaven is to be what we were made for: To be in full union with God. It is impossible to be in full and eternal communion with God and not be happy. Ergo, it is impossible to feel sad, even if your loved one is in hell. They chose it, and there is nothing you can do about it. There's also nothing they can do about it, and even if they could, they wouldn't. "Hell is a dungeon with the door locked from the inside." -- Saint Thomas Aquinas

[Maggyie]

This is very theologically incorrect.

 

Once you are in heaven or hell, that's it. When you are God-willing in heaven one day, you can't go back in time with God and make sure your friend didn't do x or y so they can get out of hell and go to heaven instead. Once your judgment has happened, it is permanent and unchangeable. This is the teaching of the Catholic Church and must be held by all Catholics.

 

yeah that's the point.

 

once your judgement "happens"

 

the understanding that we creatures who are in time have of something "happening" and the "before" and "after" of it, is probably different than the understanding of God who is outside of time and doesn't experience "before" and "after." That's why it's appropriate to pray for people even after the fact, like if I know someone is going into a job interview at 9 am and I don't find out until 12 I still pray for the interview to go well. The person (God) who is answering your prayers is outside of time.

 

Obviously this has limitations from a practical perspective. Not really going to sit here and pray that a car crash doesn't happen, after the crash happens.

 

But it's technically true that God is not bound by our understanding of time when answering prayer.

 

I don't think particular judgment happens "within time" obviously we have almost zero idea of what that is like, but my suspicion is it happens outside of the the physical plane where there is time.

 

Although I do wonder how Catholic theology would deal with non-linear concepts of time, lifespans and relativity etc. Maybe there is writing on this and I am just unaware of it. Clearly a lot of traditional theology works off assumptions about linear timelines. There is the whole concept of the Church being on a pilgrimage which implies going from fixed point A to fixed point B. And the whole "waiting" theme, waiting for the Messiah, waiting for him to come again... we are limited in using our human concepts to describe our relationship with God, but for God all time is NOW and the concept of waiting doesn't apply.

[BarbTherese]

This thread keeps reminding me of the legend re St Augustine and the seashell. :stars:

(Must add, however, that I do hold to Faith seeking understanding - realizing its limitations of the finite trying to understand the infinite)

Augustine and the Seashell

Marian Horvat

The great Doctor of the Church St. Augustine of Hippo spent over 30 years working on his treatise De Trinitate [about the Holy Trinity], endeavoring to conceive an intelligible explanation for the mystery of the Trinity.

 

Augustine meets a boy on the beach

 

He was walking by the seashore one day contemplating and trying to understand the mystery of the Holy Trinity when he saw a small boy running back and forth from the water to a spot on the seashore. The boy was using a sea shell to carry the water from the ocean and place it into a small hole in the sand.

 

The Bishop of Hippo approached him and asked, “My boy, what are doing?”

“I am trying to bring all the sea into this hole,” the boy replied with a sweet smile.

“But that is impossible, my dear child, the hole cannot contain all that water” said Augustine.

 

The boy paused in his work, stood up, looked into the eyes of the Saint, and replied, “It is no more impossible than what you are trying to do – comprehend the immensity of the mystery of the Holy Trinity with your small intelligence.”

 

The Saint was absorbed by such a keen response from that child, and turned his eyes from him for a short while. When he glanced down to ask him something else, the boy had vanished.

 

Some say that it was an Angel sent by God to teach Augustine a lesson on pride in learning. Others affirm it was the Christ Child Himself who appeared to the Saint to remind him of the limits of human understanding before the great mysteries of our Faith.

http://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/h065rp.Shell.html

 

 

 

 

[Maggyie]

To be in heaven is to be what we were made for: To be in full union with God. It is impossible to be in full and eternal communion with God and not be happy. Ergo, it is impossible to feel sad, even if your loved one is in hell. They chose it, and there is nothing you can do about it. There's also nothing they can do about it, and even if they could, they wouldn't. "Hell is a dungeon with the door locked from the inside." -- Saint Thomas Aquinas

 

"To be in full union with God. It is impossible to be in full and eternal communion with God and not be happy. Ergo, it is impossible to feel sad, even if your loved one is in hell."

 

But this is a theological tautology which even if true (and I suppose according to the Church it is, therefore it must be) does not satisfy the human heart. It does make the saints out to be monsters, and the relationships they experienced on their pilgrimage to be meaningless.

 

Now when someone says "but I simply couldn't be blissed out in heaven and know my daughter is in hell" the usual Catholicy response is "well that's just a fault, in purgatory you will be cleansed of any attachments you would treasure over and above your attachment to God" and then quote the person the relevant Scripture.

 

The heart is repulsed by this, it just isn't natural for a mother to be so caught up in her own enjoyment that she doesn't care her child is locked away forever in eternal pain, even pain of the child's own choosing. It goes against human sympathy and compassion and the natural order of things. Granted we are talking about subjects that are supernatural and not natural... but if you think that the good things that are written in the human heart are there for a reason, and the capacity for love and empathy fall into that category... I don't know how to square that with the tautology above.

 

In the same vein and to answer the question of the OP, the thing I would miss most is being married. We are assured in many places that there is no such thing as being married in heaven. That's why people are permitted to remarry after being widowed etc. And yet for me my connection with my husband is such, that I can't believe (or don't want to believe) that this connection will be severed and I will be happy about it. It's a sacrament so I know my soul will always bear the mark of having been married to him, but once we are there, we will no longer be special to each other? We will just be floating around (ummmmm) with these marks on us, and toodle loo?

[Maggyie]

And I hope I don't come off flippant with the whole "floating around praising Jesus, who are you again? toodle loo" thing but honestly that's the impression I get.

[PhuturePriest]

"To be in full union with God. It is impossible to be in full and eternal communion with God and not be happy. Ergo, it is impossible to feel sad, even if your loved one is in hell."

 

But this is a theological tautology which even if true (and I suppose according to the Church it is, therefore it must be) does not satisfy the human heart. It does make the saints out to be monsters, and the relationships they experienced on their pilgrimage to be meaningless.

 

Now when someone says "but I simply couldn't be blissed out in heaven and know my daughter is in hell" the usual Catholicy response is "well that's just a fault, in purgatory you will be cleansed of any attachments you would treasure over and above your attachment to God" and then quote the person the relevant Scripture.

 

The heart is repulsed by this, it just isn't natural for a mother to be so caught up in her own enjoyment that she doesn't care her child is locked away forever in eternal pain, even pain of the child's own choosing. It goes against human sympathy and compassion and the natural order of things. Granted we are talking about subjects that are supernatural and not natural... but if you think that the good things that are written in the human heart are there for a reason, and the capacity for love and empathy fall into that category... I don't know how to square that with the tautology above.

 

In the same vein and to answer the question of the OP, the thing I would miss most is being married. We are assured in many places that there is no such thing as being married in heaven. That's why people are permitted to remarry after being widowed etc. And yet for me my connection with my husband is such, that I can't believe (or don't want to believe) that this connection will be severed and I will be happy about it. It's a sacrament so I know my soul will always bear the mark of having been married to him, but once we are there, we will no longer be special to each other? We will just be floating around (ummmmm) with these marks on us, and toodle loo?

 

I understand this. If I were in heaven and my sister were in hell, it's impossible for me to imagine not being sorry that she is in hell. However, I am not currently witnessing the Beatific Vision for all eternity, and so cannot tell you how not being sorrowful over such things works. I also cannot comprehend what eternity is like, and sometimes when I think about it I literally get dizzy. I simply know what the Church teaches, why it teaches it, and obey. That's all any puny human with a puny and extremely limited human brain can do.

[Lilllabettt]

This is very theologically incorrect.

 

Once you are in heaven or hell, that's it. When you are God-willing in heaven one day, you can't go back in time with God and make sure your friend didn't do x or y so they can get out of hell and go to heaven instead. Once your judgment has happened, it is permanent and unchangeable. This is the teaching of the Catholic Church and must be held by all Catholics.

 

 

OK so don't break your head with this stuff FP/PP. 

But I never said that a person who was in Hell would get out of Hell. The interventions I'm talking about mean the person was never in Hell to begin with, even if that was how their story ended at one point. God intervenes, he changes the ending.  The interventions happen inside time, the judgment, which can't change, happens outside of time. It's difficult to talk about this stuff because the concept of time is so fundamental to our understanding of reality. 

 

But God reboots stuff like this a lot.

For example: The Immaculate Conception. Jesus saves His own mother before either of them are born.  Mind-blowing. But that's just God bending time and space. 

[Cherie]

In the same vein and to answer the question of the OP, the thing I would miss most is being married. We are assured in many places that there is no such thing as being married in heaven. That's why people are permitted to remarry after being widowed etc. And yet for me my connection with my husband is such, that I can't believe (or don't want to believe) that this connection will be severed and I will be happy about it. It's a sacrament so I know my soul will always bear the mark of having been married to him, but once we are there, we will no longer be special to each other? We will just be floating around (ummmmm) with these marks on us, and toodle loo?

I feel the same.

I'm as loyal a Catholic as they come, but I must admit I'm a little tempted to envy my Mormon friends' beliefs on this particular subject. It's probably the only aspect of their theology that, in a different universe or something, I could imagine myself agreeing with.

[PhuturePriest]

OK so don't break your head with this stuff FP/PP. 

But I never said that a person who was in Hell would get out of Hell. The interventions I'm talking about mean the person was never in Hell to begin with, even if that was how their story ended at one point. God intervenes, he changes the ending.  The interventions happen inside time, the judgment, which can't change, happens outside of time. It's difficult to talk about this stuff because the concept of time is so fundamental to our understanding of reality. 

 

But God reboots stuff like this a lot.

For example: The Immaculate Conception. Jesus saves His own mother before either of them are born.  Mind-blowing. But that's just God bending time and space. 

 

But that happened since the beginning. It's not like at one point God decided Mary had original sin and then the next moment God said "You know what? Let's change that." God knows everything and has always known everything. Therefore he already planned for Mary to be without original sin. What you're proposing at the very least comes across as saying God can change his mind, which we both know is impossible.

[Amppax]

This debate reminds me of Molinism. 

Edited January 5, 2015 by Amppax