Not sure if this is the right place to post this. If not, let me know and move it to the correct place please!
So I'm a spiritual atheist. I believe in consciousness continuing after death in some way (really the only thing keeping me sane and alive in this crazy state of legality, etc.) Yet I've seen several posts from atheists and such as condemning pedophiles, like "so you believe in heaven? How would you feel if a pedophile or molester was with your kids in heaven?" and the like.
On the other hand, there's loads of believers who say all pedophiles will be in hell (even some atheists say they wished they believed so pedophiles could go to hell). As someone who believes in continued consciousness after mortality, the idea that it would be without sex is simply baffling to me. Many reduce sex down to pure baby making procreation rhetoric, as there will be no need to procreate, so no sex. But what if sex could be repurposed for bonding? In my view it would serve as a method of communication.
As such, it's my belief sex will occur, and evil people will have to be cleaned of their ways. I feel that even if they were bad in this life they should be properly made into functioning phantoms over time. There are some who believe that evil doers will simply cease to exist. However, the idea that segregation should occur and be permanent is a tough one. People cannot fathom that bad people could ever be made good even in some perfect ideal scenario, yet also shoot down good people simply due to societal and cultural conditioning. And sex? Ew!
However for this life to be the only one when there's so much unnecessary and unjustified suffering and unfair treatment of both minors and adults, even animals, perpetual cessation of consciousness somehow doesn't do it for me even though it means the end of suffering. Like...nothing, not even the awareness to be aware they're pain free? Nah.
What are your thoughts on this? What do you think the afterlife could be like?
Heaven is sexless and NO PEDOS ARE ALLOWED! What do you think?
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Heaven is sexless and NO PEDOS ARE ALLOWED! What do you think?
38, female. Writer, mediocre artist, and total sub!
Westernized society hates youth. MAPs are the cure. Youth are NOT slaves. They are our future and we must fight for their freedom.
Westernized society hates youth. MAPs are the cure. Youth are NOT slaves. They are our future and we must fight for their freedom.
Re: Heaven is sexless and NO PEDOS ARE ALLOWED! What do you think?
I don't believe in an afterlife. As an epistemic solipsist, and by extension someone who rejects philosophical materialism, I have to take the possibility of an afterlife seriously but I don't actually believe in one. By common sense standards I must take for granted (i.e. the obvious correlation between brain activity and conscious experience, even if the latter isn't numerically identical to the former there appears to be a causal relationship), I have every reason to assume that consciousness ends with the death of the brain. I presumably lose consciousness during non-REM sleep (although dreaming can occur at this stage), certain medication will temporarily end your consciousness, a blow to the head might do the same, etc.
I have this impression that people see the hedonistic view as implying that death is totally neutral, and I think that it is in and of itself, but to the extent that we view something as good we are wired to respond negatively to its absence. I don't know much about Epicurus but it seems to me that he was more of a negative hedonist (and moreso in terms of welfare than in viewing everyone's 'happiness,' which he apparently defined as the absence of pain, as equally desirable and everyone having as much of a reason to care for the happiness of any other sentient being as they do their own) which might explain his take on it (my focus would also be that it's not painful or pleasurable, whereas his approach seemed to involve pointing out that there's no one who exists to be harmed by it so it's neutral in value for that reason). I really don't know anything about Epicurus though. I see death as a mixed bag (assuming that it means the end of conscious experience)- desirable in that it eternally protects us from pain but a loss of something precious in permanently stamping out any hope of future happiness. The goodness of no more pain cancels out the badness of no more happiness; or no more possible happiness, but to say that it's 'neutral' entirely is somewhat meaningless because our response to neutrality is indifference (e.g. I don't care one way or the other if a leaf falls from a tree in some random forest somewhere, assuming that this doesn't indirectly harm sentient beings but, once I factor in certain circumstantial variables, if some magical genie tells me that they are going to painlessly and instantaneously end my existence at midnight precisely unless I request otherwise, or that they won't do this unless I request it, I'm either going to avoid this or pursue it which contradicts treating my death as 'neutral').
I have to say, the idea of reincarnation is interesting but I am really grossed out and bothered by the idea that in a future life I could be in a romantic relationship with my father or cousin or some man from this life whom I strongly dislike, whether I'm the man and he's the woman or vice versa (it's mostly the combination of being hateable and physically male that repels me and if I know that someone once had a male body, I can't not associate that with them). I know intellectually that if I'm not aware of my past lives and the relationships they involved then I couldn't be disgusted and bothered by them (or maybe in this future life I'm gay/bi, but I'm imagining this as a straight man so I can't not filter it through that) but because I am aware now, it's impossible for me to conjure up the possibility in my mind without being repulsed. If I wanted to daydream about this, one way around it could be to give myself the power to remember past lives so I'd know who to avoid.
If an afterlife doesn't involve reincarnating into new physical bodies then I don't see how sex would be possible, unless it involves some kind of virtual physical reality experience. Without a physical body, I don't see how you could feel hunger, cold, sexual arousal, etc. or any sensory perception (libido is clearly connected to bodily states which is why it declines with age, certain medication, sleep deprivation etc., presumably because of the drop in certain hormones even when one isn't necessarily stressed out). The way that I've kind of worked out the possibility of ghosts in my mind is that what you'd be seeing is an illusory 'representation' of someone and not an actual physical entity (I like the idea of writing a fantasy or soft science fiction story that is, in my belief, logically possible; which is why I personally wouldn't write about backwards time travel/time travel proper even though I like it in different novels and movies and tv shows, so even though I'm not really interested in ghost stories to begin with I've always wanted there to be that clarification in case skeptics push back and ask the obvious, like how can you see a non-corporeal being, how do ghosts experience sensory perception, etc. The polar opposite to materialism, the idea that only consciousness is real and the physical world is an illusion; I've always called that 'idealism,' allows for a lot of paranormal activity that both materialism and emergent dualism do not, if the physical world is just a simulation then certain rules that we take for granted don't have to be fixed).
If it were up to me, the afterlife I might choose is that every sentient being spends the rest of eternity in a beautiful dream (it would be much harder to defend anti-natalism if this was virtually guaranteed because no matter how bad someone's life, quadrillions upon quadrillions upon quadrillions of years of euphoria; more than that if we're talking about eternity, would compensate for it). The perfect dream, one designed to be as pleasurable as possible for each person in consideration of their personality quirks etc. It's cold to say but it wouldn't matter if you were interacting with real people as long as you believed that you were and if everyone gets the same heaven then I, thinking about this while I'm not in such a dream, don't have to worry about how my choices might affect others (in the dream I will, I mean that there's no altruistic reason for me to not plug myself into the Matrix since I can't do anything for anyone 'awake,' not that I do much anyway but I could otherwise adopt a shelter cat, in theory; if my future self wasn't homeless/poor, or feed a chipmunk, etc.). A dream might be best because of our reduced capacity to perceive ambiguity and the dreaming cognition allows for greater emotional intensity which is ironic considering how vague and unreal dreams can feel in retrospect (because our capacity to pay attention and store long-term memory is diminished), I can't remember how much more active it is but the 'emotional' limbic system is more active when we dream than is physically possible when we're awake. Or it might be that there are advantages to full lucidity, but an eternal dream is an interesting idea to me because we dream when we sleep.
I have this impression that people see the hedonistic view as implying that death is totally neutral, and I think that it is in and of itself, but to the extent that we view something as good we are wired to respond negatively to its absence. I don't know much about Epicurus but it seems to me that he was more of a negative hedonist (and moreso in terms of welfare than in viewing everyone's 'happiness,' which he apparently defined as the absence of pain, as equally desirable and everyone having as much of a reason to care for the happiness of any other sentient being as they do their own) which might explain his take on it (my focus would also be that it's not painful or pleasurable, whereas his approach seemed to involve pointing out that there's no one who exists to be harmed by it so it's neutral in value for that reason). I really don't know anything about Epicurus though. I see death as a mixed bag (assuming that it means the end of conscious experience)- desirable in that it eternally protects us from pain but a loss of something precious in permanently stamping out any hope of future happiness. The goodness of no more pain cancels out the badness of no more happiness; or no more possible happiness, but to say that it's 'neutral' entirely is somewhat meaningless because our response to neutrality is indifference (e.g. I don't care one way or the other if a leaf falls from a tree in some random forest somewhere, assuming that this doesn't indirectly harm sentient beings but, once I factor in certain circumstantial variables, if some magical genie tells me that they are going to painlessly and instantaneously end my existence at midnight precisely unless I request otherwise, or that they won't do this unless I request it, I'm either going to avoid this or pursue it which contradicts treating my death as 'neutral').
I have to say, the idea of reincarnation is interesting but I am really grossed out and bothered by the idea that in a future life I could be in a romantic relationship with my father or cousin or some man from this life whom I strongly dislike, whether I'm the man and he's the woman or vice versa (it's mostly the combination of being hateable and physically male that repels me and if I know that someone once had a male body, I can't not associate that with them). I know intellectually that if I'm not aware of my past lives and the relationships they involved then I couldn't be disgusted and bothered by them (or maybe in this future life I'm gay/bi, but I'm imagining this as a straight man so I can't not filter it through that) but because I am aware now, it's impossible for me to conjure up the possibility in my mind without being repulsed. If I wanted to daydream about this, one way around it could be to give myself the power to remember past lives so I'd know who to avoid.
If an afterlife doesn't involve reincarnating into new physical bodies then I don't see how sex would be possible, unless it involves some kind of virtual physical reality experience. Without a physical body, I don't see how you could feel hunger, cold, sexual arousal, etc. or any sensory perception (libido is clearly connected to bodily states which is why it declines with age, certain medication, sleep deprivation etc., presumably because of the drop in certain hormones even when one isn't necessarily stressed out). The way that I've kind of worked out the possibility of ghosts in my mind is that what you'd be seeing is an illusory 'representation' of someone and not an actual physical entity (I like the idea of writing a fantasy or soft science fiction story that is, in my belief, logically possible; which is why I personally wouldn't write about backwards time travel/time travel proper even though I like it in different novels and movies and tv shows, so even though I'm not really interested in ghost stories to begin with I've always wanted there to be that clarification in case skeptics push back and ask the obvious, like how can you see a non-corporeal being, how do ghosts experience sensory perception, etc. The polar opposite to materialism, the idea that only consciousness is real and the physical world is an illusion; I've always called that 'idealism,' allows for a lot of paranormal activity that both materialism and emergent dualism do not, if the physical world is just a simulation then certain rules that we take for granted don't have to be fixed).
If it were up to me, the afterlife I might choose is that every sentient being spends the rest of eternity in a beautiful dream (it would be much harder to defend anti-natalism if this was virtually guaranteed because no matter how bad someone's life, quadrillions upon quadrillions upon quadrillions of years of euphoria; more than that if we're talking about eternity, would compensate for it). The perfect dream, one designed to be as pleasurable as possible for each person in consideration of their personality quirks etc. It's cold to say but it wouldn't matter if you were interacting with real people as long as you believed that you were and if everyone gets the same heaven then I, thinking about this while I'm not in such a dream, don't have to worry about how my choices might affect others (in the dream I will, I mean that there's no altruistic reason for me to not plug myself into the Matrix since I can't do anything for anyone 'awake,' not that I do much anyway but I could otherwise adopt a shelter cat, in theory; if my future self wasn't homeless/poor, or feed a chipmunk, etc.). A dream might be best because of our reduced capacity to perceive ambiguity and the dreaming cognition allows for greater emotional intensity which is ironic considering how vague and unreal dreams can feel in retrospect (because our capacity to pay attention and store long-term memory is diminished), I can't remember how much more active it is but the 'emotional' limbic system is more active when we dream than is physically possible when we're awake. Or it might be that there are advantages to full lucidity, but an eternal dream is an interesting idea to me because we dream when we sleep.
Re: Heaven is sexless and NO PEDOS ARE ALLOWED! What do you think?
The afterlife is 100% pedo. How could it be otherwise? The most pure and beautiful relationships would only be there.