Is 'Heaven' just a state of mind?

Humanists UK 

Ssondrpote29 c7rcat3h91r7eP0c 52abi0t2Fh2: a581uym 86t8M2afa  · 

We are not a Christian country.

And as the Census2021 demonstrated, religion is in a steep decline. Why, then, are children required to pray, by law, in our state schools? What justification is there for the 26 unelected bishops who sit, speak, and vote in the Lords?

Will the overtly Anglican nature of King Charles III’s Coronation in May truly represent the country? The evidence, provided by the Census, says no, it will not. Religion’s claim to institutional power, and hold over our education system, is now unjustifiable.

No state in Europe has such a religious set-up as we do in terms of law and public policy while having such a non-religious population. It’s time we do away with these anachronistic hangovers that do not represent where we are as a country, and get with the times.

Discussion:

Matt Phipps

One more generation dude, just one more.

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• Dom Lowe

  Indeed Reverend Phipps 

Tim Veater

I think it's becoming obvious in the way society operates and people behave.

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• Dom Lowe

  You don’t need religion to be a good (or bad) person Tim

  There are many factors influencing societal change and in my opinion, being forced to pray to imaginary deities is harmful to many in the long run.

  2,000-year old fairy stories invented by goat-herders in the Middle East should be filed under fiction nowadays 

  

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  Tim Veater

  Dom Lowe I agree with your first sentence Dom and maybe most of your second. However we part ways on your third. Christianity is undeniably an integral and fundamental part of our western society and English constitution. It is impossible to have been brought up in it without absorbing its principles. Even atheists are 'christian' because they can be no other unless they arrive from Mars. The problem is that if you chisel away at them, both individually and societally, the structure of morality disintegrates and only self interest becomes the norm and to hell with everyone else. Oops - there we go again.

  

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• Dom Lowe

  Tim it’s a shame that the structure of morality that you imply religion builds wasn’t respected by those ordained who have had thousands of abuse cases levelled at them.

  Your theory is a bit like the old ‘bring back conscription, a spell in the army would sort them out’

  It’s dated and being rejected by more good people every day.

  Some people need that belief but not me, I’m a good person because I want to be not because I’ve been terrified into believing that I’ll spend eternity in a stinky pool of lava being prodded by a horny red devil with a fork.

• Tim Veater

  Dom Lowe Heaven and Hell are all in the mind Dom, as with everything. 'Reality', or lack of it, are very strange concepts when you consider them deeply. They are figurative, emblematic and adjectival to represent states of mind and moral consequences. Your last sentence is a reflection of your interpretation of what it means and I suppose you could say it's medieval and a bit outdated to say the least. Human lives emotionally are very complicated things and can be metaphorically made heaven or hell. What happens when the brain and body cease to function, is for every person to discover.

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• Dom Lowe

  Tim I used to frequently have such discussions with a great friend of mine who tragically passed away a couple of years ago.

  He swore to me and promised faithfully that once he’d gone, if there was any conceivable or possible way that he could come back to haunt or even just say ‘I told you there was an afterlife’ to me, I could rest assured he would make it happen.

  As yet nothing, which leads me to think that we live, then we die, and that’s it.

  To be alive is the most wonderful thing, to live in the comparable luxury that we do with so much information to hand making so many possibilities and options open to us is nothing short of miraculous.

  Life is heaven, there is no hell 

Dom Lowe I'm glad your life experience is so rewarding you feel able to attach that epithet to it. You use the term allagorically I presume, but it suggests you have a notion of what 'heaven' means - namely a state of bliss, a sort of utopia. It is a projection of an ethereal and spiritual concept onto the earthly realm of sensation and experience. Clearly humans have imagined this in some form or another for millenia. It is hard wired into our understanding and interpretation of life. Our desire for 'heaven' is not limited to life because the mind cannot comprehend non-existence, and there is in everyone an inbuilt sensation of eternity. Plato spoke of the 'forms' which were reflections of the reality. Can we have a conception of heaven without the reality? And what in essence is the experience of heaven on earth but a partial fulfillment of the reality? By the same token, many by a combination of factors, experience 'hell on earth', either self imposed or by factors outside their control. I can't help feeling that this always involves a moral and spiritual dimension too.

Further discussion:

Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

Hoover Institution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noj4phMT9OE&t=1s

By Design: Behe, Lennox, and Meyer on the Evidence for a Creator

Hoover InstitutionMichael Behe, John Lennox, and Steven Meyer are three of the leading voices in science and academia on the case for an intelligent designer of the universe and everything in it (including us). In this wide-ranging conversation, they point out the flaws in Darwin’s theory and the increasing amount of evidence uncovered by a rigorous application of the scientific method that points to an intentional design and creation of the physical world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXexaVsvhCM&t=2s