TreesNightly

I�ve been listening to comedian Pete Holmes� podcast You Made It Weird recently. A point of interest relevant to this blog is that Pete ends each episode with an exploration of his guest�s religious or atheistic beliefs. Most often his guest is a fellow comedian, a trade that fosters atheism almost as readily as scientific fields. Speaking of which, he�s had on scientists like Brian Green and Bill Nye as well as less scientifically literate types such as Deepak Chopra (that was a hard episode for me to get through even though it was about half the usual two hour length.) Pete himself is a lapsed fundamental Christian who still holds various spiritual beliefs while being sympathetic to the secular. I tell you all this to both encourage you to check out his show and to introduce a concept Pete often brings up--that science answers the �what�s and �how�s of the universe but offers little in terms of �why.� The big �why�s were the last related questions I found of value as I left theism--...

If heaven is defined as the best possible afterlife, there are at least as many concepts of heaven as there are religions in the world. I�d argued there are as many different concepts of heaven as there are people who have ever considered it. Perfection is seemingly a subjective idea as strange as that sounds. Be it virgins, streets of gold, reunions with family, or nirvana, most agree that the bad things we experience in life, do not occur in heaven. They don�t occur because they fundamentally can�t. If I�m in heaven and a fellow worthy dead guy wants to do something I don�t like, they just can�t do it because it would conflict with my perfect world. Yet if they can�t act on their desires, then their experience is lacking and therefore not a fulfillment of their ideal. The only way around this is to say, despite appearances, perfection is not subjective. There is one perfect experience for all of us, we are just not yet able to know it. This still poses a problem--that person who know...