Buddha’s suggestion to the Christians regarding the Mormons and the Muslims
September 5, 2011
Mohammed’s Gabriel and Smith’s Moroni both went into some detail regarding the delights of paradise. The sort of stuff that would be hard to resist. Organisms lasting thousands of years, total bliss, can’t get better. Now here the Christian wants to insert a consideration of the Buddha and then to draw a conclusion. Or being a god and giving your children the chance to become gods also.
We know from the Buddha that all existence is in time (which Kant disputes in a way) and it is never ending. And one thing life has taught to those with considerable experience is that all things eventually get boring and the joys come to an end and one is stuck forever in that dreadful state. Getting your hopes up and then seeing them dashed, and doing that over and over and over and over again. Paradise then will be truly boring, like a sort of solitary punishment where you can do as you like, but you don’t want to do anything but go to sleep or have some fun, but nothing is fun anymore. The end of fun.
Accordingly I think it is wise of the Christians to have kept the state of perpetual joy a bit vague and even suggest that it is of an entirely state of being far from things in time and space (which, according to Kant, are merely the way we look at things when we look, and without looking they have no existence).
Of course the Muslims and Mormons could say that these are metaphors for the unimaginable delights of paradise or godhood, which technique is very legitimate for moderns.
A later reflection: Let a man take the stance of his eternity in terms of what he chooses, e.g., to be at the height of an organism, and to freeze in that state, and allow it to go on and on and on, never ending, never fading, always as strong and thudding. Perhaps people so choosing will be motionless statutes in the heavenly garden, and the rest of us will shake our heads and be glad that we did not choose that, for we would have missed all this (as we looked at each other and our host, Jesus). So for the Christian the image will be a garden party, and Jesus will be present and God will be the host, and God will provide entertainment from his infinity which will be so wonderful people will never be conscious of time, the merely human way of considering things anyway. And the statutes will be there too, but they are frozen in their own personal, chosen eternities, and will be oblivious to everything except their own going delight. So they are at the garden party, but not really there, lost in their own fantasy. So everyone ends up at the party, one way or the other.