Heaven and Hell

https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/heaven-and-hell.html

Children are dependent on the adults around them - for food, shelter, clothing - all the necessary material things for life. They are also dependent on love, education and guidance. They have to trust what the adults close to them tell them. Their critical faculties are not mature enough to detect BS. It is this vulnerability that is exploited and abused when they are taught that heaven and hell are not mythological, but real. The result can be that they can be intellectually and emotionally crippled for the rest of their lives, and they can pass the same toxic memes* to their own children.

Can you imagine burning for an eternity? Can you imagine an omni-everything God allowing such a thing? As someone not brought up having been terrorised by such a bogeyman story, I find it totally obvious that it is a made-up tale, invented to make you too afraid not to cling to dogma.  From the outside, it is ludicrous and transparent. But from the inside, it is utterly terrifying, and victims waste a large part of their lives trying to save others from their own imagined nightmares.

A thought occurred to me. If you were thrown into the lake of fire, how long would your pain receptors last? Not long, I would imagine, and then you would lose the ability to detect pain, like a leper. The main drawback would then be utter boredom, which brings me on to Heaven. 

There does not seem to be any point in Heaven. What to do? Even sex-obsessed and sex-deprived Muslim men, once they have deflowered their ration of virgins, still have an eternity of boredom to endure. Groundhog day without end. I would go insane well within the first couple of centuries.

*Meme in the original Dawkinsian sense. An idea, or a bunch of ideas that persist and reproduce just because they are good at persisting and reproducing, like genes.

**The image is from the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. My wife and I visited a few years ago. We were running late, and had to pass, at a pace, a corridor and side rooms and gardens stuffed with priceless works of art with barely a glance. The Last Judgement in the chapel depicts a priest who Michelangelo particularly detested, on his way to hell. By all accounts, Michelangelo hated to be forced to paint the chapel, and left many digs at the Pope and Church encoded in his work. When we visited, the chapel walls and ceiling had just been cleaned up, and what struck me was just how much bare human flesh was vividly on show.