Maybe it's just me, but all I would really want out of an eternal paradise would be for everything to be explained to me. Or not everything, but just how all my relationships went kerplooey. Or rather my potential relationships. Unfortunately, once they stop being interested in you, they retroactively were never interested in you. And they're emphatically not interested in talking to you anymore. So there's no way to know.
To extend the concept, though, a Heaven for smart people where everything is explained sounds like a sound basis for a religion. I mean, explaining the unexplained has always been the basis for religion. Unfortunately, when you get down to it, most or at least a great portion of the explanations come down to "The Lord works in mysterious ways." So why not go one step further and say, "The Lord works in mysterious ways and will explain it all to you when you get to Heaven"? It makes at least as much sense as anything going. Probably wouldn't be as profitable as Scientology, but what can you do?
So which comes first when dealing with the inherently inexplicable, the chicken of belief or the egg of understanding? You lived in the right place to have such ponderings, Mr. D.
ReplyDeleteCanterbury’s St. Augustine famously decided: Intelligo ut credam – “I understand in order that I might believe.” 400 year later, also in Canterbury, St. Anselm postulated Credo ut intelligam – “I believe in order that I might understand.”
And then in 1982-83, St. John of Hickland said, "Wait-- what?"
DeleteThere's no room for belief in my worldview; it's all about understanding. Of course, any omniscient, omnipresent, omniscient deity that I could believe in wouldn't leave us wondering for millennia on end. Tease.