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Post by Moose on Mar 1, 2015 0:03:52 GMT
I have often asked religious people how anyone can be happy in heaven if something dreadful - especially physical suffering I think - happened to them on earth. And the response I have often had is that it 'won't matter' or that it will 'be as if it had never happened.' The thing is though that I do not think that suffering can be 'undone' and that no amount of 'heavenly' reward can compensate for it. Tell it to the Jordanian airman who was burned alive; tell it to any number of people who have been tortured to death. Those moments happened and nothing can undo them or make them not have happened or even mitigate the agony experienced at the time. Nothing that has happened can be made to not have happened ... even God cannot do that.
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Post by JoeP on Mar 1, 2015 18:16:11 GMT
Is this a science discussion or a religion discussion or a Doctor Who discussion?
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Post by Moose on Mar 1, 2015 19:15:47 GMT
All three!
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Post by Miisa on Mar 1, 2015 19:26:22 GMT
Not so sure. If you have no memory if it having happened, then do you feel like it happened? Does it influence your life in any way? If no-one at all has any memory or knowledge of it happening, then what?
It is just that I know that it is incredibly easy to get people to "remember" things than never actually happened to them, and they can honestly be affected by the events, even though they demonstrably didn't actually occur. So it isn't that hard for me to flip that.
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Post by JoeP on Mar 1, 2015 19:36:47 GMT
Religious answer: God can do anything, so there. Religious and potentially scientific answer: if you completely forget the thing, isn't that the same as it unhappening for you? If there's such a thing as heaven at all, presumably you accept that people can be restored to fit and active bodies, frailties of age banished? And if so, why not frailties of mind? Doctor Who answer: alternate timelines.
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Post by juju on Mar 1, 2015 20:48:26 GMT
Maybe it's like having a baby. It's agony at the time but you don't remember the pain. How do you know whether 'nothing can mitigate' it? If Heaven / alternative states / higher planes etc exist, then things like pain and suffering will probably be forgotten if you are in a completely new mode of existence. I think the idea is you become a spiritual being for whom things like that no longer resonate or have any power. You may remember it happening but it does not have any emotional effect any more. I've been reading 'Stumbling on Happiness' by Daniel Gilbert, a Psychology Professor at Harvard. His main argument is that the human brain is pretty awful at predicting how we will feel in the future and what our future self might think and want. Even on an earthly, prosaic level, suffering sometimes leads to better things and we don't always know how things will turn out. I was just talking yesterday to a friend whose husband left her for another woman. She was absolutely devastated at the time, but since then she's met and married someone far more suited to her and she couldn't be happier.
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Post by Moose on Mar 2, 2015 0:55:13 GMT
But ... but ... even if you forget a thing, it still has happened. If I were to boil one of you in oil right now, that moment and the agony you felt could never be undone whether you remembered it or not. It still happened.
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Post by juju on Mar 2, 2015 1:08:25 GMT
So did the pain I went through in childbirth. So what? I don't feel it or think about it now.
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Post by Moose on Mar 2, 2015 1:32:17 GMT
Then why mention it, if it was so insignificant?
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Post by Miisa on Mar 2, 2015 6:19:50 GMT
All I can remember from past pain is what I was thinking, or, better yet, saying at the time, the pain itself cannot be remembered. So even though I remember the things I said when I was giving birth the first time, and can from that deduce it was an experience I did not want at the time to repeat, I did do it again, happily.
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Post by juju on Mar 2, 2015 7:15:29 GMT
Then why mention it, if it was so insignificant? As an example. What I'm saying is that it is perfectly possible to go through something really unpleasant but for it not to have lasting effects or there be any need to dwell on it.
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Yuki
Senior members
Posts: 632
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Post by Yuki on Mar 2, 2015 10:37:49 GMT
Not so sure. If you have no memory if it having happened, then do you feel like it happened? Does it influence your life in any way? If no-one at all has any memory or knowledge of it happening, then what? No one remembers dinosaurs or Pikaia being around, and yet we know they did at some point in the history of our planet. Even if no one remembers a particular event, the universe does, and one can always find clues to reveal it again, though that could be very difficult in some cases.
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Post by Miisa on Mar 2, 2015 11:40:49 GMT
True, but my response was to this:
The objective truth of something having happened is one thing, the subjective knowledge of it being suffering is another.
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Post by juju on Mar 2, 2015 16:54:35 GMT
Exactly. To quote Hamlet: '... there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.'
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Post by Moose on Mar 2, 2015 18:30:22 GMT
The Universe remembers... that is a good point. It's why I object to all those DW 'it never happened' stories. It DID.
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Post by Kye on Mar 2, 2015 19:07:16 GMT
And how, pray tell, does "the Universe" remember anything? Does it have a memory? A mind? Where is it located? Now if you substituted "God" for of "The Universe" I'd be in perfect agreement. But then, I'm a theist.
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Yuki
Senior members
Posts: 632
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Post by Yuki on Mar 2, 2015 19:14:30 GMT
The universe remembers through causality. As long as we don't go into the subatomic world, anything that happened left traces through which it can be at least partially reconstructed.
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Post by Moose on Mar 2, 2015 20:58:54 GMT
that
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Post by Kye on Mar 2, 2015 21:23:51 GMT
But it's not conscious. We're the ones doing the conscious reconstruction.
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Post by juju on Mar 2, 2015 21:38:46 GMT
Good things happen, bad things happen. What matters on a personal level is how you think and feel about those things. I don't think you can say that nothing will ever make up for something bad happening - you can't possibly make that prediction. That's not even true all the time in this life, let alone in a theoretically different mode of existence. And as Kye said, the Universe doesn't think, feel, remember or have any preference one way or the other. Only sentient beings do that.
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Post by Moose on Mar 2, 2015 22:12:12 GMT
It's not conscious - and I see no way in which a conscious universe could ever be - but from the moment of the Big Bang to the moment of ending (if it ever does) a thing can't unhappen
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Post by juju on Mar 3, 2015 10:39:14 GMT
From a scientific POV that's true, although in the context of Dr Who it might not be (timey wimey stuff and all that ). From a spiritual perspective though, it doesn't matter whether it's true or not - it's how you feel or whether you personally remember and are affected that counts. And you might not be.
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Post by Moose on Mar 3, 2015 19:02:53 GMT
I just can't see it like that - suffering is suffering even if the person forgets That moment can never not have happened
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Post by juju on Mar 3, 2015 20:31:04 GMT
I'm not sure what your point is. All life has some degree of suffering, for some more than others. The universe is not a perfect place. It's not necessarily a matter of whether the person remembers or not, it's whether it can still affect them. You've had bad things happen in your life, I'm sure. Do you think about them all the time, every minute? Do you dwell on them constantly? Or do they diminish after time? Can you now view some bad things dispassionately or objectively? I know I can. They happened, yeah, but they no longer have any power over me. I wouldn't even want them to 'unhappen' - they are part of who I am. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and all that.
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Post by JoeP on Mar 3, 2015 22:52:46 GMT
I'm not sure what your point is. Her point is to create lots of posts.
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Post by Moose on Mar 4, 2015 15:32:13 GMT
Not entirely But I can't articulate what I actually mean .. it's just a feeling. It actually came from the DW episode in which Amy kills Madame Cavario ... a time line which is later aborted. And when she laments that she killed a person she is told that 'it never happened' and she says 'but I remember it so it did.' I found that fascinating
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Post by Kye on Mar 4, 2015 16:19:55 GMT
I find it very eerie in my life when my friends or my kids tell me about something they remember me doing or saying, and I have absolutely no memory of it. It's as if I'm living in a parallel universe... (I have a terrible memory so this actually happens pretty regularly.)
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Post by juju on Mar 4, 2015 18:06:09 GMT
I get that. My sister has a far better long term memory than me, and can remember incidents and people that I should but just can't. It's like there's some sort of 'dead zone' in my head where that info should be. I try and put it down to me moving away and her staying in the same town - in fact, she has recently moved back to the same street we grew up in, where my mum still lives, so she's getting more visual clues. But I don't know if it's that... I think I just have a terrible memory.
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Post by tangent on Mar 4, 2015 19:55:20 GMT
This thread has some excellent posts, just reading it gives me a warm glow of a philosophical kind. I particularly like the idea that the pain of childbirth has no lasting unpleasant memory. It actually came from the DW episode in which Amy kills Madame Cavario ... a time line which is later aborted. And when she laments that she killed a person she is told that 'it never happened' and she says 'but I remember it so it did.' I found that fascinating Dr Who is sometimes illogical and not always scientifically accurate. Nevertheless, when Amy's timeline is aborted, her part of that timeline escapes into a different reality, so the timeline is not completely aborted.
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Post by Moose on Mar 5, 2015 1:13:12 GMT
Steve - no. In this particular episode the timeline simply ceased to have happened at all (The Wedding of River Song)
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