Wednesday, March 21, 2012

More Hitchens . . .

. . . this time on the general desirability of mental / emotional strife:

It's often been observed that the major religions can give no convincing account of Paradise.  They do much better representing Hell; indeed one of the early Christian dogmatists, Tertullian, borrowed the vividness of the latter to lend point to the former.  Among the delights of Heaven, he decided, would be the contemplation of the tortures of the damned.  This anthropomorphism at least had a bite to it; the problem in all other cases [of our attempts to envision a convincing Paradise] is that nobody can seriously desire the dissolution of the intellect.  And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.

Who would want their "Heaven"?  Life without struggle is not life.  It's a coma.  I ask again, who would want that?

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