Our understanding of the world around us is framed primarily in terms of our experience. We can demonstrate easily to a child the relationship between mass and weight. We can show how inertia works. We know what wet is and we know what blue is. We understand that earth is like a cannonball, the sun is like a fire. These things have always been this way and will presumably always be this way. Our senses have know limits and we have tools that bring our world within the limits of our senses - we can 'see' interstellar nebulae or intercellular organelles, we can hear whalesong and radio waves. Our most fabulous tools are our most abstract. We can describe our world in the most exquisite and evocative terms. Our understanding of the unknown has outstripped the limits of sensibility, we are in a realm where the supernatural powers of life and death and the meaning of absolutes are a crystalline bead of consciousness that must function according to these universal truths but is as yet unexplained by our knowing them.
That I deform the spacetime continuum and act in accordance with quantum mechanical theory is a secondhand knowledge. I'm sure that it sustains me and were it removed I would know the limits of my own mortality, but it is not an experience I enjoy or am even aware of. My knowledge of this world and by extension things in this world beyond my senses (like the immediate world beyond my closed door) is framed in terms of the familiar. A fatuous statement in itself, since it is impossible to frame your world in terms of the unfamiliar, but it is a summation.
I might be deforming the spacetime continuum, but I can't feel it. Everything that makes up my world is permanent (always there, always the same) and expressible in terms that I understand (Blue, Hot, Heavy, Distant) - you know, familiar.
If someone were to say to me that death and heaven were like nothing I'd ever experienced, this would be true (I'm still alive and I don't know what heaven would be like) but if it were true in the way that I don't know what life is like at Planck measurements of time and distance, then you sure as hell got me there. I understand that some pretty esoteric stuff happens at these limits, but what it would be like to have a consciousness that operates at this level is incomprehensible.
Death to me is straightforward. Death is a period of time, to all extents and purposes eternal, that is to my consciousness what that similar span was like for the eternity before my birth.
If I were to say what heaven is, it would have to be framed in terms of my experience of the familiar, and I would have to say that this is pretty much it.
If it gets any better than how I feel on a good day, and I don't get to experience it 'cause I'm a filthy little atheist, then I feel blessed.
I don't know who else would be in heaven. It would not be heaven by my understanding of how God is handling this if only my buddies (and some easily identifiable assholes) could get in.
My understanding of hell is right here on earth, the hell of living in this paradise while being tortured and killed for sport. Fortunately, I have not witnessed it directly. I have heard the testimony of those that have, and I believe it.
If heaven is ridding earth of the hell of human creation and God can make that happen then there must be some part of us being made in his image that ain't getting expressed properly in our genes.
When this happens, and spontaneously I might add since God is sticking hard and fast to the free will rules, and the earth is rid of poisonous scum, then I will rejoice. If I am part of the poisonous scum, I will be insensate, heaven will be yours.
I fear that after such celestial winnowing that heaven will be so big that those of us left to inhabit it will simply die out because of the distances involved in trying to find a mate.
