Prosaic Afterlifes

One thing I remember from when I first read New Wine for the End Times was a sense of simplification in me about the question of the afterlife. I didn't realize this before reading the book, but I had some uncertainty about it, I suppose about whether I would go there. Heaven was something nebulous, uncertain, or poetic, a dream. But the Millennium is guaranteed to almost all (except extreme ethical anti-theists). And it is a more or less prosaic place / time, somewhat different from this life, but recognizably similar. Just like in this life, where we have to learn to be in tune with God, so it will be in that life. Both this life and the next are places of work, and there is a degree of risk in both places -- the risk of hardening.

I think Christians sometimes have trouble believing in heaven, because it's so dream-like or poetic. They know themselves to be made of prose, not poetry. How can a prose-being live in the world of poetry? Can a prose-being be turned into a poetry-being? At best, it is uncertain whether we can really exist in the world of poetry.

Perhaps some people can believe in poetry, that it is real. But I think by default, poetry seems like a dream. It is a beautiful, unreal thing for the imagination. So if heaven is poetic, it's a beautiful, unreal, imaginary place. Only where there is prose, there is real life.

Some Christians have a hard time thinking about the afterlife, and who goes there, because traditional Christian soteriology doesn't make sense to them ("Do children who die before they profess Christianity go to heaven?" "What about my very nice friend who isn't a Christian -- or the one who is sort of on the line between Christian and non-Christian?" "What about people in uncontacted tribes in the Amazon basin?") The New Wine System makes more sense (the answer to all four questions in the previous parenthetical are "they will be resurrected to the Millennium and hopefully, over the course of the Millennium, will mature to the point of going to heaven"). With the New Wine System, people can face the afterlife and see it as real.

Given this, believers are freed from the despair that accompanies the belief in the transitory life. They can shift their focus away from survival and enjoyment (get what you can in this life) and toward ethics and God (try to work toward becoming close to, and like, God in this life and the next). New Wine Christians might look at death as "falling asleep" the way Jesus and the early church did, something relatively mundane and lightweight, rather than a tragedy mixed with a celebration as Christian dying can be seen under modern Christianity.

In New Wine or MSL thinking, is heaven a prosaic place? If we take the Bible of New Wine Christianity literally, it sounds like heaven (the New Jerusalem) is a giant cubical spaceship made out of weird, beautiful materials, which actually floats in heaven (the sky). I don't think modern people would make up that heaven, it wouldn't speak to them as normal beauty, so it doesn't work the same as modern poetry or imagination. It's too weird to be a beautiful dream (at least to me). It seems sort of orthogonal to my tastes, which perhaps is appropriate. That it doesn't fit with my desires gives it the taste of reality. Heaven isn't about what we want, it's about what God wants. Still, while it doesn't sound like my fantasy of heaven, it doesn't sound 100% prosaic either.

Should we assume that Revelation (the source of the New Jerusalem image) is literally true? My first thought is, no, it's explicitly a vision, and visions don't have to be literal. I guess it could be, but we should consider whether it's not. In that case, maybe Jesus saying that in his Father's house, there are many rooms (or words to that effect) gives us some idea.

(I'm not sure all of where Jesus could be seen to be talking about heaven. Here's the passage I was thinking of in the previous paragraph (John 14:1-4):

14:1 "Don't let your heart be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in me. 14:2 In my Father's house are many homes. If it weren't so, I would have told you. I am going to prepare a place for you. 14:3 If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and will receive you to myself; that where I am, you may be there also. 14:4 Where I go, you know, and you know the way."

Jesus' description is very plain and is consistent with a prosaic heaven. It does not rule out a poetic heaven. Without Revelation, I would default to thinking either prosaic or a plain kind of poetic heaven.)

MSL (which is apart from the Bible) doesn't commit us to any particular view of heaven, but it does commit us to a view of humans as being mature when they go there. When we are mature, will we need a heaven of magic, wonder, and maximal pleasure? Or will our tastes have changed? MSL does indicate that, unless somehow nobody hardens / rejects God, there will be an undercurrent of sorrow for the people who are not there. And even for those who are there, some of the truth of their existence there will involve how they got there, from lives of hardship and (temporary) enmity with God. I don't think that heaven will be a place of pure happy feelings, but overall tempered with sorrow. That is what love of people and the truth call for. I suppose that heaven may involve qualitatively rich or new, otherworldly experiences, which speak to a sort of Sehnsucht (as C. S. Lewis uses it?) or Lewis's image of heaven as being like the world you know but five times bigger (I think he said something like that), but we won't need it to.

Secular Life, Millennial Life, Heavenly Life

I have found myself saying "this life", to refer to the life that each of us lives between physical birth and death. What follows "this life" is to wait for resurrection. Then, to be resurrected in the Resurrection which can also be called the Millennium. I like being able to say "millennial" about what goes on in the Millennium. But "this-lifely" is awkward.

Another term for "this life" could be "secular life", the time that is lived in this world. An atheist, Muslim, Christian, and even a Buddhist or Hindu would agree that there is a thing that we live in on some level, agree on that same thing, in which people are born (and registered as having been born if they live in a time and place where birth certificates are kept), and we can all interact politically and modern medicine staves off problems that we all recognize as problems. In this world, where perhaps we only expect to live 60 or 80 years, time flows linearly.

The Millennium, I assume, and this would be the natural assumption from natural theology, I think, flows linearly as well. Some people talk about non-linear time (kairos), versus linear time (chronos). Maybe kairos runs parallel to both secular and Millennial time, which are forms of chronos.

(My understanding of kairos in this post is that it is "gathered time" (every Christmas is linked to every Christmas you ever experienced). If the past currently exists, we can be close to all the Christmases at once at each Christmastime (kairos), even if otherwise things proceed according to chronos (where we are closest to the moment that just entered the past).)

Hell, ultimately, becomes non-existent and thus I guess timeless. Heaven, according to MSL, if I recall correctly, has a chronos component (repeated outworkings of life that proceed linearly), but perhaps also a kairos component. Certainly restful time lends itself to contact with kairos or the timeless, and heaven is a time of rest.

I don't know what to say about times before creation (the beginning of secular time).

Duration of Heaven

I've been thinking that heaven is of finite length, but repeats everlastingly. In other words, assuming that God is of finite "size", he has finite memory with which to store who we become and what we do. So once we have become ourselves, we live in heaven for a while, and then God deletes some or all of the events that transpired after we entered heaven, so that we can live new lives in heaven. So we have everlasting life, but each particular timeline / life is temporary and gets undone.

If that is the case, do we have any idea how long each of those lives lasts? What is the duration of heaven (in the sense that heaven has a duration)?

I think of heaven as a place for us to be who we are, once we have become who we are in this life and the Millennium. How long does it take a person to be who they are? We don't live our lives all at once. Sometimes we have contradictory traits, which can only be lived one at one time, one at another.

So perhaps the minimum duration of heaven is the time it takes to be each of our traits -- but, I think we would have to live them out to their fullest extent, like bringing a fruit to full ripeness.

Then, if some of us finished early, we would have to wait for others.

I think of each "duration of heaven", then, as being something perhaps very long, vaguely defined.

Why Must the Past be Remembered?

This post is in "essay" format where I try different things, some successful and some unsuccessful (which I guess at this point, to be honest, is what I am choosing because I think there might be some value in the parts that I would otherwise cut, but I'm too tired to figure exactly what's good about them).

I will try to answer the question "why must the past be remembered?" by considering how it might constitute who we are, and also how it is part of the truth. Also, how it might in large part constitute the present.

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In Size of God, Part 2, I wrote that what makes a person who they are includes their life history.

Is this true? In what sense of "life history" is it true?

It certainly is the case that cultural memory is part of what makes a nation "who" it is. Cultural memory is an account of the past which may or may not be what literally happened, which forms part of a culture's identity. Individual people are like nations with a population of one, and there is a kind of "personal cultural memory" to each person.

How thick is this? (How much memory does it take to store it, for instance?) In my case, it's pretty thin. I don't have a strong sense of personal history or identity. However, I suppose there are a few things I can say about myself if I'm explaining my life and who I am, which I think are important to say.

These things present to me as being the truth about my past. But, what is the whole truth about the past? Doesn't it include many, many more details than I can remember? Even people with a thick personal cultural memory remember far less than what actually happened.

So if my personal cultural memory claims to be about the past, can it be correct in making that claim if less than the full past informs it?

For me to be a completely legitimate being, perhaps I need to be able to tell the truth in all things, and so I could only have a personal cultural memory if there was a complete record of the past, not necessarily consciously possessed by me, but at least by God, who could validate it by apprehending all things and affirming me when I say that what happened happened.

In order for me to be anyone at all, I must claim "this is who I am" with 100% definiteness -- it's part of what I sense when I say "I", is implicit in my saying "I". I make this claim during my life, but I'm sometimes wrong, because I can't access my past. My concept of my past does not line up with God's concept, both because of this ignorance, and because I have not fully come into tune with him, so that if I look at any part of my past, I do not judge it the way he would. (I'm guessing that the Millennium is a time in which people face their pasts.) But once I have come to terms with my past as it actually is/was, I will be able to say "this is who I am" with 100% definiteness and 100% truth, and thus 100% legitimacy.

I think part of who I am is accessible through what I intuitively refer to when I say "I". That "I" contains my whole past. "My whole past" refers to "every decision I've made" and "that I failed to choose to make decisions over stretches of my life", among other things.

It could be the case that God's personal cultural memory requires that he remember everything that goes into us becoming ourselves. We can construct a simplified cultural memory, but he has to remember the truth as it actually happened. I have some awareness of the history of England and can form a rudimentary identity of the country. There is an "American's identity of England" in me, and perhaps similar but different ones in other Americans. These have something to do with us Americans, and something to do with England itself, and how English people see themselves. God has such cultural memory / identity for each of us, and he has to see it according to his character, which is truthful. It was part of his life that we went through all the things we went through, and those events were significant to him, because they were part of how we came to be... whatever we are going to end up being, but hopefully to become completely legitimate like him.

Is the truth something that is inviolable, such that to delete it is to falsify something and break legitimacy? This makes some sense from a Biblical Christian perspective. God wants to forgive us, so he must send his Son to die. But, why not just delete the past, if that's an option? But he had to send his Son to die.

I think the above reasons are satisfying enough for me for now, to basically say that the truth makes up who we are and is also inviolable.

But, this raises a question for my concept of heaven given the possibility that the "size" of God is finite (see here). How can we have eternal life if God will run out of memory to store the truth? I had thought that the answer was to keep all the memories that go into who we are, but that since in heaven, nothing affects who we are, God could delete memories formed in heaven from time to time.

Wouldn't this introduce falsehood? Maybe it would be okay if God intended to keep all the memories, but ran into one of his own limitations, and so took the least-falsifying route, which would be to leave our earthly and Millennial histories untouched, but delete some heavenly history to allow us all to keep living. God must intend the best, but can be kept from doing the best by some limitation or other.

But then, why not just delete all of our pasts, to have even more people in heaven? From the reasons given in the post, this would make it so that we couldn't truthfully say who we were.

So some memory is off-limits for deleting, the memory having to do with who we are. So once we are in heaven, who we are can't change.

This is not too big a deal to say with respect to our characters, how we are aligned with God. Once our hearts are like God's hearts, we can't change and wouldn't want to.

But who you are involves more than just your character. It also involves identity.

I am (more or less) an American. Let's say, in the following hypothetical, that I died without ever having eaten Mexican food, having heard Mexican music, participated in any Mexican holidays, and so on. And I continued through the Millennium somehow without ever encountering a Mexican person or a Mexican thing. In heaven, let's say I spend 20,000 years with Mexicans, eating Mexican food, dancing Mexican dances, visiting heavenly replicas of Mexican ruins and of what those ruins were in their unruined state, speaking Spanish to Mexicans and listening to them talk about things in Spanish in a Mexican way. I fully immerse myself in Mexican culture. At the end of the 20,000 years, am I at all Mexican in who I essentially am? No. Those were just interests I had, choices I could unmake.

"Having interests" in a temporary and non-essential way is different from something being part of who you are. Those 20,000 years will fade away as God (and everyone else) forgets them. We all know that they will go away, so we don't hold onto them. For 20,000 years I can be a Mexican, and perhaps I can be a Mexican for all time, cycling through temporary years. But I could always cease to be Mexican -- but, whether I like it or not, to the extent that being American has already seeped into who I am, being American will be with me at all times now and forever.

The freedom to forget these phases or their earlier parts allows us to keep existing. But the memories that make up our character as aligned with God have to be protected. Was it we who really decided to follow Jesus? Whoever it was who made that decision, it had better be us. All the steps of repenting are decisions that we made, in the past. How was it that we, in all our particularity derived from everything we have experienced, including the memories we had in the past, come to choose to trust and obey God? God has to remember this to know for certain that it was we who repented, and not someone else.

Perhaps God could look on us in heaven and see that we never sin anymore. Was it the case that we chose to be against sin, or was it rather the case that we were given a sinless nature? How can we know a person if not to observe their behavior? If we could simply be given good natures, then God would have, and we would never be subjected to life on earth, only granted life in heaven. It is our decisions that make us who we are. God can know that it was we who decided to become who we are, if he remembers the moments in which we made those decisions, and everything that fed into those moments.

If God doesn't know who we are, he can't trust us fully, and must make us make all those decisions over again, to prove that it wasn't just that we had good natures.

What if God deleted the memories of the pasts that led to our salvation, but kept a note to himself saying "I can trust myself, and since I had seen how these people were as good as their behavior, I don't need to remember the decisions that went into that."? But those memories make up part of who God is. How could God know who he was without them? Without the memory, he couldn't be certain that he was legitimate, and thus he would cease to be legitimate and cease to exist. If legitimacy can't trust itself, it is not legitimate, because what is truly legitimate is 100% trustworthy to legitimacy, and legitimacy itself must be truly (100%) legitimate. His own legitimacy comes from his decisions.

But he could infer from the fact that he was able to delete the memories that he was trustworthy and legitimate, because if he wasn't legitimate, nothing would exist anymore. He had been 100% legitimate up to the point in time when he deleted the memories.

So perhaps God can delete the memories of our past.

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Another argument for why our memories must be preserved: While in one sense, the only thing that exists is the present, in another sense, the past exists. It's like if you have a book that exists only in the present, but the pages store the memories of the past. In the world of the pages, the past exists. We live in the world of the pages, and what makes us who we are exists in the world of the pages. I suppose the pages make God legitimate, which enables him to validate the book that stores all experience, including the pages.

If the past really exists, then I "currently" (book perspective) exist in the "past" (pages perspective), as much as I do in the present. Thus, who I am depends on who I was and how I became who I am now. My present depends on a chain of past selves, experiences, and experience bodies, all of which (book perspective) currently exist, written on pages. For them to be deleted makes it impossible for me to be who I am. But, once I have fully become who I am, to delete subsequent pages does not threaten my legitimacy, and I can safely exist, though pages are forgotten. Maybe it's like the author has fully developed the character's perspective, and after that, everything is fan fiction. The fan fiction can explore all kinds of possibilities, but can never change the canon interpretation of the characters. In this fan fiction, the characters always act in character with the canon version of them, but are in all kinds of other scenarios. This fan fiction can be periodically deleted when the server runs out of storage space.

If my present self in the book requires all the past pages to be what it is, then I suppose in heaven, when the pages are cut from the book, they must be pared back from the latest pages back to some earlier point, perhaps to the beginning of God's rest (heaven) (if the book ends at p. 3,502, and heaven begins on p. 2,580, pp. 2,581 - 3,502 are all to be deleted), rather than, as I originally thought, leaving a gap between the last remembered page and the beginning of heaven (there can't be a gap, leaving any later page unsupported by all the pages leading up to it).

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Does the past cause the present? I suppose the only thing it doesn't cause in the present are the decisions being made in the present. If the past causes (most of) the present, how can it do that if it (the past) doesn't exist? Maybe it does exist. It could be a "page", still in the book, still existing, and cause (most of) the present.

I am aware that there is quite a bit to the philosophy of time, but I'm not aware all of what has been said there. I like the image of, everything exists in the present, and the past is simply a feature of the present. This preserves the past while sticking to my preference of "the only thing that exists is the present". I think the "pages in a book" theory of the past is possibly true.

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So overall, I think that the past must be remembered by God, and thus take up space in his memory -- or, it's possible that that is true -- I feel, right now, that it likely is true. If God is finite in "size", there is a limit to how much memory can be stored, and a certain amount is needed for each of us to develop to the point of being able to live with God forever.