The Nature of Heaven

I'm not religious, but I've wondered for some time about the nature of Heaven in Christian theology.  Specifically, what is it like for the people who go there?  I can come up with some answers to this question, but none of them are all that satisfying.  As such, I would like to enlist the aid of my Christian friends who have actually studied this subject, and with their help, we will all become more enlightened on this subject.

One, very simple answer is that Heaven is totally beyond our comprehension.  All we know ex ante is that it is perfectly good, and we will only learn more when we get there.  This is clearly unsatisfying--we want to know about Heaven before we get there, that's why we're inquiring.  Of course, that's the most we can say against this possibility, so unless we can find a better and more interesting answer, it's what we're stuck with.

We are saved by another view of Heaven...that's not much more satisfying than the first.  According to this view the souls of the righteous form a celestial choir and sing praises to God.  This may have more appeal to Christians than it does to me--I'd rather do something a bit more intellectual than merely sing praises, but this also is a fairly consistent idea.  In Heaven, one has all the satisfaction one could want, except perhaps something to do.  Thus, souls in Heaven do the best thing that occurs to them: praise the one responsible for their bliss.  As I said, this doesn't seem very satisfying to me, but if someone can make a better case for it than I just have, I'm open to it.

Probably the most popular vision of Heaven is that of a sort of congress of friends and family.  When a soul reaches Heaven, it meets the souls of those it knew and loved in life and spends eternity in their company.  The first problem I can see with this idea is that it makes God incidental, or even unimportant.  What makes Heaven wonderful is not the presence of the Almighty, but rather of those mere mortals who are missed by those still living.  I myself have no objection to such a conception, but a Christian would certainly have to resolve this difficulty.

A more substantive objection to this interpretation of Heaven involves the details.  To use a non-Christian example, when Socrates discusses his views on death in the Apology, he says that he will either experience oblivion or ascend to the Isles of the Blessed where he can discuss philosophy with the great thinkers of the past.  But what if those great thinkers don't want to discuss philosophy with him?  What if Heraclitus, Parmenides, Homer, et al. have more interesting things to do than philosophize with Socrates?  (Admittedly, philosophizing with Socrates would be quite a treat for any true lover of wisdom.)  More generally, when one comes to Heaven, one inevitably has some idea of what perfect bliss would be like, but what if people have different ideas of Heaven that include each other?  A dear friend may wish to spend eternity with someone you find distasteful, or perhaps to ration their eternity different way than you would prefer.  We can put aside this objection by invoking concord amongst the righteous, but this will still involve changing Heaven from the popular conception.

How about this: instead of everyone living in the same Heaven, each person has their own Heaven, which is precisely to their liking?  Thus, conflicting visions of Heaven are made compossible, as they are discrete and individual.  But this means that Heaven rests on a lie--the "Heavens" in which people dwell are illusions rather than realities.  The bright side to this is that we can easily grasp what Hell would be like: to know, and be unable to forget, even for a second, that the wondrous world they now inhabit is nothing but a fantasy.  However, surely Heaven and falsehood cannot be combined, so I reject this interpretation, though if someone thinks they can defend it, they're welcome to do so.

That concludes the list of schemas for Heaven that I think are worth mentioning, and that I can articulate clearly.  This brings me to one idea I've been putting together while reading Plato.  However, it is only a rough idea, and it involves interpreting Plato's theory of forms a fair bit.  Neither of these am I prepared to do lightly, and I would not propose this vague notion as true, or even as a true interpretation of Plato.  I do think it fits well with Plato's philosophy, which I greatly respect.

Now is probably a good time to answer a question that might be bothering the reader: why I am, an atheist, wondering about the nature of Heaven?  This is not an easy question to answer, but I will do my best.

One important thing to understand is why I'm an atheist.  In simplest terms, it is because I don't know what God would be if he existed.  If someone were to ask me today, "Do you believe in God?", I would have to ask for clarification.  (If someone were to have asked me the same question a few years ago, I would have answered with a hasty, "No.")  I've analyzed various ideas of God and found them all wanting.  I also do not find convincing any argument for a generic God's existence, so I would not even qualify as a Deist.  On the other hand, lacking a conception of God, I cannot rule out a priori the possibility of some divine force or being of a form I simply have not imagined.

Still further, I find certain, vague notions of divinity rather appealing.  The idea of an all-seeing and perfectly just judge is certainly something I like, and  the idea that all knowledge is somewhere collected is appealing as well.  But by the same token, it would be nice if I didn't have any homework; this world is not as I would like it in many ways, so why should it be in these?  The upshot of all this is that I'm open to the possibility of divinity without being at all convinced of it.  To answer inevitable questions, yes, "atheist" is the proper term for me, and no, there is no serious hope of converting me to Christianity or any other religion--to do so, you'd need to come up with a genuinely new argument.

So, I'm an atheist willing to consider the possibility of the divine, and this gives me some reason to not ignore questions like the one I've posed.  But why should I actually bother thinking about these issues?  Because if there is divinity, I want to have correct ideas about it...because I want to have correct ideas about everything.  If these ruminations bring me closer to the truth, most excellent; if not, at least I have inquired.

Now on to my idea.  To give a complete explanation would require recapitulating a great deal of Plato, which I'm not going to do.  However, everyone seeking wisdom should read the Dialogues.  To start off, let's take his theory of forms, at least in vague outline.  According to Plato, to try to analyze the world as we see it on its own terms results in nothing but confusion.  In order to properly understand the world, we must abstract away from the world of flux in which we live to a more permanent realm of forms or ideas.  These forms are not all coequal; there exists a hierarchy of forms culminating in the form of the Good.  By ascending through these realms of forms, a philosopher gains a more and more complete understanding of the world until, at the end of his journey, he understands all things as they are.  Plato never actually discusses what the form of the Good is, but my hypothesis is that it a variation on Eleatic monism--another idea that would be too complicated to explain in detail here, let alone the variation I have in mind.  Simply put, a philosopher attaining to the form of the Good would comprehend the unity of the world.  Plato scholars have debated the nature of the form of the good for thousands of years, and all I will say in my defense here is that this idea is not unique to me.  I do have some ideas of my own about Plato's epistemology, but this brief sketch I've given is sufficient for my purposes.

Another important aspect of Plato's cosmology is that the souls of those who are neither extremely righteous nor extremely vile are reincarnated, and thus given the chance to attain to the Good in the fullness of time.  I have to say that I count this as a point of superiority over Christian spirituality, which gives souls only a single shot at attaining righteousness (though I understand some of the reasons for it).  As I see it, if God truly wants all souls to come to him, but hates sin, surely he could contrive a means to allow souls more than one chance to attain genuine righteousness.  As I said, this is very much non-Christian, but I digress.

Plato includes in his cosmology rewards for those souls who were virtuous in life, but who did not reach the pinnacle of the Good.  It would not be unfitting to call the state these souls enjoy "Heaven," but I want to reserve that name for the state attained by the truly righteous.  There are two possibilities that I see at this point: one is more logical, the other more attractive to me.  However, as I've said, the world does not order itself to my whim, so I have to give more credence (out of none) to the first.  Still, I will describe them both.

For the first possibility, we can imagine that souls that have grasped the form of the Good and come to realize the unity of the world would then ascend to unity with the world.  Since a being at this stage would have already, by grasping the form of the Good, acquired the greatest satisfaction conceivable to mankind, and it would hardly make sense for them to be separate from the universe, it easily follows that this immanence would be the highest good conceivable.  What it would actually consist of for the philosopher, I cannot say, but at the very least there is a logic to this idea.

The second possibility tweaks the cosmology a bit and doesn't actually change the ultimate result, but it will be easy to see why I would find this option more appealing.  Instead of Heaven being reserved only for those who have attained to the form of the Good, we might allow a philosopher who has reached a slightly lower level of enlightenment to dwell there in contemplation to prepare for his ultimate ascension.  In Heaven, he would spend all his time (assuming that time as we understand it exists in Heaven) meditating on the forms and seeking for further enlightenment, leading eventually to the immanence I described above.  Why I like this option better is fairly clear: it makes attaining ultimate enlightenment easier.  Especially since Plato has souls' memories buried by the waters of the River Lethe before they are reborn, I suspect he would prefer this possibility, to the alternative of every soul being completely reset until they reach the pinnacle, as well.

So there you have my idea for Heaven.  It is very much non-Christian; in truth, it bears a striking resemblance to Buddhism, which was developed around the same time.  I do not claim that this is true, or even that it is a true interpretation of Plato.  I simply claim that it is consistent in itself and with Plato's writings.  Constructive criticisms are welcomed.

Is Government an Organization or a Function?

Imagine, if you will, a world without government.  What does it look like?  Is it a chaos where life is nasty, brutish, and short?  Is it a paradise, without hatred or coercion?  Perhaps it lies somewhere between the two, tending toward one or the other, or maybe you need more information before you can tell.

What I'm wondering about in particular is how did you make the transition from our world (which presumably has at least some government) to a world without it?  What precisely did you remove?  When we speak of government we often conflate two distinct meanings of the term.  Government can be either a set of tasks or an organization that performs those tasks.  Which do you have in mind when you use the word?  Different ideas on this point lead to vastly different answers.

Probably the most popular interpretation is of government as the State--a territorial monopolist of judicial enforcement (or some other essentially identical definition).  Precisely what the State does, or should do, is a major point of contention in modern political discourse.  Some believe that it is rightly a simple guarantor of the natural rights of the citizenry; others that it ought to equal out disparities of economic or social power; still others that it exists to help society achieve its collective goals, usually (though not always) communicated by means of a roughly democratic process.  Anarchists from Noam Chomsky to Hans-Hermann Hoppe see the State as an agency of oppression by those with effective control over it, typically a subset of the extraordinarily wealthy.

Of all these ideas, the anarchist view is most correct, since what ultimately typifies a State is the impunity with which its agents can commit acts which, when performed by anyone else, would be considered criminal.  Devices like constitutions, separation of powers, and supreme courts might be used to restrain the activities of the State, but these safeguards are ultimately illusory, as they are enforced by the State itself.  That it would eventually begin looting and tyrannizing the populace is about as foregone a conclusion as that a fox set to guarding a hen-house would one day start consuming its wards.

As you might guess from the preceding paragraph, I am not a fan of the State.  Precisely why I object to it should become obvious over the course of this inquiry.  For a long while I was also in the camp that identified government with the State.  However, reading Plato, a number of articles on natural law, and a book by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn gave me a new idea that significantly changes my perspective, at least terminologically.  The meaning of terms is fundamentally significant to any discourse seeking truth, and I think explaining my new views will help elucidate some subtleties our casual use of the word government obscures.

What would be an alternative to thinking of government as the State?  Consider this paradox.  According to Kuehnelt-Leddihn, conservatives during the 19th century thought of a society ruled by a democratic State as in actuality having no government at all.  The solution to this conundrum is an alternative interpretation of government.  Natural rights theorists have traditionally ascribed the tasks of protecting life, liberty, and property to government, almost always meaning the State.  But what if, instead of government being an organization, it is instead a function.  We could thus keep the notion of government protecting life, liberty, and property, but drop the necessity of a territorial monopolist.

According to Plato, the purpose of the ruling body, whether of a man or of a society, is to temper the passions that can lead it away from the Good.  In the Gorgias, he carefully explains how a tyrant, who can satisfy his desires to the greatest extent, is worse off for doing so, and even in truth a slave to his own whims.  He may be very clever, but lacking wisdom, he will invariably take action which is contrary in effect to his true wish.  Such a man does not rule himself, and stands in need of restraint by those wiser, for his own good as well as that of those he might harm.  By the same token, if all the people in a society are permitted to express and act on their desires to the utmost degree, nothing but harm can be expected to result.  Thus, a society must be regulated for the common good of all its members.

I agree with Plato, at least as I have interpreted him.  To put it more plainly, since some readers might be surprised by this, I am convinced that government is a necessary component of a society.  To speak of one without the other would be nonsense.  This may seem to break sharply with my anarchist ideas, but in fact they are quite compatible.  Being as I am a property-based anarchist, suppose there were no private property at all and anyone would be permitted to use any physical object they wished.  This would result in conflict as soon as one person wanted something that another person was using.  We can easily imagine that in a few cases this is resolved peacefully, it strains credulity past the breaking point to say that this would be the norm, especially after some people with a great deal of strength and modicum of intelligence noticed that they could acquire whatever they wished by brute force.  Remembering that in this scenario there would not even be property rights in individuals' bodies, we can see immediately that this would lead to an utterly intolerable state.  However, if we have property rights in objects and bodies, and these rights are generally respected, we can easily imagine an essentially peaceful society, even with occasional criminals and outlaws.

Now, to avoid being misunderstood, I do not mean to say that any distribution of property rights is acceptable.  Rather, I have a specific method for assigning them in mind derived from the tradition of natural law, specifically Locke, Rothbard, and Van Dun.  While there is room for nuance, the basic principles are the presumption of self-ownership of individuals' bodies; that new property titles only arise when previously unowned resources are plainly altered, with the title belonging to the person who altered those resources; and property titles can be transferred only by means of voluntary exchange or gifts.  The great beauty of this system is that it can ensure conflict-free interaction starting from the beginning of mankind onward and also is the legal regime most conducive to economic prosperity.  However, another advantage is that it strains moral intuition almost not at all--to find fault with this system, critics usually have to resort to horribly contrived examples or extreme behavior, for example, consensual cannibalism.  If you have to go to the extreme of eating people to find an objection--which I think can be answered--then you're really grasping at straws.

Something I've left out, however, is how these rules are to be enforced.  Obviously the law will not support itself, so some group of men must organize to do so.  Thus, a government is born.  However, this government need not be a compulsory monopolist.  In fact, there can be many organizations providing government in various ways in the same area; and this has been borne out historically.  Of course, it would be to the advantage of each such organization to eliminate its competition, but so long as public opinion is against the violence necessary to establish such a monopoly, it will be all but impossible for them to do so.  Thus, if such a system could be established, it could be remarkably stable for the freedom from injustice it would provide.

Now, it might be objected that this whole scheme hinges on public opinion.  If the public decides it no longer wants justice, then a State and all the corresponding injustices arising therefrom can take over.  This isn't as serious an objection as it seems.  If a people believes that injustice is unobjectionable, there will be injustice.  Nothing terribly remarkable about this.  And in such a case, the solution is surely not to convince them that only certain people dressed in the proper regalia or brandishing the appropriate insignia may commit injustice, but rather than it is acceptable for no one to do so.

There you have it: my views on the nature and proper role of government.  Constructive critiques welcome.