There’s that recurring theme with atheists who, wanting to portray religious people as close-minded, intolerant and limited, ask if they think that atheists can be good people, and, alternatively, if atheists can go to heaven.
The answer to this is to first define “good”, and then to define “heaven”, or salvation.
Accepting the most usual definition for “good”, the answer is yes. Most atheistic solutions to ethics are benevolent, tit-for-tat ones, which will be aggressive only if provoked, and even then only in a limited way, in order to deter further provocations. The dynamics of the cold war were essentially an example of two inherently godless camps doing self-serving things and thus avoiding any widespread violence and evil. There are, of course, very evil atheistic ethical frameworks, which we can see in the history of the age of enlightenment and socialism, so let’s not delude ourselves: atheism is actually wide open to bad ethical choices if they are seen as reasonable and self-serving.
The answer to the third question, whether atheists can go to heaven, is more difficult. If you define heaven as a state of permanent, eternal union with God, then my answer is a decisive “no”, because an atheist simply doesn’t have the kind of internal urge that makes one explore everything related to God because all his motivations drive him there, as if everything depends on it. If you really want God, you will find him, and then I can be quite certain that you’ll go to heaven when you die. If, as atheists often proudly say, you feel no need for God, you won’t go to heaven because what you are looking for is not in heaven. It’s that simple. You may now answer that it’s not right, but my response is that it’s exactly right, and it wouldn’t be right to put you in heaven so that you can annoy saints and angels with your sarcastic remarks about how stupid they are to love God so blindly when you see nothing special about Him. Since you see nothing special about God and nothing attractive about heaven, get the fuck out. It’s only logical.
Since you don’t need God anyway, you won’t be missing out on anything, apparently.
A little unrelated question… Are you planning to write article about UFOs and “abductions” phenomena?
No, because I have nothing to offer on the subject. I don’t know what the facts are so I prefer to stay out.
So basically, fast reproducing humans and overpopulation of Earth are causing souls to lack enough spiritual substance? Actually, that makes complete sense. This is practically massive manufacturing process in some communist country that causes quality of product to drop.
What do you think about the future then? There will be more and more humans who will have low mammalian life forms as part of their souls and people will BE “animals”?
Well, it’s not causing souls anything, it’s causing there to be more bodies than qualified souls, and the rest is populated by either unqualified souls or nothing, but yes.
As for the future, I think humanity doesn’t have one. Its candle is about to be snuffed out.
Did you really meant that there is nothing driving the body? I thought that the lowest point was some sort of global astral emulating a soul.
Of course not.
One of the things I learned when I entered samadhi in 1994 was that the body is usually on autopilot, and it can function just fine on an animal level without the soul. The soul is an optional override, like a driver in a self-driving car. You can usually tell when someone is on autopilot, and you can probably tell when there’s no driver in the vehicle at all.
As for the global astral field, it doesn’t actually emulate a soul, it’s more like a higher, strategic level of the autopilot which coordinates the “traffic in the city”. It gives direction, creates artificial desires, resists unwanted things and alleviates wanted things, drives the level of automatic emotional responses to certain things that are above the purely animal, genetic level, basically it tells you what you should like, what’s modern, what you should oppose if you’re to be a part of the “in” crowd. It does this regardless of whether there’s a soul driving the body because it’s like traffic data for your “internal autopilot”, and the soul is an optional override. It can cut in and take control, but it will feel very strong inputs from the automatic systems nevertheless. I always feel what the “autopilot” wants me to do, that part never stops, regardless of how much you are in control.
The moment where the soul actually consciously takes control of a life is usually experienced as a spiritual awakening; and when that happens, you understand that the body needed to have the autopilot in order to survive up to that moment instead of vegetating or dying, and when you pay attention you can learn a lot about its way of working.
Is that what they call “seeing the Tao”? Building a “bridge” over lower elements to directly experience causal?
So you say there are basically empty humans, did you mean literally not a trace of soul or a completely undeveloped soul?
I wouldn’t tie this too closely with any specific religious symbolism – it is what it is. When a soul starts waking up in a body, when you get some sort of a spiritual experience, you always have that feeling that you just started to truly live, that everything before had been like a waking dream, a zombie-like existence, but the thing is, you can only recognize that in contrast, when it ends. When you’re a zombie, you don’t know that you’re a zombie, you think you’re normal.
As for the existence of soulless people, let me turn the table on you here. You tell me how many people you know that demonstrate clearly and without a doubt the existence of an awakened, present and focused soul that shines through the body so unmistakably you can’t doubt it?
Trick question? 🙂 I’ll say I have never met such a person, but I am in email contact with one
–” I always feel what the “autopilot” wants me to do, that part never stops, regardless of how much you are in control.”——————————————————————————–
I know that feeling, like a strong pull towards a certain action or a shadow of an emotion. Sometimes in certain situations there is this strong input to some sort of anger (usually when annoyed over my limit) but it is rapidly cut, faster than it was created, a moment of darkened vision and I am serene. Is that the override you are talking about?
When someone is on “autopilot” they are usually behaving like “zombies”, mindlessly wandering in their life. Didn’t realize there can be no driver.
Thank you for pointing that out.
“I know that feeling, like a strong pull towards a certain action or a shadow of an emotion. Sometimes in certain situations there is this strong input to some sort of anger (usually when annoyed over my limit) but it is rapidly cut, faster than it was created, a moment of darkened vision and I am serene. Is that the override you are talking about?”
I have a better example. Let’s say you’re talking to someone and you’re automatically following the path of least resistance and at one point you snap and think, why the hell am I agreeing with this person, everything he said is meaningless drivel?
Or, you drive a car while you’re deep in thought and you see that you made the same turn that you usually make, but this time it’s wrong because you intended to go elsewhere. The autopilot just followed the habit it’s trained to follow, and if you don’t make a strategic override, it will live your body’s entire life in your absence.
A zombie is a person who is always on this autopilot, and is either never spiritually awake enough to make those strategic decisions, or there isn’t anyone there, it’s just autopilot driving a body because there are less human souls than human bodies on the reincarnation market.
All of those examples are familiar, especially when I’m
walking to the office and am deep in thought and my body just goes automatically
without my input and sometimes when a
line of thought is resolved I see myself going but without the intention to go.
But I am not sure if this is the case, probably there isn’t a soul worth
mentioning in my body.
There is one thing that is weird these days. Astral, that is
doing the autopilot command is pure, clean structure. It wasn’t like that
before, it was filthy and disgusting, full of peoples junk and multi-coloured. What
I expect to happen is that zombies stop being animals, but that isn’t true in
all cases. How do people generate that “filth”?
Well, if you’re conscious enough to perceive the situation you’re not the one with the problem, I’d say.
Ok, they are not all at same spiritual level, but everybody dies physical death and experiences other planes of existence. Surely, an atheist will be confronted then with a overwhelming new experience of something so contrary to everything he/she believed in life.
What I am interested is, do they go through same ordeal as people of other religious orientations/beliefs go? Or simply their lack of spiritual substance causes them to experience everything as “eternal darkness”?
I used term “eternal darkness” as its similar to what I read in NDE reports by some atheist, i.e., “there is nothing after death”.
I’m actually evasive because my answer might be shocking. You see, I have a pretty good idea about how reincarnation works, and how evolution of a soul works. You can’t just make souls quickly, the process of aggregation of spiritual substance is slow and takes time. It’s comparable to the evolution of physical organisms – it takes millions of years. Also, there’s a matter of compatibility between a soul and a certain physical type. Even a difference between male and female is enough to cause problems for some. So when you just double the number of human bodies in the last 40 years, what gets to inhabit them? Human incarnation became cheaper than it ever was, and the number of really human souls has been rather constant throughout the ages, even if you consider that the really old ones mostly left the cycle of rebirth. If it takes serious time to produce soul qualities that require human incarnation, and you produce bodies at a much faster rate, what fills the gap? You can incarnate some souls who were waiting for reincarnation because there weren’t enough bodies, but that’s a limited number. Then you incarnate high mammalian forms that are compatible and have similar minds, and since some of those are quite advanced there is no perceived loss. But then you get to lower the criteria exponentially and the result is that most humans who live today are essentially empty, they are what the atheists believe all humans to be: soulless animals. And it’s fucking obvious when you see the spiritual quality of some people, which is beyond comprehension if you assume there’s some higher spiritual presence in them.
What do you mean by “spiritual makeup”? Effect from past lives?
I mean what they are made of, spiritually, the substance their souls are made of and the way it is organized. From what I can see, there are several main reasons why someone is an atheist. For some, the way Universe works is incompatible with the way religions portray God and they conclude it can’t be true. For some, the nature of this world is incompatible with the concept of a benevolent creator. I think both those objections are quite valid, but they are a reason to say that more must be going on here than the religions think.
Then there are those who say they are atheists but they keep arguing with God and spiting him; basically, they hate what God stands for and atheism is their way of rejecting him. Some simply have no spiritual sense that would tell them about God’s presence and they don’t understand what people are talking about, they think they are all crazy.
Due to the vastly differing reasons for atheism, I see no reason to assume they are all at the same spiritual level, and therefore that they will share the same destiny.
I read NDE experiences from atheists and they say its nothing there. Of course that is not true, but what if there is really nothing for them?
You said: “atheist simply doesn’t have the kind of internal urge that makes one explore everything related to God”. Maybe that kind of “self defense mechanism” doesn’t allow for full after life experience?
When I think about it, I am wondering how does various planes of existence look for them…
I don’t think they are atheists by accident; I also don’t think it’s a matter of choice for them. They just don’t perceive things, because of their spiritual makeup. Of course, there are cases of atheists who had very elaborate and spiritually valuable NDE experiences, so apparently the reason why someone is an atheist isn’t always the same.