Which religion has the best heaven?

Hmmmm....

Well, the Norse afterlife was basically a continuous party until a giant (presumably drunken) battle takes place. After that I assume is the worst hangover ever. No thanks.

The Greek/Roman afterlife always seemed pretty grim.

The Jewish afterlife is unspecified. That's a contender.

I don't recall the NT being very specific about the afterlife aside from it offering eternal life. Maybe I need to read the Bible again. People talk about it being very static, but I don't think the NT actually states that. I wouldn't like static.

I don't remember what the Quran said. I should re-read that too.

I hear reincarnation when people talk about the Hindu faith. That doesn't sound bad. Something that changes instead of being static sounds a lot better.

I'm not clear on Buddhism.

I don't have any clue about an afterlife. However, I can't see how brain and mind can be separated. So does that mean life is just a short segment on the line of time? That, I'm not sure about. Maybe life is much, much larger, but not in a linear sense. What if the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true? Maybe a life isn't a line but an infinite tree of possibilities. Maybe it's something completely different that we've never considered. The Universe is always surprising us.

In more fun news, there's a story from NPR about the Shake Shack in Seoul, and it includes this bit:

Interestingly, one of my Korean university students in Seoul, where I spent part of the year researching the leisure culture of Korea, told me he saw Westerners working in the kitchen at Shake Shack. For him, that gave the whole enterprise a more authentic sense of Americanness.

I am glad that apparently people everywhere use the same rules of thumb!

I love that.

Don't love Kat's situation. Too much badness for me to coherently type a full response on my phone, but I can certainly sympathize.

Also would like to make lengthy response to Gud's musings. Hopefully work will not get too much in the way of my posting today...

That's awful, Kat.

I am a delicate flower and woke up this morning in Chicago and its 73 and I'm all "but it's so HUMID!"

ION, two days until husband moves. I am a giant stress ball.

Changing a student's grade makes me RAGEY. Horrible lesson for the students and horribly dishonest.

Absolutely! Grades should reflect students' mastery of the material. Not where the administration wishes they were, not how well they move a ball into a desired location, just their mastery of the material. Period.

The shooting at TX highschool is not Mac's school or near b.orgers. Not that that makes it less horrible, just getting that out there as news catches it.

Wow, Dana.

Thanks for that, msbelle. I like to get the reassurances as early as possible. Ugh, apparently is still happening.

I somehow managed not to bring in my oatmeal this morning. I was really looking forward to that.

t /trivial disappointments

OK, I don't think any of my currently pending tasks are all that urgent.

Kat, that is terrible. I am outraged by the grade changing and appalled by the principal. You Aren't Letting Us Support You is a crappy fucking criticism, what the hell? They need Oz's "I told you what I need, this is not about helping me" speech looping on their personal soundtracks for a while. And so early in the year, sigh, I'm sorry, that must be really hard.

Buddhism is not really about afterlives, although for a long period in China Buddhists were the preferred officiants for funerals (I think it was funerals) because they had the most variety of hells and great descriptions of them.

The end game, as it were, for Buddhism is not about having something good waiting for you after this life, it's about getting out of the game entirely. Off the wheel. Escaping the cycle. Pascal's wager would be, I would think, entirely moot.

Now, I have given a lot of thought to how to deal with finite lifespans and what gives me the most comfort (and seems to fit reality as I understand it) is to consider the universe in 4 dimensions. The space-time representation of your life, or anyone's, occupies it's hypervolume whether our current conscious experience of time intersects it or not. Not unlike eternal life.

Well, it makes me feel better.