Paradise (Where is it now?)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, December 30, 2009, 22:15 (5224 days ago) @ George Jelliss

About 1:30 today I put on the radio and caught the end of the News. Someone with a Middle-Eastern accent was describing a picture of the paradise to which Muslim suicide bombers think they are going when they become martyrs. He said something to the effect that "we don't know if such a place exists". I tried to locate the programme on Listen Again, to check that I'd heard right, but unfortunately it is not available. My immediate reaction was "Oh Yes We Do!" It is the pantomime season after all. 
> 
> There has been some talk here in the past about near-death experiences, which are supposed by some to be a foretaste of Paradise, but I'm not clear how far the religiously inclined contributors think there is an actual Paradise to which people go in some form after death.
> -What is left out here is the near-death experiences that amount to a waking nightmare or hell; those rarely get as much press! But good luck arguing with Muslims. They'd make Falwell proud if he was still alive...-> I'm quite certain, as much as one can be certain about anything, that Paradise exists in the same sense that Wonderland, Oz, Middle-Earth, Narnia, Looking-Glass-Land, Cloud Cuckoo Land, Brobdingnag, Lilliput, Utopia and other fictitious places of the literary imagination exist. That is they exist only as dreams and fantasies in human minds. That is they do not exist in reality.-I've often wondered where MY religious experience exists. As someone who's been at the minimum an agnostic for 16 years, I always chafed when people like the Pope said I was "less than human." And it is a fact that there is a part of the brain that is dedicated to religious experience... So even though I chafe at the "less than human" comment I have always wondered if I was really missing something... and then it hit me!-
Music is the ultimate form of religious experience for me. The right song in the right frame of mind (like a prayer) is a magical communication of one person's experience to another... and for me it is a drug that continuously compels me to find new experiences. -If you ever studied Western Hermeticism, you also realize that "magic" as it is often put is an attempt to recreate an exact emotional state for another person. These are the kinds of things that for obvious reasons--materialism doesn't handle very well, because they are all arts, and not sciences.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"