The only thing that can explain this discrepancy between european and the broad american view on what is going on in your own country, is the tremendous influence held by misinforming "News" Corporations, such as Fox News.
I don't think that's it. Most of the delusional behavior you describe was around before there was a Fox news, back when there were three fairly responsible and slightly left leaning networks.
Half the country supports the tyranny of the elite because it appears to benefit them relative to the other half. Also, nearly everyone is trying to get away with something in life, at the expense of someone else, and that blinds them to what's really going on.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the US is bigger than Germany, with more ethnic diversity, and a different history. What works in Europe would not necessarily work here. My large city is more than half composed of recent immigrants, mostly from Vietnam and China. They're smart and they work hard, but most of the ones I know don't really seem to get political pluralism, or care very much about it. Somehow we have to make this all work. Yes, American society is deeply delusional and immoral in a lot of ways, but its not as if what seems to work in Europe would completely apply here.
I think there's a limit to how far society can be thought of as a collection of individuals. Obviously it is a collection of individuals. But those individuals also act in coordination as larger groups. Most people, to varying degrees, adjust their own feelings of identity to fit that dynamic. Differences of judgment about this don't necessarily mean someone is "wrong", its just a different emphasis.
Yes, its wrong to force racists to associate with people they don't like. I count myself as a racist, but I'm not blind. Its also wrong to kidnap a bunch of Africans, either directly or by proxy, harness their labor for profit, and then persecute their descendants. These days everyone agrees that slavery was wrong, but it doesn't appear to me that most people grasp how deeply it injures people. When you have family to care for, it takes your moral sense and your work ethic and turns them against each other. Its like being forced to force yourself to eat shit, in a way that goes more to the core of your being than mere food. And that injury does get passed down from parent to child. The wound doesn't just magically heal the moment the knife stops cutting. I'm not saying people should be using it to make excuses or demanding special treatment, since that tends to prolong the problem. But have a little understanding.
By most measures I'm libertarian, and I agree with Rand Paul on most issues. But often life presents a choice between greater and lesser evils. I support a law that says effectively, "If you're thinking of making your house a restaurant, you will either serve black people or find something else to do for a living. No man is an island. I find there to be something brittle and reality-denying about a philosophy that doesn't have room for this.
Completely off topic....When a person reads, or at least when I read, the brain grabs an area of words and letters all at once, and quickly and subconsciously assembles and interprets them in the most sensible order. I rarely notice this except when it settles on a solution that's questionable enough to make me look more carefully.
Anyway, your sig says "seriousness is well above my gay pride".
Do you really want to force your enemies hand like this?
It has been quite profitable for those in the military/contractor revolving door who have been responsible for this strategy. Although in theory its people higher up the chain who decide the policy, they do so based on the expert advice of people who are neither entirely honest nor interested in the long term.
I suspect that has a great deal to do with the sad state of discourse.
I think it has more to do with almost universal dishonesty. Teach people dialectic and they'll just use it dishonestly also.
I've noticed that even Plato, who I'm a big fan of, tended to twist things around to whatever point he was trying to make. For example, in one dialogue he argues that popular dislike of Pericles is proof that he was bad for Athens, and in another he argues that popular dislike for Socrates is proof that he was good for Athens. He uses almost exactly opposite logic dressed up as sincere questioning.
I think the problem is a lot bigger than the internet. It looks to me that the whole cultural vision that started with the European enlightenment has largely run its course, at least in North America. I can't comment on Europe, since I haven't been there recently. Its not that we don't have freedom - in many ways we have more now than ever. Its that the fire has gone out somehow, and its just momentum that's carrying us forward. The ideal of freedom was always pretty corrupt, a matter of freedom to enslave other people or steal their land. Now that corruption has overtaken it.
Not to be all gloom and doom: there will be another enlightenment. But I don't see it happening immediately. In America, the most ambitious and talented people seem to be recent immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe. And it doesn't seem that most of the Asians think or care very much about freedom, at least not yet.
The other possibility is that the whole institution will become increasingly paralyzed and unable to accomplish anything. Unlike a company, the armed forces can't actually go bankrupt. The USB ban and similar issues are already a problem for the Air Force.
I am trying to figure out why you value animal life more than plant life.
I'll take this statement at face value.
All eating requires sacrifice of life.
Not to the same degree. For example, eating cheese does not sacrifice life to the same extent as eating beef. And eating fruit sacrifices life not as much as uprooting a plant. Also, there are huge differences in the brutality involved, for example feed lot cattle have a far worse life than free range cattle, so I prefer to eat the later if I eat beef.
OK. Given that its taken hundreds of millions of years for oil to accumulate under ground, and that oil is useful for all kinds of things besides driving around in fuel-inefficient cars, here's another question:
Do we really have to burn it all up in the next couple hundred years, just because we can?
Forget the caribou, lets leave some in the ground so we can use it later.
Furthermore, if the argument against the federal regulatory power grab is so compelling on libertarian principles....Why do so few of the same people have a problem with the federal homeland security power grab, and the vast sums of money that are poured into that? Yes I know there are some climate-change-hysteria skeptics that are also genuinely in favor of small government, but they are a politically insignificant minority.
I'm of the belief that a person should do their own dirty work at least every now and then, or go vegan.
I agree. Or at least smell a feed lot one time and see if they still want to eat beef that's not free range. The way chickens are raised these days is appalling also.
It seems similar to me as the quandary with eating meat. A lot of people have to eat meat to stay healthy, yet it still requires sacrificing something else. All you can do is pick the lesser of evils, and try to point yourself in the right direction. Personally I'm against a lot of the medical testing they do, but its a judgment call, and reasonable people can arrive at different conclusions.
One reason I'm against some of it, is I see that the medical industry has a lot of power lust and greed in it, and in a lot of ways doesn't really care about health. The way many hospitals treat both their own patients and their own employees is really brutal. So I say, try treating people right, and focusing more on caring for the body doing the obvious things like exercising and not eating junk food. That right there would do as much or more for health than a whole lot of grisly animal experiments. Do the right things first, and see how much of the wrong things remain necessary.
As I see it, a defining characteristic of our world is that some live by sacrificing others. Obviously it doesn't start with man, it goes all the way down the evolutionary chain. Seeing that the whole natural order is like that, and that its often unavoidable given what came before, people justify it. But there's a price we pay. And as we become increasingly powerful, the price can get higher. Europe's 20th century wars would be one example of how behavior that sort of worked before becomes more problematic with advances in technology.
Personally I think we'll pay eventually for every bit of our lack of humility and love for others, be they other people or other animals.
As I see it, none of it is about fairness. The whole Objectivist trick is this:
1. Describe how "second handers" steal the work of creative people 2. Get all incensed about the unfairness of it 3. Use that as a pretext for stealing the work of other people
Unless this has changed since I looked into it 15 years ago, the top Objectivist Society leadership mostly became wealthy by speculation and market manipulation. Almost none of those people actually built anything - they're parasites, not different from Ayn Rand's villains except they use money to control resources rather than government.
An honest person sees that they are entitled to the fruits of their own labor, just as Ayn Rand argues. But also that no man is an island: nearly every man's success is in some degree dependent on others. Consequently others are owed something. There are two sides to it. Live and try to treat other people right, while doing what you can to prevent other people from abusing you. Its very simple. As a unique or motivating philosophy the whole issue sort of goes away.
Pelosi would be an example from San Francisco. I don't know her voting record in relation to airport scans, but her rhetoric in general has been "keeping America safe". I know she's been supporting increases in surveillance funding in other areas, which has actually gone up quite a bin on her watch after Bush left office, but a lot of that is for secret programs so its hard to call her on it. As speaker of the house, with her party having controlled the house, the senate, and the executive for most of these past two years, she could have done something about the airport security situation if she wanted to. At the very least she could have called for a public dialogue.
I'd buy that argument, except the left-wing politicians from liberal cities like San Francisco have been supporting this stuff also. Its not just the war-mongering right, its almost all of them.
I suspect it has more to do with cowardice, an instinctive love of control, and campaign contributions.
I don't think its even about making people feel more secure. That's not the question congress is asking when they approve these kinds of things. Its about campaign contributions. A bunch of government guys and contractors found a pretext to transfer money from the US treasury to themselves, and nobody cared enough to stop them. Its security theater in the sense that security is the pretext, but they don't actually have to make the theater convincing in order to get away with it.
I agree. Here's an additional point....There is a difference between believing something because you made something up and want it to be true, and believing it because you have some awareness or understanding of it. I don't think its elitist to suppose an earnest, thoughtful, and fortunate person can gain some actual understanding in relation to the reality or unreality of god or immortality. At that point you've become less agnostic, and more theistic or atheistic, but not as a matter of fear or dogmatism.
I think the left/right dichotomy here is false. The hundreds of thousands of people working in the federal security apparatus, either as government employees or for private contractors, are generally praised rather than vilified by the right. And yes, they are just trying to take care of their families. But the way they're doing that is a drain on other more productive endeavors, and is slowly eroding our freedom. They may have been pushed into their current work largely by circumstances. But at some point it still has to be resisted.
If you work for the government, or in the 'government security apparatus', and you're in a situation where you are able to conscientiously put people's money to productive use, then hats off to you, and I'm not talking about you. But if the shoe fits....There's two different places the sensitivity can come from.
In your example, both the atheist and the religious person are 'taking comfort' in a belief about death. Both of them fear it. The belief of your atheist is more totalitarian though - it admits no compromise with other possibilities. In that sense I don't see how that's different from the Christian who is certain they will go to heaven rather than to hell.
Paul Erdos, as an example, was an atheist, yet according to him the defining and traumatic event of his life was being 5 and realizing that he would die. Why was that realization so compelling to him? Maybe part of it is he appreciated something of the value of the mind, and of identity, so the prospect of losing it seemed more tragic. In that regard, more depth of knowledge increases fear rather than decreasing it. Yet if he felt that he was a part of something larger than himself that does not die when he dies, he would have felt better. So in that case more knowledge would have decreased fear.
My initial reaction to this 'fear of death' thread, is that the thinking of educated people is more subtle to start with - ideas are more real than perishable objects, which can always be reconstructed from the ideas. So they don't fear death, in the same way that we don't fear a data set being deleted when it can be regenerated. But now after reading all of these 'fear is caused by religious belief' postings, I'm wondering if educated people are more afraid than they seem to be on the surface, and that they've just done a better job of blocking all the outlets.
I guess I can agree that any kind of faith in the face of apparent facts is productive of fear though - the worldview of someone who believes in Heaven and Hell is constantly threatened. But if they weren't afraid they likely would never have cultivated that worldview to start with, or their parents wouldn't have.
The flip side of morphine of course, is since it takes away your fear, it takes away a person's desire to deal with any of the issues that produced that fear to start with. Not that this is necessarily applicable to you in your situation.
Your point here about strict judgment was important to me personally. By relaxing my beliefs for or against things, and just leaving them in whatever state of ambiguity seemed to be justified by the available facts at the time, all kinds of possibilities opened up that weren't there otherwise.
Of course, too much of this sort of thing too early leads to a sloppiness or fuzziness in thought that's not very constructive either. And everyone is at a different place with that. As a teacher, I started off trying to get people to explore and think about things from different directions. But I think there was a large portion of the class that I wasn't serving very well. A lot of people really do need clear, rote steps that they can follow, and only after it becomes sufficiently familiar that way do they have a chance of thinking more flexibly about it.
My experience with academics has generally been that they are knowledgeable and smart enough to engage very much in that manner, but too arrogant, at least in relation to lesser or non-academics. Ask them something from outside of their intellectual bubble, and they'll twist the question into something befitting of the apparent simpleton that asked it, then speak to that. They're smart enough to see the answer to the real question and communicate it, if they can see the question. But seeing it requires admitting any relevant limitations of their own knowledge, and they won't do that. I find this frustrating when I can see that the person's understanding is valuable but their pride prevents them from sharing it.
I have your same experience with the 'general population'. But I agree with the point that anyaristow makes, and think it applies to me in relation to academics also. Its possible to learn something relevant from practically anybody. If I keep getting the same useless interaction, then its because I never learned what the opportunity actually provided.
It's difficult to imagine what part of us actually goes to heaven. I don't see how I could be happy there knowing that anyone is being tortured for eternity....Having to spend eternity singing the praises of the most powerful and emotionally needy being in creation really doesn't appeal to me.
I think the problem with the 'heaven' you're describing is that it was cooked up by people who weren't interested in it making that kind of sense.
The heaven of the New Testament, which is said to be "within you", also doesn't seem to me to very much resemble the pearly gates caricature of Hollywood and AM radio preachers.
I don't think of it as a place a person or a part of a person goes. Conceiving of it is more like trying to look at something that's under water. You see what reflects off the surface, and not what's underneath. But then when the light is right, you see that you were staring right at it and it was there all the time.
We're there now or we are not. Same with hell. There's nothing magical about brain death that suddenly makes it real, or changes the status of whatever part of us might or might not have survived death. Either a part of us stands outside of our temporal experience, even while we are living, or it is not real after we are dead either.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing that can explain this discrepancy between european and the broad american view on what is going on in your own country, is the tremendous influence held by misinforming "News" Corporations, such as Fox News.
I don't think that's it. Most of the delusional behavior you describe was around before there was a Fox news, back when there were three fairly responsible and slightly left leaning networks.
Half the country supports the tyranny of the elite because it appears to benefit them relative to the other half. Also, nearly everyone is trying to get away with something in life, at the expense of someone else, and that blinds them to what's really going on.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the US is bigger than Germany, with more ethnic diversity, and a different history. What works in Europe would not necessarily work here. My large city is more than half composed of recent immigrants, mostly from Vietnam and China. They're smart and they work hard, but most of the ones I know don't really seem to get political pluralism, or care very much about it. Somehow we have to make this all work. Yes, American society is deeply delusional and immoral in a lot of ways, but its not as if what seems to work in Europe would completely apply here.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.
They are, alas, entitled to their own delusions.
I think there's a limit to how far society can be thought of as a collection of individuals. Obviously it is a collection of individuals. But those individuals also act in coordination as larger groups. Most people, to varying degrees, adjust their own feelings of identity to fit that dynamic. Differences of judgment about this don't necessarily mean someone is "wrong", its just a different emphasis.
Yes, its wrong to force racists to associate with people they don't like. I count myself as a racist, but I'm not blind. Its also wrong to kidnap a bunch of Africans, either directly or by proxy, harness their labor for profit, and then persecute their descendants. These days everyone agrees that slavery was wrong, but it doesn't appear to me that most people grasp how deeply it injures people. When you have family to care for, it takes your moral sense and your work ethic and turns them against each other. Its like being forced to force yourself to eat shit, in a way that goes more to the core of your being than mere food. And that injury does get passed down from parent to child. The wound doesn't just magically heal the moment the knife stops cutting. I'm not saying people should be using it to make excuses or demanding special treatment, since that tends to prolong the problem. But have a little understanding.
By most measures I'm libertarian, and I agree with Rand Paul on most issues. But often life presents a choice between greater and lesser evils. I support a law that says effectively, "If you're thinking of making your house a restaurant, you will either serve black people or find something else to do for a living. No man is an island. I find there to be something brittle and reality-denying about a philosophy that doesn't have room for this.
Completely off topic....When a person reads, or at least when I read, the brain grabs an area of words and letters all at once, and quickly and subconsciously assembles and interprets them in the most sensible order. I rarely notice this except when it settles on a solution that's questionable enough to make me look more carefully.
Anyway, your sig says "seriousness is well above my gay pride".
Do you really want to force your enemies hand like this?
It has been quite profitable for those in the military/contractor revolving door who have been responsible for this strategy. Although in theory its people higher up the chain who decide the policy, they do so based on the expert advice of people who are neither entirely honest nor interested in the long term.
I suspect that has a great deal to do with the sad state of discourse.
I think it has more to do with almost universal dishonesty. Teach people dialectic and they'll just use it dishonestly also.
I've noticed that even Plato, who I'm a big fan of, tended to twist things around to whatever point he was trying to make. For example, in one dialogue he argues that popular dislike of Pericles is proof that he was bad for Athens, and in another he argues that popular dislike for Socrates is proof that he was good for Athens. He uses almost exactly opposite logic dressed up as sincere questioning.
I think the problem is a lot bigger than the internet. It looks to me that the whole cultural vision that started with the European enlightenment has largely run its course, at least in North America. I can't comment on Europe, since I haven't been there recently. Its not that we don't have freedom - in many ways we have more now than ever. Its that the fire has gone out somehow, and its just momentum that's carrying us forward. The ideal of freedom was always pretty corrupt, a matter of freedom to enslave other people or steal their land. Now that corruption has overtaken it.
Not to be all gloom and doom: there will be another enlightenment. But I don't see it happening immediately. In America, the most ambitious and talented people seem to be recent immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe. And it doesn't seem that most of the Asians think or care very much about freedom, at least not yet.
The other possibility is that the whole institution will become increasingly paralyzed and unable to accomplish anything. Unlike a company, the armed forces can't actually go bankrupt. The USB ban and similar issues are already a problem for the Air Force.
I am trying to figure out why you value animal life more than plant life.
I'll take this statement at face value.
All eating requires sacrifice of life.
Not to the same degree. For example, eating cheese does not sacrifice life to the same extent as eating beef. And eating fruit sacrifices life not as much as uprooting a plant. Also, there are huge differences in the brutality involved, for example feed lot cattle have a far worse life than free range cattle, so I prefer to eat the later if I eat beef.
OK. Given that its taken hundreds of millions of years for oil to accumulate under ground, and that oil is useful for all kinds of things besides driving around in fuel-inefficient cars, here's another question:
Do we really have to burn it all up in the next couple hundred years, just because we can?
Forget the caribou, lets leave some in the ground so we can use it later.
Furthermore, if the argument against the federal regulatory power grab is so compelling on libertarian principles....Why do so few of the same people have a problem with the federal homeland security power grab, and the vast sums of money that are poured into that? Yes I know there are some climate-change-hysteria skeptics that are also genuinely in favor of small government, but they are a politically insignificant minority.
I'm of the belief that a person should do their own dirty work at least every now and then, or go vegan.
I agree. Or at least smell a feed lot one time and see if they still want to eat beef that's not free range. The way chickens are raised these days is appalling also.
It seems similar to me as the quandary with eating meat. A lot of people have to eat meat to stay healthy, yet it still requires sacrificing something else. All you can do is pick the lesser of evils, and try to point yourself in the right direction. Personally I'm against a lot of the medical testing they do, but its a judgment call, and reasonable people can arrive at different conclusions.
One reason I'm against some of it, is I see that the medical industry has a lot of power lust and greed in it, and in a lot of ways doesn't really care about health. The way many hospitals treat both their own patients and their own employees is really brutal. So I say, try treating people right, and focusing more on caring for the body doing the obvious things like exercising and not eating junk food. That right there would do as much or more for health than a whole lot of grisly animal experiments. Do the right things first, and see how much of the wrong things remain necessary.
As I see it, a defining characteristic of our world is that some live by sacrificing others. Obviously it doesn't start with man, it goes all the way down the evolutionary chain. Seeing that the whole natural order is like that, and that its often unavoidable given what came before, people justify it. But there's a price we pay. And as we become increasingly powerful, the price can get higher. Europe's 20th century wars would be one example of how behavior that sort of worked before becomes more problematic with advances in technology.
Personally I think we'll pay eventually for every bit of our lack of humility and love for others, be they other people or other animals.
to claim I have never read her works is not fair
As I see it, none of it is about fairness. The whole Objectivist trick is this:
1. Describe how "second handers" steal the work of creative people
2. Get all incensed about the unfairness of it
3. Use that as a pretext for stealing the work of other people
Unless this has changed since I looked into it 15 years ago, the top Objectivist Society leadership mostly became wealthy by speculation and market manipulation. Almost none of those people actually built anything - they're parasites, not different from Ayn Rand's villains except they use money to control resources rather than government.
An honest person sees that they are entitled to the fruits of their own labor, just as Ayn Rand argues. But also that no man is an island: nearly every man's success is in some degree dependent on others. Consequently others are owed something. There are two sides to it. Live and try to treat other people right, while doing what you can to prevent other people from abusing you. Its very simple. As a unique or motivating philosophy the whole issue sort of goes away.
Pelosi would be an example from San Francisco. I don't know her voting record in relation to airport scans, but her rhetoric in general has been "keeping America safe". I know she's been supporting increases in surveillance funding in other areas, which has actually gone up quite a bin on her watch after Bush left office, but a lot of that is for secret programs so its hard to call her on it. As speaker of the house, with her party having controlled the house, the senate, and the executive for most of these past two years, she could have done something about the airport security situation if she wanted to. At the very least she could have called for a public dialogue.
I'd buy that argument, except the left-wing politicians from liberal cities like San Francisco have been supporting this stuff also. Its not just the war-mongering right, its almost all of them.
I suspect it has more to do with cowardice, an instinctive love of control, and campaign contributions.
I don't think its even about making people feel more secure. That's not the question congress is asking when they approve these kinds of things. Its about campaign contributions. A bunch of government guys and contractors found a pretext to transfer money from the US treasury to themselves, and nobody cared enough to stop them. Its security theater in the sense that security is the pretext, but they don't actually have to make the theater convincing in order to get away with it.
I agree. Here's an additional point....There is a difference between believing something because you made something up and want it to be true, and believing it because you have some awareness or understanding of it. I don't think its elitist to suppose an earnest, thoughtful, and fortunate person can gain some actual understanding in relation to the reality or unreality of god or immortality. At that point you've become less agnostic, and more theistic or atheistic, but not as a matter of fear or dogmatism.
good point
I think the left/right dichotomy here is false. The hundreds of thousands of people working in the federal security apparatus, either as government employees or for private contractors, are generally praised rather than vilified by the right. And yes, they are just trying to take care of their families. But the way they're doing that is a drain on other more productive endeavors, and is slowly eroding our freedom. They may have been pushed into their current work largely by circumstances. But at some point it still has to be resisted.
If you work for the government, or in the 'government security apparatus', and you're in a situation where you are able to conscientiously put people's money to productive use, then hats off to you, and I'm not talking about you. But if the shoe fits....There's two different places the sensitivity can come from.
In your example, both the atheist and the religious person are 'taking comfort' in a belief about death. Both of them fear it. The belief of your atheist is more totalitarian though - it admits no compromise with other possibilities. In that sense I don't see how that's different from the Christian who is certain they will go to heaven rather than to hell.
Paul Erdos, as an example, was an atheist, yet according to him the defining and traumatic event of his life was being 5 and realizing that he would die. Why was that realization so compelling to him? Maybe part of it is he appreciated something of the value of the mind, and of identity, so the prospect of losing it seemed more tragic. In that regard, more depth of knowledge increases fear rather than decreasing it. Yet if he felt that he was a part of something larger than himself that does not die when he dies, he would have felt better. So in that case more knowledge would have decreased fear.
My initial reaction to this 'fear of death' thread, is that the thinking of educated people is more subtle to start with - ideas are more real than perishable objects, which can always be reconstructed from the ideas. So they don't fear death, in the same way that we don't fear a data set being deleted when it can be regenerated. But now after reading all of these 'fear is caused by religious belief' postings, I'm wondering if educated people are more afraid than they seem to be on the surface, and that they've just done a better job of blocking all the outlets.
I guess I can agree that any kind of faith in the face of apparent facts is productive of fear though - the worldview of someone who believes in Heaven and Hell is constantly threatened. But if they weren't afraid they likely would never have cultivated that worldview to start with, or their parents wouldn't have.
The flip side of morphine of course, is since it takes away your fear, it takes away a person's desire to deal with any of the issues that produced that fear to start with. Not that this is necessarily applicable to you in your situation.
Your point here about strict judgment was important to me personally. By relaxing my beliefs for or against things, and just leaving them in whatever state of ambiguity seemed to be justified by the available facts at the time, all kinds of possibilities opened up that weren't there otherwise.
Of course, too much of this sort of thing too early leads to a sloppiness or fuzziness in thought that's not very constructive either. And everyone is at a different place with that. As a teacher, I started off trying to get people to explore and think about things from different directions. But I think there was a large portion of the class that I wasn't serving very well. A lot of people really do need clear, rote steps that they can follow, and only after it becomes sufficiently familiar that way do they have a chance of thinking more flexibly about it.
My experience with academics has generally been that they are knowledgeable and smart enough to engage very much in that manner, but too arrogant, at least in relation to lesser or non-academics. Ask them something from outside of their intellectual bubble, and they'll twist the question into something befitting of the apparent simpleton that asked it, then speak to that. They're smart enough to see the answer to the real question and communicate it, if they can see the question. But seeing it requires admitting any relevant limitations of their own knowledge, and they won't do that. I find this frustrating when I can see that the person's understanding is valuable but their pride prevents them from sharing it.
I have your same experience with the 'general population'. But I agree with the point that anyaristow makes, and think it applies to me in relation to academics also. Its possible to learn something relevant from practically anybody. If I keep getting the same useless interaction, then its because I never learned what the opportunity actually provided.
There are quite a few problems with Heaven..
It's difficult to imagine what part of us actually goes to heaven. I don't see how I could be happy there knowing that anyone is being tortured for eternity....Having to spend eternity singing the praises of the most powerful and emotionally needy being in creation really doesn't appeal to me.
I think the problem with the 'heaven' you're describing is that it was cooked up by people who weren't interested in it making that kind of sense.
The heaven of the New Testament, which is said to be "within you", also doesn't seem to me to very much resemble the pearly gates caricature of Hollywood and AM radio preachers.
I don't think of it as a place a person or a part of a person goes. Conceiving of it is more like trying to look at something that's under water. You see what reflects off the surface, and not what's underneath. But then when the light is right, you see that you were staring right at it and it was there all the time.
We're there now or we are not. Same with hell. There's nothing magical about brain death that suddenly makes it real, or changes the status of whatever part of us might or might not have survived death. Either a part of us stands outside of our temporal experience, even while we are living, or it is not real after we are dead either.