Been watching the documentary about Hitler (Sat night, BBC2 - sad or what?! )

Anyway. Just got me wondering.

Most of us here have a concept of afterlife, where we'll go to Valhalla, the Summerlands, Heaven etc. Presumably we think of ourselves as "good guys" and our families also.

What do you think happens to "the bad guys".

Hitler, Ian Brady, <insert name of evil-doer here> - where do they go? Are they accorded a place in your afterlife where you and your family go? Do they go somewhere different? Are they punished?

I'm still formulating a view here myself but thought I'd chuck this one on the board for viewpoints.

[quote=Pomona,Oct 21 2006, 08:47 PM]
Been watching the documentary about Hitler (Sat night, BBC2 - sad or what?! )

lol nah your not sad because i watched it aswell lol! interesting you bring this up as i was pondering it aswell.
I think that we all go to the same place "heaven" or whatever you want to call it. I think that we have all made mistakes and go there and be cleansed and shown what we did why we did it and why it was wrong and from their we are sort of purified then go onto whatever you belive in; reincarnation, recyled, a world of chocolate and so on.
I dont think they are "bad people" i think we all have the ability to be bad, its whoevers up theres way of testing us and these people just couldnt resist the temptations.

lol well theres my weird views but oh well each to their own
x

Well, as you know I dont believe in a heaven or hell.. I dont think anything happens to us after whether we are good or bad in life.

I think both aspects of the afterlife are constructs to allow us some peace and to keep us in line.

Assuming there is some form of possible existence after death, why would the same thing apply to all, and why would there be a division between 'good' and 'bad'? - who would make such judgements?

In the evolutionary scale of things I see life and death as an eternal cycle in which all things must change in order to continue. In this aspect, good and bad is superfluous, rather nature is opportunitistic, and exploiting any little nitch it can through trial and error- learning and adapting. Just as the sabertooth went extinct in one glacial cycle yet evolved into being again in similar conditions, I see the same possibility of recurrence with the state of personal conscious. Also the fact of alterdimensionality expounds this likelyhood. What we fail in this lifetime becomes our lesson in the next.

i believe that we all go to the same place but it is what you want or what your subconscious tells you it should be like.

ie maybe an evil doer maybe have it on his conscience the eveil dee and may feel that he deserves for 'the other side' to be ....well nasty !

i think the average 'normal' person will have it how they perceive it to be.


errr am i making any sense ok been out and had a few Jd and cokes !

I think the bad guys come here and play. Its a strange thing, they do evil as we see it, but to them, they often don't see it or have the mechanism to empathise. Sometimes they do it in the name of what they see as good, too. Is that bad or just unfortunate for the rest of us? I always hoped for an afterlife, some part of me, but after seeing the things I have seen I don't want to go round here again, here's hoping I've learnt enough not to. Then again, if I was asked, I would do it.
jape

I find it curious how many iconize things in terms of good and bad without considering what led to the problem in the first place. Hitler was a psychotic due to head injuries sustained in WWI as well as had all the typical behavioural maladjustments afflicted by an overweening father inclined to every derrogatory psycho-terror tactic in the popular child raising disciplines of the time in Austria. However, that so many were only too keen to exploit this grandscale transfer psychosis to their own secret ends, they are no less just as much to blame!

other than life, death and rebirth, probably nothing

Two points coming out of this strike me as interesting:

1. That it is perhaps our own perception of evil and our imposition of our morality that deem someone evil.

2. That rebirth can perhaps atone in lifetimes to come for the actions we consider evil.

Now. With 1. that raises for me interesting questions about morality and right and wrong. When does something transcend the boundaries of acceptable to become "wrong" and does it depend on culture? If you take the case of Hitler, the point that Quasizoid makes is a fair one - that it wasn't Hitler alone who was responsible for the actions which wiped out millions and triggered off a war. There were plenty willing accomplices, in fact, if you only take the number of adult Germans who voted for him, that's nearly half the population. Presumably in their eyes they weren't doing anything bad, or evil, in fact, to them it would have been quite the opposite.

As for 2. If as some believe, rebirth and atonement in the next life is the punishment etc, then I suppose that deals with that. But for those who think that nothing happens - does that then make the meting out of justice in THIS lifetime even more imperative? And would that justice include hexing?

I don't discount an afterlife, its just that I don't actually see it as a given.

In my worldview all life comes from the Cosmos and our 'souls' return there after 'death'. As I said this doesn't actually mean that a soul can't go elsewhere for another life or lives before returning to source.

Now I have this inkling, not a confirmed definite this is what happened but more a suggestion, that life exists in the small scale (you and me) to teach life in the larger scale (the Cosmos) as such the baddies teach their lesson (and unfortunatly for the rest of us we tend to be the medium they use) just as the goodies.

Now onto the morality of things. Yes it is all down to our own POV. I have absolutley no love of Adolf but the attrocities he inflicted on the rest of the world were in some ways only a skewed version of evolution. Unnatural Selection if you wish. In some ways its very easy to compare his actions - attempting genocide on the jews and gypsies, culling the impure and unfit and seeking a 'perfect race' - with those of someone breeding fancy fish. That he killed and culled humans and the fish fancier only fish is really the only difference.

It doesn't make what he did right, but then we can only judge by what we accept as right and though there are some 'universal' ideals, not all are universially equal.

As to attonement via rebirth. Possible but I'm not convinced. So as far as I'm concerned its better to hex now than take the chance

Kev

Yes but what is evil?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality

"I personnally believe i am a material manifestation of the universe but that aside other than ancestorally i beleive that what i may or may not have done in a previous incarnation has too much bearing on my existance now."

maybe we are all recycled and the over all idea is to keep coming back til we reach some form of self attainment ie if we were bad last time round we then come back to learn to be good

i believe in balance - good and bad, light and dark, male and female

I also believe we "recycle" and perhaps spend time reflecting before we "re-enter" life; whether its life as we know it or not is the BIG question

Interesting question...

For me, the idea of a grand-arbiter-of-justice is... silly. Good, bad, evil and nice are all human constructs - I've seen nothing to convince me that they're much use in the afterlife (assuming there is one; I presume there is, but my viewpoints on this are even more complex, so...)

Morals and ethics in human (and animal) societies are generally tuned to keep the *society* functioning - if society changes, so does the level of the acceptable... a quick survey of the "age of consent" around the world today will show that.

xF,

...Nick

For me, evil is what people Do, not what they are, even the worst of people are not all bad, they feel love and kindness to certain people/things.

It is when certain people are percieved as 'lesser beings' that the evil deeds start.

One of my uncles helped liberate one of the Death camps, but he would never speak of what he saw there.


Cheers, midori

In norse mythology, Hitler would have gone to Hel I think. Or even straight to Nidhöggur...

Dear Pomona,

"Most of us here have a concept of afterlife, where we'll go to Valhalla, the Summerlands, Heaven etc. Presumably we think of ourselves as "good guys" and our families also.

What do you think happens to "the bad guys".

Hitler, Ian Brady, <insert name of evil-doer here> - where do they go? Are they accorded a place in your afterlife where you and your family go? Do they go somewhere different? Are they punished? "

I believe in a form of reincarnation, though it's general rather than personal, and pretty much confined to this world. IMHO, when we die or some time thereafter, our individual identity ceases to exist. However, after death we are still - in an impersonal way - part of the life of the world, just as we were before and during our lives. Everything we've thought and done goes on after us.
A parallel to the way our physical bodies are made up of atoms from many other living beings that lived before us, and will be part of many other living beings after us. So our dead are always with us, and we'll always be with our descendants, and so on to wherever it's all going.

That may sound like extinction but I don't think it is. Everything, ourselves included, is woven together in the web of life and that is another kind of identity we have in parallel to our individual lives.

As humans, we're not only living beings. We're sentient living beings, capable of thinking about ethical matters and acting on these thoughts. The idea of moral absolutes is a tricky one. It's rather unlikely the cosmos as a whole has any kind of ethical system hard-wired into it. Everything simply does what it is. But I rather think ethics are an inescapable part of being human, something inseparable from sentience for all the clashes of value that can arise from this. Something along the lines of "I think, and am conscious of connection, therefore I have responsibilities to that which I am connected to."

"Good people" and "bad people". OK, if you're taking that as a kind of summary of the total effects individuals intentionally have on those around them. It's a fair argument that it's actions rather than people that are good or bad, but if someone's actions weigh much more heavily one way than another, then it's reasonable to consider that they are what they do.

I don't think there is some kind of afterlife judicial system that rewards the good and punishes the wicked. It's an idea that has its attractions but I've no reason to think it's true. In a very real sense I believe our capacity to think about good and evil comes from the Gods but they leave the working out of applications, and the consequences of either doing or not doing so, to us. Justice is for living people to deal with.

I think that those whom it is reasonable to describe as evil cease to exist when they die. Having made life worse while they were breathing, the life that they were and remain part of goes on the worse for them having lived. Just as life goes on better for good people having lived it. Eventually, over a very long period of time and assuming we're wise enough to stay the course - which is by no means guaranteed - humanity, collectively and as a sentient part of a greater collective, may eventually work out that ethics do not matter because of rewards or punishments. They matter because they are an inescapable part of recognising that we are each a part of life, and have responsibilities accordingly. In a sense they're about growing up.

BB,

John Macintyre

I think that we are reborn over and over, learning something new each time and also teaching others something new each time through our actions, that this is decided before being reborn.

In order for a soul/being/person to have learned everything they need to have experienced and learned everything about themselves, maybe this includes the evil side, in order to find balance we have first to have been to both extremes, so in this life time we get a serial killer who in the next life could be like mother teresa, extreme example I know but just trying to articulate it is hard.
The evil doers cause much pain and sufferering but also in a hard way, they teach others, from how to cope afterwards to understanding on why things happen when we've read about their upbringing causing some of the evil behaviour.

I might add to that later, but tis the clearest I can put it for the moment.

I quite agree with Avalyn's view, however, wish to expound upon it. The dividing line in such paradoxes as good and evil is a very fundamental law that made existence at all possible, namely, that there can be no absolute. The Third Reich is actually a classic example of this, not only for being so megalomanically single-minded, but most inclined to see itself as the absolute.
Of course this absolute had one particularly fatal flaw in its' logic, namely a thing called "deterministic chaos". In this case it was the weather on the Russian front. I find it rather amazing how rapidly their whole position deteriorated from that point on.

I don't know how many of you are familiar with such aspects of nature, but that is always what happens when you put too much blind faith in ideals of perfection, not to mention all the self-righteous illusions of grandure that make this process of entropy all the more dramatic. As Avalyn suggests, there are evils that do good, and I say conversely- there are times when "good" tends to impose quite the opposite. Looking back to the days of the "Holy Inquisitions",
I think you know what I mean.

As for the continuity of personal consciousness, I rest my case on the same fundamental law. I don't know how it is with you, but I can remember some dramatic events of my path through these cycles.

Dear Quasizoid,

"As for the continuity of personal consciousness, I rest my case on the same fundamental law. I don't know how it is with you, but I can remember some dramatic events of my path through these cycles."

I'd respectfully disagree with that conclusion, from the same grounds. Though perhaps this is as much or more about what constitutes self-identity as about what constitutes survival after death.
I'm 'me' because of everything that's shaped me from being a blob of protoplasm in my mother's womb to being a bearded old git tapping a keyboard now. If a different blob of protoplasm had been shaped by the same experiences, it would have become someone else. If the same blob of protoplasm had been shaped by different experiences it would have become someone else. From this perspective, continuity of personal experience from a specific origin is what constitutes identity.

Sometimes things that happened a long time before I was born may seem very real and immediate, almost as if 'I' was there. Sometimes reading the words of someone who died centuries before almost evokes the kind of shared communication you can experience with the living. Sometimes you can remember scenes, episodes, events which seem to come from other lives. I've no argument with that.

But who is the subject of these experiences of the past? We're all people - well, most of us anyway - and have an inherent capacity to empathise very strongly with at least some other people. Why does the memory of something that happened before our birth imply that 'we' have lived before? What makes the person who originally had that experience 'us' in a way that the person standing next to them at that time was not 'us'? Or that the person standing next to us now was not 'them'? I have no trouble believing that memories and experiences can drift down the centuries, rising to conciousness here and there in people's minds. But I don't understand how someone who was born in a different time and place, and shaped by different life experiences, is somehow 'me' in a way that everybody else isn't?

BB,

John Macintyre

Dear SeveredSolo,

"I tend to agree!"

Does that mean that one of the sources Arrdhu draws on is Dion Fortune?

Apologies for lurching off topic and no need to reply.

BB,

John Macintyre

Disagree as you like, but it cannot change the fact that this path I describe is my path. That yours may have problems defining between what was your memory or experience, or someone else's is not my problem.

Dear Quasizoid,

"Disagree as you like, but it cannot change the fact that this path I describe is my path. That yours may have problems defining between what was your memory or experience, or someone else's is not my problem."

Of course it's not your problem, nor do I have any interest in changing your path, life or shoe size . I offered a few questions on the past life theme, and there's no obligation at all to engage with them if you don't feel inclined to. Saying that your path is as you describe is fine by me.

The viewpoint I put forward is not a 'path' in any traditional sense. Just a few thoughts on memory and mortality.

Memory, perception and identity just happen to be interesting. Particularly amongst folk who practice consciousness-altering techniques. And even more particularly given a wider culture that tends to regard the body as a kind of transient garment for a soul or spirit that is taken as the true identity. Any viewpoint necessitates an observer, and that makes the relationship between that observer and what they describe a part of the picture, whether or not it's consciously placed within the frame. That was all my questions were concerned with. I apologise if you took them as critical of your own beliefs. No such criticism was intended.

BB,

John Macintyre

No problem, I'm just not one to mince words very much, but to go into depth as would interest you in any way you could relate to, would practically require whole volumes. "ancestral memory" as I may quaintly call it in this case, is actually only a small part of what I can perceive of causality on the grand scale. Though I'm sure some would give anything to have such ability, even in this modern day world it is still subject to grave misinterpretation. Thus, I have spent most of my life having to keep it to myself, because most people just don't know how to deal with it. In short, it just scares the hell out of them. I have tried to filter it down to things they can identify with. For a while I did tarot readings for them with the Thoth deck. The sheer accuracy of my readings only compelled them to shift the burden of decision making onto me, while ignoring my every warning. Needless to say I got sick of "I told you so" to a bunch of raving lunatics. At least on this forum I am just another nobody with my share of allegations, buffered by a great deal of electronic noise and an adequate firewall...so I guess you'll just have to take my words for face value.