What is There to Live for in Heaven?

My grandmother died two years ago. On the underside of her casket’s lid, there was a painting of a golf course. An immaculate fairway led up to an even more well-kept green flanked by a lake, and all of it nestled in a quiet forest. During the service, the priest even talked about her playing golf in Heaven, and he wasn’t the only one. I heard one or two of my aunts and uncles say the same thing. Is this what they imagine the afterlife to be, I wondered. Just an extended version of retirement? What would be the point of that? Even as a child, I found the idea of the afterlife more unsettling than reassuring. As I got older, and began thinking more critically about my family’s religion, it came to seem downright absurd. For <a href="https://medium.com/my-unpopular-opinion/heaven-would-be-a-hellhole-3d7fe2399d48" rel="noopener">example</a>, we were told that evil enters the world as a result of free will. But if Heaven is a place where there is no evil, does that mean we won’t be free? And if God can manage to make Heaven a place where freedom is compatible with the complete absence of evil, why didn’t he make our world in the same mold? In this article, I want to explore a more complex criticism of the idea of Heaven. Given the eternity and perfection of Heaven, what possibility is there for our existence to be authentic and meaningful when there’s no longer anything at stake? <h2>Trouble in Paradise</h2> In his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, philosopher Robert Nozick introduced his “experience machine” thought experiment. Which would be preferable, Nozick asks us, to live out our lives in this reality, or to plug ourselves in to a machine — the experience machine — that can realistically simulate any pleasurable experience we may wish to have? <a href="https://medium.com/backyard-theology/what-is-there-to-live-for-in-heaven-a801a94b6bcb">Click Here</a>