Apr 21, 2012 -- 1:33PM, Newtonian wrote:

Apr 21, 2012 -- 12:48PM, Knowsnothing wrote:

In heaven, I would meet the greats of music, play piano with Beethoven. Reigning over other people is not my thing. Nor is cultivating.

Knowsnothing - what makes you think Beethoven will be in heaven?

Is he to be greater than John the Baptist?

(KJV)  Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. - Matthew 11:11.

So he's going to be all alone in heaven, since no one else is as good as he is?  Poor guy.  Solitary confinement for eternity.  Yikes!

Apr 21, 2012 -- 8:48PM, Knowsnothing wrote:

Apr 21, 2012 -- 8:12PM, Kemmer wrote:

Knowsnothing - what makes you think Beethoven will be in heaven?

Is he to be greater than John the Baptist?

Hahahahahaha. You JWs are a trip.

I didn't know John the Baptist was a pianist. 

Knowsnothing - John the Baptist was in tune with the truth!

So, how could John the Baptist be less than the least in the kingdom of the heavens?

(KJV)  Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. - Matthew 11:11

Apr 23, 2012 -- 11:16AM, mrjordan wrote:

Are we to assume that there will be instruments of any kind in Heaven?

For that matter, I like quite a few things.

pizza
strawberries
Fresh baked bread
Cheese
Swiming
Flying a plane
Playing baseball
Camping

The list is long. Are these things to be taken away from me if I was to go to Heaven? Why would I enjoy them in the first place? If people were meant to be in Heaven why didn't Jehovah just create Adam and Eve as angels?

We won't know for sure til we're dead anyway, so why pursue the question further? Or is the unsolvability of it actually the main attraction?

Apr 23, 2012 -- 12:07PM, mrjordan wrote:

Because humans were made with the will to live, not the will to die. It is in our nature. There are those that cannot wait to die...I am not one of those people that sit waiting to die. If I was that type of person then I would not try to study the bible at all.

There is nothing unsolved about death either.

From dust we came to dust we return. Ecclesiastes 3:20
While we are dead we do not feel anything. Ecclesiastes 9:5

Remember this thread is what would we do in Heaven. The question is directed at those that want to go to Heaven. I still have not seen much to answer this question. I have seen more about how everyone will die.

In other words, you think about this quite a lot. What I'm suggesting is that as you get older, the whole ideaof heaven will lose its grip on the imagination because the past becomes far more important than the future.

 I'm no big fan of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the Swiss psychiatrist who spent her career with dying patients, especially the rather bizarre cult she created around herself in later life. But she had this to say from her experience with dozens of people on the threshold of death in an interview with a gent named Daniel Redwood and it really struck a chord with me when I read it about 10 years ago as I was turning 60, and it just confirmed how I've been living ever since I got sober:

Redwood: "How can an atheist or agnostic most constructively deal with the inevitability of death? Is there an existentialist sense of angst that enters, and..."

Kubler-Ross: (interrupting) "You have no problem!! When I started this work, I wouldn't know what that was. I was raised Protestant. In my heart I was Catholic, and I was made into a Jew. For 22 years I was a little bit of everything. Then I worked with dying patients, and I began to realize that we're all the same. We're all the same human beings. We all are born the same way. We all die the same way, basically. The experience of death and after death is all the same.

"It only depends on how you have lived. If you have lived fully, then you have no regrets, because you have done the best you can do. If you made lots of goofs-- much better to have made lots of goofs than not to have lived at all. The saddest people I see die are people who had parents who said 'Oh, I would be so proud if I can say 'my son the doctor.' They think they can buy love by doing what mom tells them to do and what dad tells them to do. They never listen to their own dreams. And they look back and say, 'I made a good living but I never lived.' That, to me, is the saddest way to live.

"That's why I tell people, and I really mean it literally, if you're not doing something that really turns you on, do something that does turn you on, and you will be provided for to survive. Those people die with a sense of achievement, of priding themselves that they had the guts to do it."

Apr 23, 2012 -- 12:57PM, mrjordan wrote:

Actually, I don't think about life after death hardly at all. If Jesus allows me to survive Armageddon I may never have to experience death. But if I do die either before or during Armageddon then I know what to expect there too, as described in those scriptures. Either way, live or die, there is no mystery thus not much to think about other than keep dong what Jesus taught us to do.

So in fact you've given the whole matter a great deal of thought.