heaven- what is it? who believes in it? and why/why not?

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[/quote]You sound like someone who might want to read the Tripartite Tractate, in fact I'd highly recommend it to you.[/quote]

i am flattered [and feeling very inadequate to the esteem] that you would consider me of the brainpower level requisite for comprehending such a profound work. maybe if i took a bunch of concertas and strateras my brain might speed up sufficient to make some headway regarding intellectual challenges such as the metaphysical tome "Tripartite Tractate." but i never even graduated from college, i was too ADD'led to function there. i can barely hold my own being a hermit. but thank you.

My mind is the functions of my brain. When my brain no longer functions, there is no mind. No conscience. I cannot logically justify a belief in an afterlife of any sort. That doesn't mean I believe that "everything goes dark", because "dark" is an experience, and I cannot experience "dark" without a conscience.
I have no problem grasping concept of no consciousness, as I don't recall being conscious before I was born, and I don't recall being conscious when I've been unconscious.
Because I only have one life, I try as well as I can to make it meaningful. I try to enjoy what I can, I try to give happiness to others, and I try not to hurt anyone.
I don't see life as having an inherent meaning, which is all the more reason to give as much meaning to it as possible by living a life worth living.
Because I have only one life, I try to make the most of it, and because others also only have one life, I try not to hinder them from making the most of theirs.
I don't need an afterlife. If I manage to live long enough to get old, I'm sure I'll be more or less sick of it by the time I'm done with it anyway.

For several decades, my optimism was sustained by faith in a god both immanent and transcendent, and a heaven that was here in the world with us.

There came a point though, where the accumulated evidence indicated that the solution to the great equations of life came out the same whether or not one started from the assumption of god. Occam's razor swung and god was gone.

A year or two later, along came aspergers - diagnosis only half a century late. God hasn't made a comeback.

I was educated in a Catholic school as a child and I was so heavily indoctrinated that I felt in order to make it to heaven you would have to live such a pious and miserable life on earth it would be impossible to live up to, like many of those self flagellating saints. They invented all this nonsense of venial sin and mortal sin. If you died with a venial sin on your soul you went to purgatory and a mortal sin you suffered and eternity in hell. Since I have emotional problems associated autism. I was even told that even evil thoughts would assign you to hell or at the very least purgatory which was just as nasty but you only just stayed the for a few million years before my so called "sins" were "cleansed" and I made it to just to fairly ordinary position in heaven. St. Augustine described the fires of cleansing as more painful than anything a man can suffer in this life. But with all my evil thoughts - and I ask who does not have evil thoughts from time to time, I felt I was in an in an inescapable cycle of mortal sin. So I felt I was destined to go to God’s eternal torture chamber. These days I feel far better enlightened against all that religious scaremongering.

if they do or dont there both overrated