I hope this question doesn’t spin off to some debate about a deity, but nonetheless.
Mises states that contentment is that state of human being which does not and cannot result in any action. Now, if someone resides in your definition of heaven to which you hold they are truly content, then wouldn’t it also be true that they could/would not act?
What about it? In essence he is defining contentment as impossible.
Only making an observation/elaborate duh.
I would like to hear from those who believe that heaven, or contentment, is possible.
Maybe you can’t be generally content and act, but you can be content with the music that is playing and still act to do other things.
Seems like its just semantics.
The classical explanation is that God is generous by nature, and so needs people to be generous to. But then they have to be cared for etc.
People in Heaven indeed don’t do much but feel content.
Heaven sucks.
It just means that if you’re absolutly “content”, then you don’t have to do anything because you can’t improve your situation and anything you’d do would make your situation worst.
For people who believe in heaven : if you can be hungry in heaven, you can eat, if you can fall in love, if you can have relationships, have friends, go to nightclubs and have fun, you’ll do it it improve your situation.
But if in heaven you’re always perfectly happy and nothing can improve your life, ie. you don’t need friends, don’t need to drink, to eat, to have sex, to chat with anyone… then you wouldn’t act.
The truth of the matter is that no one can say.
As human man we MUST act in order to exchange a condition of greater satisfaction for a condition of lower satisfaction.
Perhaps in heaven it is possible to act out of perfect joy and contentment rather than necessity. Perhaps in heaven the chains of reason and action are loosed.
This is consistent with what the Christian response is to Christ’s work of salvation - one does not act in a Christian manner in order to be saved but rather out of thankfulness and contentment for what Christ has already accomplished for us.
The (earthly) church doctrine of ‘works righteousness’ has caused much confusion in this respect.
We cannot speak from the standpoint of what an omnicient, omnipresent, eternal being is capable of…we cannot imaging being capable of ‘all things’ because we cannot concieve of ‘all things’.
Would it be consistent, then, 1) that an omnicient, omnipresent, eternal being may not bound by the chains of reason and action as we know them?
…and I think Mises would have agreed on both of these points.
Both are also consistent Christian and Biblical doctrine.