What Heaven Means To Me

[sythyry]

The word "Heaven" is not a technical term of art; it means a variety of things. What does it mean to you?

[Poll #1610914]

Comments

[relee.livejournal.com]

My favorite heaven was Elysium, from Planescape. It was the plane of absolute good, and rather than being utopia, it was paradise. It wasn't boring because bad things happened, but they only happened in such a way as to bring everyone together to solve those problems. In Paradise, things are as bad as you need them to be, and as good as you can stand them being.

Of course, Heaven isn't neccesarily Paradise. When people use capital H Heaven, I tend to think of something more like Celestia or Arcadia, heavens where everyone is devoted to a conceptual ideal or a deity who is the personification of that ideal. Something like the Christian heaven, where everybody stands around and sings songs praising the glory of god. Also all the archetecture is vaguely greek with ivory towers and collumns built on fluffy cloud lands.

I suppose it depends on the origin of the heaven. If it's a God's realm, it will be defined by the nature of that God. If it's an otherworld that is merely described AS heaven, then it is likely something more like Paradise.

[kris-schnee.livejournal.com]

The comic "Order of the Stick" showed the setting's "Lawful Good" afterlife as a mountain where near the base, the residents have access to plenty of food, sex and dungeon-crawls just hard enough to be fun. We're told that people hang out there for a while but eventually get bored and climb to see the higher-level, less worldly attractions.

[relee.livejournal.com]

Yeah that was the Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia. The idea is that you gradually climb the mountain while perfecting yourself, untill you reach the top where the perfect being is and unite with it. Though, not everybody makes it that far up, and it takes forever anyways. Some people just fade into the landscape and 'sleep' and others become Archons.

Order of the Stick are pretty true to their source. They even made sure to make the Planetars green.