For centuries and longer, everyone, who has lived on this earth, has had similar experiences. In fact, as long as people have existed on this earth, with our highly developed brains (how highly developed is debatable), there have been humanly desires, and animalistic desires for that matter. This point seems obvious at first glance, but it is a fundamental point, and it is always good to start with a baseline for agreement. A baseline is something we can all agree on, and most people do not quibble over. People have always formed groups and created their own societies. Also, habits, protocols, superstitions, moral beliefs, and rules all naturally followed. Once you get past our basic survival needs, such as safety, health, nutrition, rest, and reproduction (to carry on our lineage), you start to see that there are many other common desires, that have always been shared. Some include acceptance, hope, love, and wealth. As a biproduct of these desires, other natural feelings have frequently been felt, such as happiness, greed, jealousy, and anger. These are all very primal things to have felt or desired. They are all vastly connected. With everyone experiencing this already complex cocktail of emotions and desires, the complexity is multiplied as our sheer population multiplies. We've gone from a species of few to a species of over 7 billion people. Most people can't relate to what 7 billion is. If you ask someone to honestly consider the largest number they can fathom, you might get a response, such as a thousand, or a million or hundreds of millions. After that point, to their brain, everything else is just "alot". And with the millions of years of time passed, and the exponential explosion of the population, groups, cultures, societies, the dynamics of the indiviual have grown exponentially. People have always longed for a sense of purpose. We want to know why we are here. Was it an accident? Was it fate? Am I a special little snowflake in the current blizzard, or just another bit of snow that will melt away? Why do we have to die? Why is there so much war and tragedy? Why is there poverty and hunger? Why do most of civilization live within a month's salary of homelessness, while a fraction of one percent control most of the wealth? These questions are often asked by people who take the time to think, during the hectic rat race of life. Great people have asked these questions and some have even claimed to have the answers. Okay! Many people claim to know the answer, but the answer is that we don't know. Atleast, we don't know yet. With such powerful and imposing questions, stresses, and dispair, people have hopes and dreams. People cling to hopes, beliefs, and dreams as a way to find peace, content, and a will to continue their journey more comfortably. This leads to ideas, such as paradise, perfection, and forever. These ideas are very deeply rooted into our cultures, at this point. It might seem that these ideas are too difficult to live without, or that it isn't reasonable to kill paradise. However, it is more reasonable to do away with these ideologies than to continue to use them, once you clearly understand. These beliefs have had an age-old incorporation into our minds, and to eliminate that, it requires taking incremental steps to change our thought process, involving hope. Hope can have a realistic meaning again, and not be vain. Paradise, perfection, and forever can be redefined, instead of just dilluted or inaccurate. top

It's best to ask open ended questions. Despite the interrogative section title, we don't know all the answers to life, and don't pretend to have them in this response. We ask the questions to get people thinking, discussing, and questioning. We share some insight and points you may not have fully considered. Do good things just happen, or do we have to be proactive to attain them? It is possible to have good fortune, but even that won't realize every dream you have set forth. It takes a willingness to find a path to your goal. At the minimum, it takes incremental actions, in the right direction. Dreams of perfection are far from desirable, due to our proneness to mistakes. To say the least, this inclination limits our reality. To what extent, is certainly often redefined, but only in our minds, and not because they weren't scientifically possible before. Forever is the opposite of everything we know. Observe that everything changes, and through cycles, resources are replaced. While we are here, it is common for us to have goals that we set for ourselves, but these accomplishments will not just fall out of the sky, into our laps. Goals can seem dauntingly hard to achieve, especially if you understand what you are up against. However, it is important to take incremental steps to success, and never give up hope of an achievable goal. As the last part stated, ideas like paradise, perfection, and forever come from people's urges to feel hopeful about a situation that may cry out hopelessness. It is possible to do away with these ideologies, and to use a more productive thought process. In this way, we can kill paradise. Paradise means different things to different people, and it is difficult to claim any specificity, as to what it is. It is more of a concept than an actuality. Strangely enough, many have made such claims. To get an idea of what interested contributors have had to say, regarding the topic, read this wikipedia article on paradise. Was there a secret vote, in which it was decided exactly what the definition would be? Perhaps, there was a general consensus on the matter. Really, these beliefs have evolved over time. There are many different popular sets, but they are often eerily similar. For most of civilization, the belief system you would most likely adopt would be the beliefs of your local society, or more specifically, the beliefs your upbringers participated in. If you were born into a hindu family, in a hindu neighborhood, you might have great hopes of rebirthing into something very prestigious. Likewise, if you were born into a muslim family, in a predominately muslim area, you'd likely be praying to Allah several times a day, or you may be in dire consequences. If you were born into a christian family, in a christian neighborhood, it would be very likely that you'd attend a christian church, where you'd be taught to avoid burning forever, in hell. There is no shortage of similar examples to be shown. More subtly, if you were born into a vegan family, you'd be very likely to adopt the principles of your parents, regarding a proper diet. If your guardians were buddhist, and you lived in a buddhist town, you'd likely be following Buddha's laid out path. Even if you largely rejected the common beliefs of your upbringers, it would be very difficult for your young impressionable mind to escape the more subtle mind setting, of your surroundings. It is very difficult for a child to realize that he/she is under such heavy influence of an already laid out environment, which encourages primal hopes of wishfulness, fear, and desperation, along with learning obedience, trusting authority, questioning is blasphemous, local rules, morals, and the set curriculum you'd be subjected to. And with the pressures of family, religions, primal urges, and society in general, this becomes a never ending cycle. Individuals have their minds sculpted and then reproduce. Next, the process repeats on their children. Intuitively, everyone is not taught the same. This lends to the dynamics of our society, but mostly everyone is taught something. Typically, most everyone is taught a great deal, and their identities are formed. Their lives are like putty, which the well oiled and aged traditions, religions, and governments are waiting to sculpt into their next piece. It happens so fluidly, subtly, and systematically, that if you don't ever look at this from the top down, you might never see it happen. With this wishfulness, obedience to a religion or mentor, and an unrelenting system of power, it is no surprise that people are drawn to hopes of their own form of paradise. Many have their forms of paradise tied into their religious beliefs, inherited personal beliefs, or long standing superstitions. And with commonly felt fear of the government, society's majority-wolfpack-syndrome/peer pressure, and the horror stories of opposition to religion, most fall in line. Atleast to say, whether people are conscious to it or not, their minds fall in line. With most religions, the sheer fear instilled from not falling in line, is enough to convince someone. You can be tortured, burn in hell, or come back as a miserable existence. Somehow, that doesn't sound appealing. With these factors, people practically police themselves. Our society is now built like our schools and prisons. We live in one giant panopticon, where everything is monitored, though we can't directly see all the monitoring. We can be watched anytime, doing most anything we do, but don't actually know if we are being watched. Even with modern science giving discredit to many common beliefs, the ratcheted up constraints and pressures among us, make up for the difference. All this adds up to one thing... hope! People hold out for hope, and try to forget about reality. They have hope of unrealistic ideas, such as paradise, perfection, and forver. top

Living in reality is a beautiful thing. Even though there are many terrible things that happen in this world, such as war over greed, political power, and religion, there is still amazing opportunity and enchantment. Even though there are terrible situations in this life such as mass genocide, corruption, hunger, injustice, homelessness, poverty, mistreated humans/animals, natural disasters, and different types of crime, it is remarkable to have this existence in time. You are part of it all. You were here for a flash in time, and in a tiny part of this solar system. There is something that, dare I say it, seems magical about that. Magic is just a great game of illusion, but it is magical in the sense that it is so magnificent. Just to partake in the rarity of existence, as part of such an evolved and brilliant species as the human, is spectacular. Think about it. That is enough to kill paradise, without the other reasons of uselessness, unsubstantiated reasoning, wasted time, and disregard for facts. To kill paradise and other ideology is a step in the right direction. It changes the way you see things. Once a drug addict or alcoholic is clean for some time, they begin to face what seems like a scary reality. Many quickly turn to a "higher power", as a substitute for their reality escape method. However, the ones who are brave enough to see what is around them, in actuality, see with a whole new sight. They see that there is often reasoning and good judgement, that can make the biggest life changing differences. Also, they are awakened to the realization that bad decisions they have made are what has contributed to their circumstances. What if you didn't even get this opportunity of a human existence? You could have been a roach that was stepped on, for crawling into someone's camping tent. You could have never understood or experienced anythng other than crawling down a wooden camp restroom building, to a place where you smelled crumbs. What if you had been born thousands of years ago, when there were no modern comforts, such as indoor plumbing, air conditioning/heating, modern weather forecast, maps, or such a life expectancy? We do have things to appreciate here, despite the circumstances that cause people to want to step out of reality. Ideas, such as paradise, perfection, and forever, are hindering in the same way that becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict are. They are escapes, used to avoid day to day reality. Reality is beautiful, but it can become very hard for some to cope with. Dreaming of something, with no evidence of existence, is astronomically unlikely, and no more likely than the next person's fantasy. And yet, people plan and spend their entire lives, based around these ideas. People use up their rare existence, not appreciating it for what it is. Like a child waiting for Saint Nick to fly through the sky with all their most coveted gifts, they spend their time waiting for the next life, which will surely be grander than this. It's a parodox of the mind. Many people have success with practicality. Many believe that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, so to speak. There is a cognitive dissonance that exists in most people, in which they don't believe in spirtual abnormalities, miracles, phenomena, magic, and superstition, but at the same time, they deeply do. It is very much a compartmentalization, made especially for avoiding the realities of life and death. People are commonly afraid to approach subjects, such as religion, from a neutral and rational perspective. They have been sculpted, and their mindsetting has deep roots. Perhaps, the roots have a stronger hold than even they'd like to recognize. With this common paradoxical occurence, people internally struggle throughout their lives, to keep a loyal "blind faith" in these ideas. Afterall, they clearly have so much emotionally and psychologically invested into them. It can be argued that the best ways to make your life more suitable, and easier to cope with, is to make good practical judgements. This will avoid many of the pitfalls that make people's lives intolerable. Don't just wait for your dreams to magically come true. Good judgement, and a pragmatic step by step process to realistic dreams, can be achieved. It has been proven, by example, time and time again. With all of this in mind, kill paradise! top