[Technocrat]

You know, what if heaven is exactly what you expect, and nothing more? Let's think about that for a moment - the ultimate high destiny for a muslim has been declared to be eternal sex with 70 flawless women. Do they really understand the meaning of the world eternal? The first day would be amazing. The 100th day, even the first year, tours of lust and pleasure beyond description. But there's only 70 of them, and there's only a few hundred positions, and there's only so many times you can do something, no matter how pleasureable, before the pleasure starts to fade. Even the most brutish and lustful among them would start to feel the barest tinges of boredom after, say, 400 years or so, and after that, an ever accelerating desperate attempt to recapture and even exceed the pleasure at the beginning - ever higher expenditures of energy - all for nothing. Then comes the day where he tries to destroy them, and finds that is impossible, because it is what he expects. Then he realizes he is in hell, of his own creation, for eternity.

A religion that relies solely on physical pleasure and not joy to describe heaven has no power to save its adherents from hell.

[valkyrieanne]

Interesting post. Consider also that the houris (so-called "virgins") aren't even human beings at all, but rather are djinn (in English "genies.") They don't have any of the "normal" female attributes or human bodily functions.

One of the things that makes human love-making interesting is that it *leads* to something: not just to a relationship, but to children, raising children, playing with grandchildren, feeling that you're part of a great chain moving through history.

But since houris have no normal human female capabilities besides being receptacles, there is nothing *else* to follow all this sexual indulgence. It truly would be eventually a grinding repetitive horror, with inhuman monsters.

What a nightmare of a religious view.

[broadsword]

Well put. Besides, what kind of primitive immature religion is all about pleasing one's penis and abusing women. Sheesh!

[cadmus-maui]

"Can you imagine the darkness
That will fall from on high,
When men beg God to kill them,
And they won't be able to die?"

B. Dylan

[Bobby777]

the commentary on the ha'dith that I bought (it's on Amazon.Com and I first saw it at Barnes and Noble) quotes an imam assuring followers that orgasms will last 600 years.

I am not making this up. I can give you the ISBN of this book.