"An act is pleasurable to the point of eliminating pain and beyond that it injures"
So if pleasure is really the absence of pain, and not it's opposite, then wouldn't our real default state be something like ecstasy? Maybe this is what Heaven is like. Sin causes suffering, and sin is everywhere around us and in us, but we are allowed glimpses of what we were intended to be, and this is also a glimpse of Heaven.
The default as we experience it is an immediate slide into painful conditions, hunger, boredom, etc, that we then work to mitigate. But it's interesting to bring up sin here. The idea of contentment or fulfillment without suffering and lack would approximate union with God in heaven, something ecstatic. Maybe you could say that underneath a naturalistic urge like hunger, there is original sin, a deprivation and a separation only resolved by redemption.
That is, hunger is only experienced as a lack because we have already sinned, our existence is already guilty and in need of atonement.
I just got smarter. Good stuff.
Thank you
"An act is pleasurable to the point of eliminating pain and beyond that it injures"
So if pleasure is really the absence of pain, and not it's opposite, then wouldn't our real default state be something like ecstasy? Maybe this is what Heaven is like. Sin causes suffering, and sin is everywhere around us and in us, but we are allowed glimpses of what we were intended to be, and this is also a glimpse of Heaven.
The default as we experience it is an immediate slide into painful conditions, hunger, boredom, etc, that we then work to mitigate. But it's interesting to bring up sin here. The idea of contentment or fulfillment without suffering and lack would approximate union with God in heaven, something ecstatic. Maybe you could say that underneath a naturalistic urge like hunger, there is original sin, a deprivation and a separation only resolved by redemption.
That is, hunger is only experienced as a lack because we have already sinned, our existence is already guilty and in need of atonement.