The satisfaction is ever increasing in possibility, so there's no sense of disappointment, which creates a problem of expectations always being met, which isn't realistic.
Reality is relative in many ways, however. Of course heaven would be different from Earth, so standards of "realistic" would have to change if we made it there from here. Gravity on our planet is different from lunar gravity; so is it unrealistic for us to expect to be able to jump around higher on the Moon than on Earth?
What's wrong with nonexistence if there is always some degree of equalization with reproduction and the like? It's not as if we're reaching a point where the population is decreasing
I was talking about something else. I meant that, "Life has ups and downs," and, "Heaven is an ascent while hell is a descent," though overlapping to some extent in meaning with
ups/
ascent and
downs/
descent being the correspondents, do not admit of univocal evaluation. The presence of partly shared meaning between both sentences doesn't imply that life having ups and downs is directly relevant to whether heaven-as-ascent of some kind is worthwhile or a reflection of reality.
An infinite amount of anything creates an excess of familiarity. You have to have them in moderation or they become worthless as things we experience as limited entities. This whole notion of the afterlife is a human aspiration to something beyond what is realistic or even necessary for them to have fulfillment as existential beings.
Again, we don't have any immortals to ask about an "excess of familiarity," so if we're limiting ourselves to what's scientific, well, psychology is already a soft science, with much more ambiguous results than chemistry or physics (for instance), so you shouldn't be very confident in the things you're saying. But now if your argument is based on the metaphysics of "moderation" and "experience as limited entities," your argument is not very deep. It doesn't address a lot of the questions that are pertinent to the subject.
So it's just a matter of the possibility? That's a fairly superfluous and superficial motivation for such a thing
No, it's not. Not any more than, "Well, I'd get bored if I were there," as a reason to avoid a place, anyway.
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To turn to the argument-from-works-of-fiction, though, which is the best point you've made so far:
My initial reaction to the list of stories you presented was, "Well, these authors are lacking in imagination to some degree." Now this might not be fair, though, since many of those you listed seem like fairly thoughtful people. It would be better for me to actually present a positive example of an author conveying a vision of eternity that can be rationally appealing. That's why I've been quoting Dante's
Paradiso a lot, though, because Dante paints a picture of the Christian heaven that is, for lack of a better word,
cool. I actually said that when reading the poem: "Christianity is so f^%king cool!" A deeper description might be
awesome: Dante's God is an awesome God, and to reach the Empyrean would fill me with awe.
Another example of a work of fiction supporting the appeal of eternity is the show
Lost. First, at the end of the show, most of the star-crossed lovers from the series, as well as some other main characters, "wake up" in an alternative reality where they have basically been resurrected after dying in the reality most of the story takes place in. Then they join together in a church (not a Christian church, exactly) and go together into a light, the light of eternity. Watching this scene was one of the most powerful experiences of my entire life, I'll note (I started crying so hard that my friends thought something was wrong, though things were far from wrong in my eyes at that point).
The story of Christianity itself is one that presents the concept of eternal life in what is for some an inspiring way. Looking at the flow of history as culminating in the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity is a concrete way to represent a perspective embracing a vast timeline beyond that of finite death. Christ's parables about the kingdom of heaven, in other words, speak of a world to come Whose glory would not weigh down on us with Its infinity, but elevate us. (Or, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, the weight of this glory would be one that would hold us up by way of our power to stand it.)
Maybe this all sounds "flowery," though. So another example of something with emotional meaning that indicates a capacity for rapture in us, I would say, is music. J. S. Bach's Endlessly Rising Canon, for example, expresses infinite constructive emotion. The Explosions in the Sky song "The Only Moment We Were Alone" has a similar affect* (on me at least, and in my case a more profound one than Bach's work). Now you might not see a connection between pure instrumental music and fiction, but without going into details, the way they're connected is through the paradoxes of emotion both involve.
Lastly, then, there is the type of music known as
fado. This is devoted to expressing the emotion saudade. If you've ever felt saudade, you would know that there is no way at all possible to ever get tired of it. It's not exactly a form of happiness because there's actually something melancholy about it, but it's also like déjà vu and it
does elicit a mysterious euphoria
while simultaneously evoking itself as mysteriously sad. And it's no idealistic fantasy, it's something possibly everyone in the world knows about at least once in his or her life. To think of being saudade forever is a very simple exercise of the imagination, but one that is close enough to proof that there is a way for eternity to be worth the effort of enduring it, if you will.
*And I do mean the word
affect, if as a little double entendre.