In the interests of accuracy, I'd like to talk about the Christian Heaven. Though I now consider myself an agnostic, I went to two years of bible college (think the Fundamentalist version of seminary). To the best of my recollection, the only substantial description of Heaven appears in the last two chapters of Revelation, a book that even in Fundamentalist circles is acknowledged to contain a lot of symbolism.
There are two parts to this description. The first (Rev 21:3-7) talks about what God is going to do in Heaven: "He will wipe every tear from th...
Richard: Whichever.
The Sunnyvale world doesn't strictly require supernatural explanations -- you could posit vampires as being a subspecies of humanity, etc etc etc. But as you said in that post, it doesn't matter; we don't really care if vampires are the product of demons or mutated genes. We just care 'does there exist a monster that appears human, and likes to drink blood? does buffy exhibit superior strength and reaction time that is useful for fighting said monsters?' The reality presented by the Sunnyvale world appears to answer 'yes' to these questions, while the reality presented by the hospital answers 'no'. It's something Buffy can look and see; the question is WHICH set of sensory inputs to trust.
Eliezar, why do you say Buffy made the wrong choice? I've not seen the episode, but I read the summary, and it seems to me that Buffy couldn't conclusively determine which world was real. But choosing to stay with the 'hospital' world would mean that, if she was wrong, her friends would die. Choosing to stay with the 'Sunnyvale' world would mean that, if she was wrong, she'd be hallucinating for the rest of her life. I admit it's a bit like Pascal's Wager, but it seems to me that picking Sunnyvale is more moral, unless you have a really good reason for thinking the 'hospital' world is actually correct.
I was raised in a pretty fundamentalist Christian household. I would now describe myself as a 'Christian agnostic'; I don't know if God exists and doubt there is any way to know, but I still follow parts of the faith because I believe they make me a better person. It's just a long road you have to slog down. There's no good way to throw out everything all at once.
I would suggest you start by picking the single most important aspect of your faith, one that both says something about the divine (if it exists) and about what you're meant to do -- for me, it wa...
I gotta say, Eliezar, you're doing a good job of making the alternatives look worse than religion. And I say this as a guy who drifted away from religion because he could find no rational reason to believe in the existence of the deity.