Here's a way to think of it that I made up on the spot, so YMMV: Do you have empathy for the guilty in prisons? Not the potentially innocent, but the absolutely guilty (by an objective measure). Maybe you do, but many have none. But take it from the perspective of justified punishment/separation. If you were in a "heaven" that was close to God, then God would also presumably give you perfect insight into why said people are sentenced to Hell, and then presumably you'd be as OK with people in Hell as most are with criminals being in jail.Edit: and with regards to the heaven/hell thing, I just don't get it. Unless human empathy is completely stripped, the simple knowledge that other people were in hell would be a piece of hell in and of itself. If the empathy is stripped, and all that matters to us anymore is our closeness to god, then we have lost our humanity. I am a stron believer in the concept of infinite rebirth as it is presented in Buddhism, that we are from moment to moment a wholy different being than we were in the last moment. In the long run this means that the person I am at 50 is a seperate entity than the person I was at 10. But at least there is a thread of continuity between those different states. The requirement of a lack of humanity means to me that the person I am now would be sentenced to oblivion, and some discontinuous modified version of myself would exist in heaven. So, the heaven/hell paradox ultimately requires oblivion of the mortal self. Or that everyone is a sociopath to begin with and has no empathy
It's an imperfect answer, but it's kind of an answer that doesn't require the annihilation of the self.[/QUOTE]
That really sounds exactly like what he's saying though, that God convinces you not to worry about it. It's stripping the empathy still, just phrasing it differently, and the effect is the same.