This seems like merely a particular case of a much broader debate: how many different heavens are there? Even apart from questions of different religions each believing in a heaven where only their own group can go - do all Catholics, say, have the same heaven? Does that mean two Catholics with strongly different views on many things, who loathed each other in life, risk running into each other and resuming their fight in heaven? Or a less extreme example, say someone madly in love with someone else who doesn't return the feeling - are they together in heaven?
In heaven, they would have sufficient knowledge and insight to be able to empathize with one another and totally get past everything that might have stood in their way in life. If they would not be capable of that degree of forgiveness, and not open to love to that degree, they wouldn't get to heaven in the first place. Also with different opinions. In heaven, only One actually matters. Well, technically Three, but since they are all perfectly good, perfectly loving and omniscient, there would not be anything on which the Persons of the Blessed Trinity would disagree.
That's certainly how I would interpret the Titanic heaven scene, in any case - it's Rose's personal heaven, where even Jack is an idealized version of himself without full agency, never mind everybody else. Though either way, fair point on how harsh that is for her spouse and the father of her children.
Except he'd be in his own heaven and wouldn't care that he's not in hers. Actually, while Rose is prancing about on the Titanic staircase in her heaven, that would mean that in her mother's heaven, she is being a dutiful and attentive daughter, who is standing on the docks of NYC telling mom how grateful she is to have a good husband selected for her and what a privilege it is to do her part to rescue the family fortune, and in Molly Brown's heaven, maybe she's an onlooker as Molly puts the torch to a whole stack of lifeboats with different mothership names on their sides, and in Jack's heaven, they're perennially rolling around in the backseat of the car in the hold, while Fabrizzio cheers them on, and in Mr. Andrews' heaven she's telling him "No, no, you built me an awesome ship! Look, there's the Statue of Liberty out the porthole. We made it thanks to your kickass ship smashing through all those icebergs with its revolutionary hull design. I'll bet your drawing pencil is WAY bigger than Jack's..."
That might be an even more horrific concept, IMO, where people spend eternity alone, getting pandered to by slaves with no free will.
I wonder if our conceptions of what heaven would entail speaks to some fundamental difference in a liberal vs conservative mindset: For the liberal, heaven is total control and being at the center of the universe, while for the conservative, it is uniting with an ultimate objective truth.
But what then does that say about them or the metaphysics? Assuming by ghosts you mean spirits of the dead, then heaven or hell, the afterlife is the afterlife, and the revolutionaries in my example are still locked in an eternal strife.
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*
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