Eternity

[Az]

Ok. Lets say the theists are right. You played by the rules. You learned the secret handshake. You bowed to the right entities. Now you have all of eternity before you. What are you going to do in order to fend off the boredom?

Boredom seems like quite the trifling thing. But the problem of boredom is it accumulates. Here in the real world with all the distractions of necessity we have our boredom broken up by all manner of things including the brevity of our life. But in eternity?

In heaven one can presume that our needs are met. So there goes that break from monotony. You don't need to do anything (except perhaps praise the allmighty). So what are you to do? Some people go stir crazy on a rainy day. How are they going to deal with an eternity?

Ok, so lets get to basics. Surely there are things you always imagined doing. Lets do them. Do everything you ever imagined. Think up new things as you are doing them. Do it all. In every combination and every way. Ok... done? Now what are you going to do? Eh... do it all again. Hopefully you have figured out some new things to do by now. Ok... done? What the heck... you have nothing but time. Go do it all again. In fact do everything 20 times. Done? Its getting a bit repititious. But what else are you going to do besides everything? Better go do it all again... make it 1000 times just to kill some more time.

Done so soon? Get back to it only make it 156,485,346,348,784,743,654 times this time just to take care of a bunch of time. Dang there sure is a lot of that time just hanging around in eternity. I'll wait.

Geez that went by fast. Ok get back to it. Its not like there is anything else to do than everything. Make it 262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,
628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,
141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,
677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,
473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,
215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,
815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433,262,628,141,677,473,215,815,672,433 times this time.

Bored yet? You have not even scratched the surface of eternity. Oh sure eternity sounds good. But thats because in our life we have deadlines and limits. Getting rid of such things always sounds like a good thing. But in truth they act more as definers rather than limits. And that often gives all the meaning in the world to the things that are important to us.

Eternity is a marketting pitch run amuck. Everyone wants the best. Everyone wants to live forever. Its just no one has thought of what they are going to do with forever.

[Goblinmonger]

1. Will she be there?

[Az]

2. Depends on who's rules are in effect

But even puriant interest can become satiated. Boredom wins over time when all you have is time.

[Zebedeo]

21. YES!

Apparently, she is a Christian.

"Actress Salma Hayek was never going to have a middle name - until a priest insisted her parents give her one. The Time Code (2000) star, whose mother is Mexican and father is Lebanese, was given a traditional Catholic christening. But during the ceremony the priest was stunned to discover her father had chosen the non- Christian name 'Salma.' Hayek explains, "I wasn't going to have a middle name and on most of my papers I don't. The thing was when the priest said at my christening, 'what is her name?, ' and my mother said, 'Salma', the priest said that it is not a Christian name and I must have a Christian name... My parents panicked and came up with VALGARMA. So on my passport it is just Salma Hayek but on my birth certificate I have a middle name."

good news

[muriel_volestrangler]

24. That means her parents are (or were) Christian

it doesn't say anything about her.

[screembloodymurder]

3. Eternity is a long, long time......

especially toward the end.

[mainegreen]

4. Personally, I'd love to have an eternity given one thing:

that I could spend the time letting my mind wind slowly down and eventually peacefully disassociate into nothing. The eternity thing would just give me time to do it, but I wouldn't want it to take an eternity for this to happen, it would just be nice to, you know, have a nice buffer of time.
Alas, it's going to be *wham*: nothing.
:P

[Az]

7. Death is best as a long term consideration

Its when it goes short term that everyone gets concerned.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Insult everyone who has ever existed. In alphabetical order.

"Hang on, I've done you already, haven't I?"

[cosmik debris]

6. I'd rather die happy than not die at all,

A man is a fool who will not heed the call.

That's a line from a song by The Band. I forgot who wrote it, but I've always liked it.

[Meshuga]

8. Death

Death is a good thing. It gives our lives meaning. We have limited amount of time to live so we have to do the best we can to accomplish what we want to accomplish before that little amount of time expires.

After that we are history! And that is all good in my opinion for what you explained in the OP. ;-)

[cain_7777]

9. 72 virgins would make the time pass

but then again it could make eternity feel like, well, eternity.

Eternity without conciousness would be nirvana - nothingness.

[bryant69]

10. I suppose that's one of those areas where you need faith

I will say that our growth as spiritual beings may make eternity more bearable.

Bryant

[MistressOverdone]

11. A thousand ages in thy sight

...Are like an evening gone./Short as the watch that ends the night/Before the rising sun.

From "Oh God Our Help in Ages Past."


Maybe that would help? But really, I don't know. Bowling? Take a lot of naps? Personally, I hope I could hang out with Bach and Mozart a while, maybe take a field trip to Purgatory or something.

Seriously, I don't think of heaven as a real place, kind of a spiritual experience that I have absolutely no touchstone for.

[bananas]

12. Eternity is timeless

You're confusing eternity with forever.

"While in the popular mind, eternity often simply means existing for an infinite, i.e., limitless, amount of time, many have used it to refer to a timeless existence altogether outside of time. There are a number of arguments for eternity, by which proponents of the concept, principally Aristotle, purported to prove that matter, motion, and time must have existed eternally."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity

[Az]

13. Its not confusion

Many advocates for the notion of life after death equate eternity with forever. And then there are those who advocate abandoning temporal assumptions in order to accomodate paradoxes such as posed here.

[Silent3]

15. If eternity is timeless...

...is eternity at all appealing? Would anyone who wants an afterlife be sure that being timeless was something they wanted?

Everything we know and enjoy takes place through time, in the context of time. Practically all human meanings are tied in one way or another to time. Could a timeless you even really be you? It seems to me that the real you would have died if a timeless self is what you get "next". (If a time sequence word like "next" can even be used in this context.)

[Silent3]

14. I started a thread on this same subject about a year ago...

The Afterlife: Forever is a VERY long time

It's not just boredom that's an issue, but the very idea of identity itself. In fact, I can think of a few ways of getting around boredom in an eternity, but with those tricks (always forgetting much of what you've already done, living in a seamless "Ground Hog Day" kind of loop that you aren't aware of) you either lose "eternity" in any sincere sense of that word, or you lose yourself all of the time -- to the extent that we are our memories, you would never face a distinct moment of death, but you would essentially die over and over again as you drifted from one self to another, a shifting finite bubble of self moving through eternity.

[Danger Mouse]

16. I had never thought about it that way...

what I HAD thought about is the idea of eternal confinement to Hell, and how riculously cruel it seems, when, on the flip side, you consider just how LONG it is that you are being tortured.
What would happen to you if you were tortured for that long? Wouldn't you just completely lose your sanity, your idenity, even your self-awareness?

[varkam]

17. Personally...

I think I'd get bored after a while - "The rack AGAIN?! You people need to put some imagination into your work!"

[Az]

18. Pleasure and pain both lose their edge over time

The real torture is boredom. And boredom comes to either setting.

[varkam]

19. That's what I've always figured. eom

[Danger Mouse]

20. I don't know...

I've discussed my fear/nightmare issues with hell in the past. I hear what you're saying...but the sheer horror of it still weighs on my mind a lot...meh...

[Az]

29. Great teeshirt

At the Godless March on DC a friend of mine was wearing a great TeeShirt (we know it was a great teeshirt because people kept stopping us and telling her it was) that read "Smile. There is no Hell."

[Evoman]

22. Eternity

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I get antsy if I don't get laid for a couple of weeks. I don't want to have to do it for the above number of years, which is in reality, barely a mark on the long stretch that is eternity.


Edited to add more years. I didn't think the first quadrillion gazillion cenmptillion zillion got the point across.

[jgraz]

23. Eternity introduces all sorts of logical problems

As does any infinite value. For example, if God is omniscient, he knows everything that has happened and everything that is going to happen. But if we live for eternity, that means that God's mental capacity must be infinite in order to know everything that we're going to do for our entire existence.

That still might be possible -- until you realize that no matter how large God's mind is, keeping track of all of the events over infinite time will always occupy 100% of his mental capacity, leaving no room for any other thought. After all, he may be infinite, but he can't be more than infinite. In this way, omniscience plus infinite existence effectively becomes a death sentence, condemning one to knowing everything while being able to react to nothing.

[rug]

25. There is no time in eternity.

[Az]

26. Please describe how one experiences that

We are quite specifically temporal creatures. We experience existance as a flow of time. A sequence of events. It is fine to speculate about nontemporal continuums. But if you don't relate that to what we would actually experience it doesn't really answer any questions.

[rug]

27. It's not speculation. The very concept of eternity is timelessness.

Accepting your premise that the theists are right, human existence is transformed if one survives in any fashion after death. Concepts of time, along with other things, no longer has any meaning.

Here's a Catholic view:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07170a.htm

Here's a Buddhist view:

http://library.thinkquest.org/28505/buddhism/nirva.htm

And of course, there's wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity

Time is natural. That's why the afterlife is called supernatural.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

28. What if there is no eterenity

beyond the Now that always exists? What if, within that Now, you have interesting dreams? What if, besides having only Now, there is only One Being? What if there is no such thing as time, and what is real is far beyond our comprehension?

[Evoman]

30. And what if worms eat you once you die and you completely

cease to exist in any meaningful way?

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

31. then that's fine too, isn't it?

because whatever you "think" is you becomes something else--from worm food to worm casing to dirt to nourishment for plants or eventually to rock or maybe swamp gas...haven't heard of anything just ceasing to exist--it simply changes into something else.

[Silent3]

32. Processes cease...

...and you are a process, a shifting dynamic pattern.

Conservations laws don't get you squat if you're looking to conservation of mass or energy as some kind of path to personal eternity.

Just because people bandy about terms like "mental energy" and "psychic energy" and the like doesn't mean that (1) proven conservation laws, proven for a much more rigidly-defined meaning of "energy", apply at all to such loose usages of the term, or (2) that thinking of yourself as being a form of "energy" is even a very good analogy.

Type a 100-page essay into your computer without ever saving your work. Shut your computer off. What happens to all of your work? Does it matter that nearly 100% of the physical substance of your computer remains? Can you dig your words out of the waste heat radiating from your computer's heat sinks?

The matter and energy in your body are almost incidental to what makes you you. It's the very specific arrangements of that matter into neural pathways that are the real you, the patterns and sequences cascading in a dynamic flow of electrical and chemical energy from which your expressed personality arises, in which your thoughts and memories live.

Take a bunch of scrabble tiles. Spell out a Shakespearean sonnet. Now dump the letters into a bag and shake vigorously. Where does the poem go? Where does the poetry go?

The poem was never the physical substance of the wooden or plastic tiles. The poem was never the energy it took to shuffle the letters in to place, nor the lingering heat energy in those tiles, nor the energy of the light reflecting from the tiles. The poem was the pattern of the tiles. Once the pattern is gone, the poem is gone.

When you die, your pattern dissipates. When your pattern dissipates, all that is meaningfully you ceases to be. One might say that there is a form of immortality, or at least of an indefinitely extended personal existence, in the memories of your life that live on in other people, and in the stamp of your ideas and deeds which remains in the world -- but that's a very hollow and threadbare form of immortality.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

33. That's your concept of reality

and that's fine with me. My personal experience with living and dead is different than yours. You trust science; I trust personal experience. You call me insane or deluded; I say your own belief system has made it so you cannot see what I see. Neither of us change our opinion. And the world goes on.

[Az]

34. Its not a question of trusting personal experience

Everyone does that. Its a question of whether or not you have interpretted the experience correctly. Just because your mind has come to a conclusion about what happened doesn't mean that is what happened. Remember, we do not experience reality directly. The only thing we actually experience is what our brain recreates based on the filtered input from our senses. Now isn't even really now. There is a measurable delay between actual events and when we percieve them. Add to that all the emotional weighting that our brain does and the filtering and anyones interpretation of what they just experienced becomes open to question. Which is exactly why in science we must repeat tests continuously. To eliminate that which is just what we hope for from that which is true.

[Silent3]

35. This has nothing to do with one concept of reality vs. another

You are attempting to explain the concept you have by saying things like that you "haven't heard of anything just ceasing to exist--it simply changes into something else".

I'm saying that's a terrible explanation for thinking you have an immortal soul or for believing in an afterlife. Any appeal you might be trying to make to science (if you even care to bother with such things) dealing with conservation laws doesn't fly here. Not only doesn't it fly, it's not even a good analogy.

If you have other, better reasons based on "personal experience" that's another matter entirely (not that I'm likely to be impressed, but it's still another matter). Why offer a bad explanation instead of cutting to the chase?

[Nikia]

36. Forever is a long time to be alive and a long time to be dead

I am exploring the notion though that perhaps time is not how we think about it.