by D wiltshire 7 Replies latest jw friends
Eternity Scares Me.
Since time can conceivable go back eternally and goes on in the future eternally we can never know completely what happened in the past.
We can not even comprehend what the eternal future will be like.
And so I hope that the Master of eternity is GOOD in the ABSOLUTE sense.
If someone lived a trillion X longer than you, and had a billion X more reasoning ability would he come to the same conclusions as you?
Actually, eternity exists outside of time.
YERUSALYIM
"Vanity! It's my favorite sin!"
[Al Pacino as Satan, in "DEVIL'S ADVOCATE"]
Did any of you, while still JW's, think that living forever on earth would eventually be boring? Obviously, most people would like to live past the normal human lifespan, but for eternity? How many houses can you build, how many lions can you pet, how many fig trees can you eat from before you pull all your hair out? Maybe the reason people decided to join Satan after the thousand year reign and be destroyed is because life got so damn boring.
Go therefore and baptize the people in the name of the father and of the son... what the hell, we just need to bring up the yearbook numbers!
Strangely, as a young thinking JW (is that even possible?) the thought of being destroyed at Armageddon and going into the oblivion of an eternity of nothingness, frightened me more than hell or purgatory.
Makena
Now just getting old and not being able to hit a tennis or golf ball frightens me.
There certainly are things that our brains have a hard time grasping, such as time, quantum theory, and much more but we can at least identify some of the basic shapes of these concepts. For instance, "time" can be looked at as simply the relationship between different objects. Where we get our concept of time comes from the motion of the Earth around the Sun and on its axis. Time in this sense had a begining with the "Big Bang", however we now know that there is not enough matter in the universe for it to collapse in on itself in a "big crunch" and so time will continue into the extremely distant future when all the trillions of galaxies in the universe have spread so far apart that they become invisible to each other. Eventually the stars in our own galaxy will cease their birth and death cycles when all the nuclear fuel is used and quietly die. Perhaps the giant black hole in the center of our galaxy will eat all these dead stars and then time for our local universe will end as there is nothing to relate time to.
It will be a pretty boring place by then. This doesn't match the JW concepts at all but this is what the scientific evidence suggests.
Kind Regards,
Skipper
Yeru,
Actually, eternity exists outside of time.
You'd really have to come up with a good explanaton to convince me that this statement isn't either self-contradictory or meaningless!
- Jan
--
"Doctor how can you diagnose someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and then act like I had some choice about barging in here right now?" -- As Good As It Gets
Mass and energy are inside of spacetime (the four dimensional continuum) and indeed cause most if not all the properties of spacetime (gravity/curvature, the various forces).
Spacetime itself can be embedded in some containing region; if spacetime is infinite then so is the embedding region. Cosmologists do not agree that an embedding region is necessary, but none can offer a convincing disproof.
The embedding region of spacetime can be considered as eternity, just like the embedding region of a story or play can be considered to be its author and the author's environment.
crownboy:
How many houses can you build, how many lions can you pet, how many fig trees can you eat from before you pull all your hair out?
By the time I'd been in the truth a very few years, I had a long, long list of the skills I was going to master in the New Order. Each one would have occupied at least fifty years of my time before I wore it out. Then I was going to have a talk show, "An Evening With..." in which I interviewed every historical personage I had ever admired -- not too damn many Bible folks, either: I was going to start with John Muir and George Washington Carver. Then I was going to travel the entire world. After a couple hundred years, I assumed I'd have come up with a whole 'nother list.
I figured that after maybe three to five hundred years, I'd have begun to forget all the faboo stuff I had done in the first hundred, so it would be fresh and new again. Maybe eternity is only excruciating if you can remember it all.
GentlyFeral
