Burzum

An eternity has neither a beginning nor an end, right?

I've read some about this hot place called "Hell" and that people who sin get's sentenced to spend an eternity there.

If you still agree with me that an eternity can't have neither a beginning nor and end, how come I can get sentenced to spend an eternity there?

How can I start to serve my ETERNAL sentence if it actually has a beginning? If my punishment has a begninning it can't be for ETERNITY. :devil3:



Please excuse grammatical errors, im not American.

Nectaris

Wecome to IIDB, Burzum.

I actually have wondered that myself, how something can "not exist" for a certain period of time and still be considered to have eternal existence. The easy answer is that hell is just some made up place to scare people into giving up a certain percentage of their paychecks. One suggestion for an answer I had heard is that the soul itself has always existed, but the body's existence is finite. Another possible answer is that the concept of time moving forward in a state of eternal existence is a silly notion, and that time, as we know it, doesn't exist in the state of eternity.

I don't find either of the latter two argumetns that convincing, and prefer the first about hell being a made up place. Also, if you want to talk about general concepts of hell, eternity, and heaven, General Religious Discussions might be a more appopriate forum for this sort of discussion. I'm not really sure if there is a biblical answer for this question. Of course, the experts here could prove me wrong.

And don't worry about your English, too much, as it is infinitely better than my Swedish (being that I know absolutely no Swedish, that statement is easy for me to make).

Dave

Chili

Wrong. Eternity has a beginning but no end.

Infinity has no beginning and no end.

It is in dying to our temporal life that we are born into eternal life and there become the continuity of infinity.

The above means that life belongs to the mythology and we as temporal images propagate the reality of the Word wherein eternal life was conceived.

Do you believe that?

Anyway, I am glad that you have been thinking and welcome to the boards.

Toto

I think this is incorrect as a matter of logic and definition.

definition

"Unending" does not require "no beginning."

An infinite series in mathematics may have a beginning but no end. For example, the set of all positive cardinal numbers has a beginning (1) but goes to infinity (a way of saying that it has no end, that you cannot find the largest number.)

And I think this belongs in GRD, since I don't see any particular Biblical implications.

Sign Related

On another site I told something similar to this. If a punishment begins and goes on for ever it's everlasting.

Jehanne

The Universe (that is, our Universe) likely had a beginning (13.7 billion years ago) but will also likely expand forever.

WCH

Okay... let's say I'm programming and I create a while loop with a condition like "while 1 not = 0." That loop will never end, but it has a beginning -- what's the problem with that being considered infinite, or eternal?

Jehanne

It would be infinite but would still have a beginning in time. Consider bounded and unbounded series and sequences. The series 1 / x goes to zero as x increases to infinity, but the summation of the sequence also goes to infinity. However, the summation of 1 / (x ^ 2) goes to 2, as x goes to infinity, even though the series converges to zero. For more, see Zeno's paradox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes

Chili

Exactly and that is why God was in the beginning and the Word was with God to become the continuity of infinity in our mythology wherefore "God" as first cause is infinite, "Lord God" as second cause is eternal and "like god" as third cause is temporal (Gen.1,2 and 3) but needed to take the Word to greated heights. The Word is the essence of God that precedes the existence of God to make the infinity of God known throughout the ages.

Jehanne

http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/nd-paper.html