Barefoot Bree

luvluv, the problem is that you have constructed a detailed vision of heaven entirely out of your own imagination, and now want us to agree with you that - just on the tiny remote chance that your vision is correct, out of the infinite number of possible visions - your value judgement - "boring or not" - is also correct.

What makes your vision any more right than anyone else's?

What makes your value judgement any more right than anyone else's?

Classical

At what point do we say a discussion has turned ridiculous?

Obviously, anyone talking about heaven has absolutely no clue as to what they are talking about. It has never been verified that someone has ever been there and experienced it and returned to tell us about it. It is all just fanciful wishing based on who knows what? A few verses in the bible written by men who had no clue either?

Think about what paul said in corinthians: "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard neither has entered into the heart of man the things god has prepared for them that love him." How would this man know any of this? It was his hope. Any rational person must concede that christians have absolutely no more grounds for their description of heaven than the islamic version. It is all just blind, blind faith, based on nothing at all, flying in the face of all reason and probability.

Rational BAC

I can agree with that.

Guess we'll find out when we get there.

Or maybe not.------

Porky Pine

I don't know about Heaven but, I'm getting bored just reading LuvLuv's ad hoc explanations as to why Heaven wouldn't be boring.

Mageth

Perhaps God will give him the task of thinking up an infinite number of novel ways for people in heaven to kill time.

luvluv

Bree:

You're missing my point I think. I'm not arguing that my version of Heaven is correct. I'm basically contending against the position that Heaven would have to be boring, necessarily, because of the infinite amount of time that we'll have there. Some on these boards have argued that it logically follows from the fact that Heaven is of infinite duration that it will be, eventually, boring. My arguments are essentially defenses, showing that once we give full consideration to God's attributes, there is no necessary logical move to the inevitability of boredom.

That being the case, if you choose to believe that Heaven would be boring, it's because you're accepting YOUR view of Heaven as the true one, not because of some clear insight into the logic of the situation.

Anyone who claims Heaven will have to be boring will have to give us his picture of Heaven and explain to us why we should believe his version is true. Otherwise, that argument has to go out the window, and you'll probably have to come up with some other reason why you don't want to be there.

Mageth

You go ahead and do that other 99.999999999 percent, and you're still left with an infinite amount of time. Repeat them all a trillion times, and you're still left with an infinite amount of time.

No matter how many tasks you do, there is still an infinite amount of time.

After a while, you'll realize that all that stretches before you is an infinite amount of time, and an infinite amount of tasks that God dreams up for you to, hopefully, keep you from being bored.

You have an infinite number of "perform task" functions to perform.

You have an infinite amount of "novelty" to experience (an absurd thought in and of itself).

That notion is appalling to me. It's a Twilight Zone nightmare.

The problem I'm posing is not with God. It's with us. Unless we're Gods ourselves, we won't have an infinite amount of "ideas", or capacity to absorb novelty. If we too are not "omni" and "infinite" in all respects, like God, then God's supposed capacity to dream up novelty is greater than our capacity to enjoy (or endure, or recognize) novelty by an infinite amount.

Umm, last I checked, this earthly life I'm enduring is not infinite. I've been around for 49 years, and I figure I've god 30-40 years left, tops. I have limited opportunties to make love, go to plays, listen to music, etc.

And there's a slight difference between 80-90 years and infinity, if you haven't noticed.

So, if God created all this, then yes, he's done a fairly good job of making things interesting. But I still sometimes get bored.

By saying two infinities (of distinctly different "objects" - "days" and "tasks") have a one-to-one correspondence, you're basically saying that "infinity A == infinity B". That's nonsense. Think of it this way: for each one of those infinite tasks, there is an infinite amount of time ("days", if you will) available to perform the task.

I honestly don't think you do.

As I said above, I find the idea of "infinite novelty" to be absurd. Think about it. If you truly understand infinity, then it should be interesting...

All that make-work. And still, after all that, there are billions of people each with an infinity of time to fill.

Again, the limiting factor I see is in people. Your scenario assumes people have an infinite capacity to find an infinity of new tasks fulfilling. I'm a person, and that notion seems absurd to me.

"Without end". Exactly. Eternally requiring new stimuli to occupy your time. Sheesh.

That sounds rather like some types of addictive drugs that require the user to take more and more to get a "high".

That's what this sounds like; God's the pusher-man. Humans in heaven are addicted to the drug God feeds them, but they continuously require more to feed their addiction.

Oh, and "each perhaps more exciting, more exhilirating, more fulfilling than the last"? We're talking about infinity here, right? So you're proposing that excitement, exhilaration, and fulfillment are infinitely extendable. Another absurdity.

Again, we're talking about infinity. You would be able to "just hang out" for an infinite amount of time, and work for an infinite amount of time. How long can you "just hang out" before that gets boring? You could sit and meditate like the Buddha under a trillion different trees for a trillion trillion trillion years each, and still you're left with infinite time to fill. You could ponder each atom in a trillion universes for a trillion years each, and still have an infinite amount of time to fill.

You work for a while (say, a trillion eons or so), so you decide you're going to "just hang out"? But, after a (long) while, after periods of working and "hanging out", you've already "hung out" for what seems like an eternity, and you know that your future has an infinite amount of time to "just hang out" available to you, so what attraction would that hold for you?

Again, you're comparing a finite life to an infinite life.

But indeed, I find the notion that the universe is just something that God created, that the ultimate answer to everything is "goddidit", and that, after this finite life, I'll be taken to a place where I have an infinite amount of time to contemplate the answer to everything (which answer is "goddidit") and the reason for everything, including the reason for performing the tasks I'm given to perform (which answer is "to keep you from being bored - God could do all those tasks in an instant if he wanted to, and if it was actually necessary that any of them be done") to be not very compelling, involving and fulfilling.

luvluv

Mageth:

And no matter how much time there is, there is still an infinite amount of new things things to do.

That's entirely backwards. The very reason we can experience novelty (and God can't) is because we are limited in our ideas. If we knew all ideas, then obviously there couldn't be any novelty for us.

And I can't really make any sense of your idea that we'd run out of our ability to experience novelty. If something is presented to you that's unfamiliar to you, you experience novelty. The only way you could run out of a capacity to have that experience is for God to run out of ideas to put in front of you. And that's exactly what can't happen.

I wasn't talking about duration at all there. You suggest that what we do would be tedious simply because it's busy work that God created just for us to have something to do. You suggest that our work would have to be unfulfilling because it was unnecessary, just made up activites given to us for us to have something to fill the time. My point is that everything you do is some task that is unnecessary and that God made up for you as, essentially, busy work. Yet no one thinks, for this reason, that making love or raising children or composing poetry is drudgery. Every task that God has set us to do here is exciting and fulfilling. Of course, doing any one of them forever would have to be boring. But doing an infinite number of them, each entirely different from each other and each as fulfilling as making love or raising children, would never get boring. It would be amazing.

That's hardly nonsense. You could equally well say, could you not, that for every increment of time, there are an infinite amount of tasks to be done.

Or are you suggesting that the infinite number of days is somehow greater than the infinite number of tasks in the sense that we'll run out of tasks before we'll run out of time? Surely, you're not saying that, because that doesn't make any sense. But since you can't be saying that, I wonder why you continue to emphasize the infinity of time over the infinity of activities as if the amount of time given is going to outlast the amount of activities to do.

How about you just explain to me exactly why infinite novelty is absurd?

Okay, but in the atheistic view, the ultimate answer to everything is that there is no answer. How is that more fulfilling? I mean, given theism, at least we could wonder why God did it. On atheism, no such luck.

Sarpedon

The religious answer might be more fulfulling, but that doesn't make it true.

And you didn't present any theological authorities who outshine St Thomas Acquinas or St Augustine.

It would seem to be that your philosophy is that whatever you prefer is true, and things that you wouldn't like to be true aren't. So, when I say that the dominant view of heaven is that it consists of continual worship and communing with the deity, (i.e. like a church service) you state that no theologian says this, in spite of the fact that the most important theologians did in fact say this. You would rather have eternity be a carnival/amusement park/orgy/video arcade all in one, so thats what you believe it is like. Don't you see the inherent flaws of such a worldview?

luvluv

I realize that basically everyone will have a different opinion on what Heaven, if it exists, will be like. My overall point in this thread is that nobody has any sound, logical reasons for thinking it has to be boring. If you think it'll be boring because it will be a continuous church service, then you're adopting some particular theology as true, you're not adopting that opinion through pure logical analysis. You will have chosen to believe one theologian's vision of Heaven over another's, and you'll have to defend this choice or surrender your argument.