@ Strawbery Jam
huh? this
is the philosophy forum. I don’t understand what you mean.
@RCconvert
Do we mean by this “human” form of eternity, that we simply live forever, that we have a beginning but not an end? This is not really eternal, but immortal.
very true. there is fundamental difference between real eternity and endless time. perhaps endless time should be called everlasting life so that there is no confusion. For the purpose of this thread, that is what I will define it as. (immortality brings up thoughts of spending an endless amount of time in our current physical bodies and never physically dying) Of course, in heaven one either experiences eternity
or everlasting life,and not both, but which is it?
(in case you’re interested, here are some of the implications of living in eternity that I’ve come up with. I’ve already posted these on a different thread.)
That has some interesting implications. It seems to me that if we are timeless, then when we die we must immediately become omniscient. A timeless being can not change, and an increase in knowledge would be change.
likewise, if there is a period when you are not taking a tour of the heavens, and later are, and still later have finnished the tour, you have undergone a change. This means that movement itself is incompatible with timelessness, as movement requires a change in your bodily position and orientation. Clearly, a timeless world can not be physical in the way we understand it.
There is another interesting effect of timelessness. We can pray to saints and ask them for intercessions. Why not ask any dead person who may be in heaven to pray for us? For that matter, we will eventually die ourselves and assume a timeless state. at that point, we will be able to view the history of the universe as the events are unfolding! That includes your life before you died. This means that, if heaven is timeless, and we get to witness events on earth from heaven, your heavenly self is looking down on you at this very moment! Does this mean that we can pray to ourselves? or even more intriguing- to our grandchildren?
@ GEddie, Vouthon, and Linusthe2nd
before I saw this thread I thought we
could have some understanding of eternity through reason without having a personal experience. I also posted in the other thread my understanding of it:
wouldn’t god consider the burning bush to be in the past, and judgment day to be in the future? not exactly. Picture a regular Sunday comic. To the characters, time seems to flow along normally, but the artist can meddle in any panel within the comic. In the real world, the fourth dimension is time, and perhaps the best way to visualize this is to consider an infinite number of still frame universes that we are being pulled through very rapidly, much like film through a projector. God simply injects himself into certain parts of history, and affects nature in such a way that Moses sees a burning bush, and Adam and eve hear a voice reprimanding them for eating of the fruit. Now think of time as a line, with events starting with point A on the left and moving to point B in the middle and and then on to point C on the right. This time line extends from the beginning to the end of the universe. Now imagine that we stretch this line vertically so that it becomes a plane of timelines that are exact replicas of each other. In fact, we stretch this line so that the plane extends infinitely up and down, meaning an infinite number of identical timelines. My understanding of how god experiences time is that he experiences it as a series of these lines, from top to bottom if you prefer, rather than as a series of points from left to right. This is the reason for “a day is as a thousand years to god, and a thousand years as one day.” the whole of history of creation exists in one moment of god’s “time”, but each moment of our time is experienced forever by God! Sodom and Gomorrah, from god’s perspective, is happening right now, just like every other event in history.
Of course, this isn’t entirely accurate because it portrays god as moving through some other “dimension” of time rather than experiencing an endless NOW, but I think you get the drift. This sort of thing is hard to describe. perhaps RCconvert7 can varify that this is indeed what he has experienced?
this thread really baffled me. It seems interesting to contemplate the implications of living in eternity, but the fact that we will eventually live in a physical world when our bodies are resurected, as revealed in scripture, seems to contradict it. our post death eternity also contradicts the idea that after we die, we will need to wait for a period of time before our physical resurection.
besides this, it seems logically possible to
acsend to a state of eternal-ness, but it doesn’t seem logicaly possible to descend from it. Once eternal, one can undergo no changes, and a shift from eternity to time would be a change. this is why I don’t understand how the incarnation and mystical experiences are possible. RCconvert eventually came “back from” eternity, or else he wouldn’t be talking to us.
In short, everlasting life seems to be supported by revelation and the teachings of the catholic church, but the testimonies of catholic mystics and RCconvert7 seem to support the idea of eternity.
I don’t know how to resolve this problem, and any help would be greatly appreciated.
