What we gonna be spending eternity doing?

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“Just as a blind man is unable to form any idea about colors, or a deaf person to fathom what it means to hear sounds… so the body cannot comprehend the delights of the soul… For we live in a material world, and the only kind of pleasure we can understand is that experienced through our body. But the joys of the spirit are everlasting and ceaseless. There is no resemblance of any kind between the enjoyments of the soul and those of the body.”
–Maimonides

Perhaps this will help in trying to answer your question. I believe there is a great Catholic saint, St. John of the Cross maybe, who basically states the same thing as Maimonides.

Do you believe in our having a soul? You may be interested in the first paragraph from the following link:

newadvent.org/cathen/14153a.htm

Many believe that our glorified bodies in the World-to-Come will be spiritual in its nature.
 
I pray it is eternity in the presence of Our Lord, God of Heaven. That is the essence, no need for icing.
 
Robert_Sock said:
Many believe that our glorified bodies in the World-to-Come will be spiritual in its nature.
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999 How? Christ is raised with his own body: “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself”;553 but he did not return to an earthly life. So, in him, “all of them will rise again with their own bodies which they now bear,” but Christ “will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body,” into a “spiritual body”:554
–CCC

In thinking about your question one should assume that we will have a different nature and therefore we will not be engaged in our earth-like activities.​
 
1 Cor 2:9

“The eye has not seen, and the ear has not heard nor has it entered into the heart of man what things God has prepared for those who love him.”

Or on the other end of the spectrum

Eternal fire, gnashing of teeth, torment, death, separation from God.
 
ANV said:
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You hear a lot of atheist counter-apologists say they think eternity would be boring and yet those same folks hold science in great esteem and awe.

I doubt we will get bored if the horizon of discovery suddenly becomes infinitely wider.

Are you ready to stop learning ANV?

Take a leaf out of atheist Christopher Hitchens’ book. When he was asked about the possibilty of the afterlife, shortly before his death, he enigmatically answered;

“I like surprises”.
 
Robert_Sock said:
“Just as a blind man is unable to form any idea about colors, or a deaf person to fathom what it means to hear sounds… so the body cannot comprehend the delights of the soul… For we live in a material world, and the only kind of pleasure we can understand is that experienced through our body. But the joys of the spirit are everlasting and ceaseless. There is no resemblance of any kind between the enjoyments of the soul and those of the body.”
–Maimonides

Perhaps this will help in trying to answer your question. I believe there is a great Catholic saint, St. John of the Cross maybe, who basically states the same thing as Maimonides.

Do you believe in our having a soul? You may be interested in the first paragraph from the following link:

newadvent.org/cathen/14153a.htm

Many believe that our glorified bodies in the World-to-Come will be spiritual in its nature.
Click to expand...
I don’t believe in the soul in the spiritual sense, even that I sometimes speak of it but outside it’s spuritual or religious meaning, more like energy, personality, feelings, sentiments, character.
 
Lion_IRC said:
You hear a lot of atheist counter-apologists say they think eternity would be boring and yet those same folks hold science in great esteem and awe.

I doubt we will get bored if the horizon of discovery suddenly becomes infinitely wider.

Are you ready to stop learning ANV?

Take a leaf out of atheist Christopher Hitchens’ book. When he was asked about the possibilty of the afterlife, shortly before his death, he enigmatically answered;

“I like surprises”.
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After learning too much that is enough what happens 😛 do you get stuck in the boring state till ever and ever.
 
ANV said:
I don’t believe in the soul in the spiritual sense, even that I sometimes speak of it but outside it’s spuritual or religious meaning, more like energy, personality, feelings, sentiments, character.
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From a psychological perspective (I’m a research psychologist) I used to think of the soul as the mind, although many other psychologists tended to distinguish them. For example, Carl Jung defined the soul to be more like our personality. Is the mind simply a function of the brain? Most people, I think, do think so. Based on my spiritual experiences, I now believe that much of the mind is based on the supernatural (God and Satan).
 
I know He said he’s going to prepare a mansion for me. So I am happy because I can’t afford my own house only apartments. The only mansion or home I will ever have will be in heaven 😉 And if I know my Lord, He will put an art studio in it for me and a piano and violin. Maybe a nice kitchen with one of those island things and of course a nice bottle of red vino, I hear He makes a nice vintage 😉

love you Lord
amen
 
The problem stems from the fact that we do not, now or ever, will understand what eternity is really like. We think of eternity with our poor feeble mind as millions and billions, and gazillions of years. But that is all in time. When we die we will be outside of time. No more years, months, weeks, days, hours, seconds, etc.

That’s the way atheist think and that it would be boring. Think about the most beautiful, exciting time you have ever had and if you do that over and over after a while you get bored.

I don’t think heaven is going to be like that. No human mind can comprehend how great it will be. Just being in the presence of God, being in the mansion that has been prepared for us, being with our Guardian Angel, being with Jesus and Mary, able to finally understand the Trinity, a JOY THAT WILL NEVER END, how can that be boring!!!

The more we praise God, the more joy we will have. The more joy we have the more we want to praise God, and on and on.

I love to look up at the stars at night and just worship our Lord in awe. I try to spot the faintest star and I know that God is there at the same exact time and He is here. And to think that even the faintest star is still in our galaxy. And there are gazillions of galaxies and God holds all of that in the palm of His hand. We will finally understand what is in the farthest galaxy we can imagine, but that will be not even a drop in a bucket, or a smallest fraction you can imagine of what wonders we will experience.
 
The Beatific Vision is the End of The Quest.

Slightly doctored, from an earlier post:
Remember Fleetwood Mac’s song “Sara”?
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**Drownin’ in the sea of love
Where everyone would love to drown. **
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There’ll be raw Spirit-to-spirit contact with God, the intellect’s concept of God being replaced by the Reality. The intellect will know Him at its greatest capacity, and the will will love HIm at its greatest capacity. An unimaginable union of knowledge and love with the only One who can satisfy our true desires, the End for which we were created.
This union includes the union of knowledge and love of all of the other blesseds and the angels: “The Sea of Love”.
This love will be far greater than any spousal love on this earth could ever be.
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And after the General Resurrection, the glorified, but still flesh-and-blood, body reappears, and finally there’ll be the the perfect, balanced union of spirit, soul and body. Total harmony.

The intensity of each person’s level of bliss in Heaven is determined by how he lived his life on this Earth.
ANV said:
I don’t believe in the soul in the spiritual sense, even that I sometimes speak of it but outside it’s spuritual or religious meaning, more like energy, personality, feelings, sentiments, character.
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Not believing in the soul in the spiritual sense doesn’t change the truth that the soul is spiritual.
ANV said:
After learning too much that is enough what happens 😛 do you get stuck in the boring state till ever and ever.
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You’re stuck with the present-day-world concept of happiness: sort of like the JW belief in a purely material world: living in log cabins, picking fruit and playing with animals. That would end up being hell! You have to think big! God’s not limited to what our woefully sawn-off intellects can dredge up!
Crusaderbear said:
We will do whatever pleases God.
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That’s true, BUT:
A Christian apologist (CS Lewis?) made a good observation.
In this life, we pray to the Father: “Thy Will be done…”
In Heaven, God will say to each of the blesseds: “THY will be done.”
All evil desires will have been purged from the will. Only pure desires will remain.

Remember that the glorified resurrected body has to be catered for.
The resurrected body will be able to do what Our Lord’s resurrected body could do: eg move from and to anywhere at will.
 
Not debating about the soul, but about how we gonna spend eternity doing.
 
ANV said:
🤷
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An Unpublished Manuscript on Purgatory:

excerpt:

I am going to try to make you understand, as far as you can upon earth, what Heaven is like. There are ever new feasts which succeed each other without interruption. There is happiness, always new and such, it would seem, as has never been enjoyed. It is a torrent of joy which flows unceasingly over the elect. Heaven is above all and beyond all — GOD: God loved, God relished, God delighted in; in one word, it is to be satisfied with God without ever being satisfied!

The more a soul loves God on earth, the higher she advances in perfection, the more she will love and understand God in Heaven.

Jesus is the true joy upon earth and the eternal felicity of Heaven.

catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?
 
ANV said:
Not debating about the soul, but about how we gonna spend eternity doing.
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As an atheist, you presumably believe in annihilation/nothingness after we croak.

The soul is part of us, and always will be, so as Frank Sinatra sang, “You can’t have one without the other.”. If you don’t like the honest Church-based answers some of us give, why are you even asking?

And hell is another “kettle of fish”. :eek:
 
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