Why is this life not infinite or even near-infinite?

[Neoplatonist]

It seems that given an infinitely long life on earth, each of us would eventually encounter enough of love and compassion and forgiveness that our hearts would be turned toward higher things and set us on the path to redemption before being judged.

Why, then, are our lives so amazingly short instead? Compared to an infinite God, how is this not the same as if we decided our children’s entire adulthood (marriage, career, family size) based on how they behaved for one day or one week of the time they were 7 (or 14)?

Perhaps we could even set it at 18, since that allows them sufficient capacity to freely consent to binding committments.

 

[Oreoracle]

Couldn’t it be argued just as easily that an extended lifespan would make people incur more hardship over their lives and cause them to be more jaded, welcoming death for release? We even observe that phenomenon amongst the suicidal with the current life expectancy.

 

[John_Martin]

It was ordained by God that we have life by union with Him, have the capacity to correctly animate our bodies with our souls by union with him. And on the day we stopped listening to him (as a species, via Adam and Eve), we “surely died”, surely lost the capacity. Instead we began to define life and animate our bodies according to apprehended good and evil, define our life as the life of our bodies being satiated with apprehended and reasoned “good” rather than understanding ourselves according to God’s declaration.

According to Revelation, you are a new creation upon your baptism. But still the thread title suggests a humanly founded definition of what is “life”, and this counters the revelation. The body dying is an apprehension of what is evil, while baptism is a declaration from God of eternal life and resurrection of the body. People who would argue for or want infinite or near-infinite life of the present body are wanting to continue defining the life of the body and self from apprehended and self-defined good, in other words, do not want to submit to the revelation, but try to find their own way to “be ‘like’ God, knowing good and evil”.

It is not because we “encounter enough of love and compassion and forgiveness that our hearts would be turned toward higher things”, and an infinite time on earth would not change that. It would simply be an infinite swapping of temporal perceived good for something else we could consume. It is because we “number our days”, noting our own changes and dying that we seek a savior, seek revelation of God and of our own being and life.

 

[Shin]

From Holy Scripture we read back in the time when people lived longer, everyone was so wicked Our Lord flooded the earth to erase every living human being except eight people.

So my impression is that by a certain age people are set in their ways and that is normally that, they just keep on the same path and no longer develop or deviate from it.

 

[Neoplatonist]

But still the thread title suggests a humanly founded definition of what is “life”, and this counters the revelation. The body dying is an apprehension of what is evil, while baptism is a declaration from God of eternal life and resurrection of the body. People who would argue for or want infinite or near-infinite life of the present body are wanting to continue defining the life of the body and self from apprehended and self-defined good, in other words, do not want to submit to the revelation, but try to find their own way to “be ‘like’ God, knowing good and evil”.

Nope. I’m all for the fuller vision of “life” to be had in Heaven. Not trying to say that our conception of good life here is in any way, shape, or form better than that. I am pretty comfortable in saying that this life beats the stuffing out of eternity in Hell, though. I’m also willing to take “blinking out of existence altogether” over an eternity in Hell.

Can we even remotely construct a humanly graspable analogy in which deciding our child’s fate for all eternity based on what they had learned by the age of x matches anything we would call compassion or mercy?

 

[Neoplatonist]

From Holy Scripture we read back in the time when people lived longer, everyone was so wicked Our Lord flooded the earth to erase every living human being except eight people.

So my impression is that by a certain age people are set in their ways and that is normally that, they just keep on the same path and no longer develop or deviate from it.

Does that mean you would discount conversion stories and general “changes of heart” if they happened after a certain age in someone’s life?

Perhaps you just mean “in general” or as a predominant tendency. In that case, however, I have to wonder, what’s the rush? I mean, if the unrepentant spend a few more years on earth before being whisked off to the lake of fire, would that not be worth it in exchange for the rare few who might turn around late in life?

And again, I know it helps to clarify early and often on these threads, I am not saying my way would be better than God’s way. I’m saying x seems to fit with what we normally mean by the term “compassion” but y does not seem to, so maybe we need to use a different term, OR we need to figure out how to make sense of a way in which our normal term could apply to y as well.