Eternal life
is defined as LIFE WITHOUT END. Let’s take a moment to consider what it might
be like to live without cessation.
First, I need to introduce a mathematical term, the “googol,” the biggest number mathematicians have bothered to name. A googol is 10 to the exponent 100 (or 1 followed by 100 zeroes). It looks like this: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Okay, now we're ready to inspect the concept of living forever in the best place of all, Heaven. If you lived in Heaven for a googol of years, how much closer to the end of your eternal life have you progressed? Are you now a tenth of the way to its end? Well, obviously the question is bogus, because ETERNAL LIFE HAS NO END; you cannot ever get closer to the end of your unending life.
Is that what you want?
Let's see. You’re living in paradise, daily praising God with the angels. You know—what you already do now, every minute of every day—when you aren’t watching football or Game of Thrones, noshing, napping, drinking beer, having sex, and so forth. (Do they have TV in Heaven?)
In Heaven, you get to live all your tomorrows, without threat of annihilation. You will live a googol of tomorrows, times a googol of tomorrows, times.... you get the idea: ETERNAL LIFE. And you will always live the day AFTER all your tomorrows, and the year and the millennium and the eon after that—ad infinitum.
First, I need to introduce a mathematical term, the “googol,” the biggest number mathematicians have bothered to name. A googol is 10 to the exponent 100 (or 1 followed by 100 zeroes). It looks like this: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Okay, now we're ready to inspect the concept of living forever in the best place of all, Heaven. If you lived in Heaven for a googol of years, how much closer to the end of your eternal life have you progressed? Are you now a tenth of the way to its end? Well, obviously the question is bogus, because ETERNAL LIFE HAS NO END; you cannot ever get closer to the end of your unending life.
Is that what you want?
Let's see. You’re living in paradise, daily praising God with the angels. You know—what you already do now, every minute of every day—when you aren’t watching football or Game of Thrones, noshing, napping, drinking beer, having sex, and so forth. (Do they have TV in Heaven?)
In Heaven, you get to live all your tomorrows, without threat of annihilation. You will live a googol of tomorrows, times a googol of tomorrows, times.... you get the idea: ETERNAL LIFE. And you will always live the day AFTER all your tomorrows, and the year and the millennium and the eon after that—ad infinitum.
In the eternal life of your resurrected body, will you be the
same race and gender and age as you are now? Is this the form you would you
like to keep FOREVER AND EVER?
Well, it is paradise, so let’s presume it will be the best of all possible worlds. It's all "spiritual," so presumably you can be a male spirit for a few zillion years and then switch to living as a female spirit. Try being a stallion, a dolphin. Expand your imagination galactically: What’s it like to be an orchid-squid from the planet Zoo? Play through all possible forms. Yet won’t you eventually get bored with a life that CANNOT end? Years which go on and on to the exponent of a zillion, zillion googols with no exit, only an infinitude of eons dawning over the horizon.
Is that what you WANT?
It seems to me that life in ANY form or endless menagerie of forms—no matter how beautiful, exalted and super-powerful—would begin to feel claustrophobic given enough time. I know that I would feel packaged, trapped, boxed-in, by eternal life. I would eventually yearn for release from all possible bodies and minds, from the perpetual motion machine of experience.
Thanks for the offer, but please "Cancel my subscription to the resurrection."
Well, it is paradise, so let’s presume it will be the best of all possible worlds. It's all "spiritual," so presumably you can be a male spirit for a few zillion years and then switch to living as a female spirit. Try being a stallion, a dolphin. Expand your imagination galactically: What’s it like to be an orchid-squid from the planet Zoo? Play through all possible forms. Yet won’t you eventually get bored with a life that CANNOT end? Years which go on and on to the exponent of a zillion, zillion googols with no exit, only an infinitude of eons dawning over the horizon.
Is that what you WANT?
It seems to me that life in ANY form or endless menagerie of forms—no matter how beautiful, exalted and super-powerful—would begin to feel claustrophobic given enough time. I know that I would feel packaged, trapped, boxed-in, by eternal life. I would eventually yearn for release from all possible bodies and minds, from the perpetual motion machine of experience.
Thanks for the offer, but please "Cancel my subscription to the resurrection."
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