I'm not sure I want to live forever.

reply to post by racasan


Yeah, tell me about it. At least in hell I can skate, to put a rather dry twist on the song.

reply to post by droid56


Well you really don't know what living forever is like, because the amount of knowledge you have about it is pretty much zero.
The Bible does talk about the 2nd death, the lake of fire. Satan and his pals will end up there and will be tortured forever. I am guessing maybe this is where people go, who side with Satan and reject Jesus as well. Maybe their soul will be destroyed and they will be forgotten by everyone as if they never existed. I mean I am only guessing at what will happen to those who reject Christ Jesus, but it won't be good.

So, to the people who are saying if one's eternal self ever gets bored, that they can reincarnate with no memory, doesn't becoming bored as an immortal essentially tell us all we need to know? That in & of itself is a flashing neon sign to me that if boredom in immortality can be reached, that for living in the unending to become listless & feeling useless or having seen & done all they can in that state, it tells me there's a brick wall there, too, and hence, it's no more special than where we're at now.

No matter what religious afterlife you dress it up as, it sounds like a long, drawn-out, never-ending existence of finite experiences resulting in the same boredom problem we have in the mortal realm. That's not really that much to aspire to if the experiences have an end, and the solution is to redo the boredom on the human level again. And again. And again. Lather, rinse repeat. If that is the End Game for us, I'd much rather wink out of existence. Otherwise, I'd be liable to find out what it's like for an immortal soul to to completely crazy.

Kaboose
reply to post by droid56

 

Well you really don't know what living forever is like, because the amount of knowledge you have about it is pretty much zero.
The Bible does talk about the 2nd death, the lake of fire. Satan and his pals will end up there and will be tortured forever. I am guessing maybe this is where people go, who side with Satan and reject Jesus as well. Maybe their soul will be destroyed and they will be forgotten by everyone as if they never existed. I mean I am only guessing at what will happen to those who reject Christ Jesus, but it won't be good.

I don't understand: WHO is going to do this torturing of satan and his pals?

reply to post by droid56


I find the idea of blinking out to be comforting. Frankly the idea of existing for all eternity sounds exhausting.

reply to post by InTheFlesh1980



"The drivel that slathers off your mind becomes a topic for others to discuss? "


What do you think this forum is founded on?


If your looking for something complicated and incomprehensible to entertain yourself there are a variety of options on this site which offer extra drivel.

Are you hoping to live forever so that you can slather your condescending condensation over what you see as lacking? Perhaps this is your heaven

No offense to the OP .This sounds a bit like a 5 year old boy saying .... EWWWWW!!!... girls!!!

The word eternal in scripture does not mean endless time.Eternal in Greek is the translation of αἰώνιος,,, aion or eon.It means age or age lasting...in other words eternal has an ending.Eternal is sometimes translated as world.Yahoshua said blasphemy of the holy spirit will not be forgiven (forgiveness means.... freed from bondage) in this aion(world/age) or the aion to come.It does not mean endless time,or in one sense ...time at all.

Time measurement is a construct of man.Later in life Einstein postulated time was only now and the separation of past, present and future were an illusion,,though a very convincing one.Eternal life is a very poor description of what we know almost nothing of.Our own constructs of what constitutes boredom and activity also are very poorly perceived.I have no desire to speculate what any experiences value is until the fat lady sings.

reply to post by droid56


Only a Finite ego can only be "bored" or "tired" of living eternally my friend. If you were to treasure your life and all the unlimited possibilities that exists today and tomorrow. That childlike spark would erupt out of you once again and that innate soul desire to experience will be realized and endless. Throw away that notion to comprehend eternity, as someone said in the past replies. Time is non-existent, trying to comprehend with your Finite ego-mind will only give you acne on your face.

As for the others who see life as a task or chore to be completed and done with. You are out of luck, every ending and every beginning exist simultaneously right after the other. Relax, play, learn, and love.

The belief that souls are eternal/humans' obsession with immortality is likely born out of humans' fear of the unknown and death. Inherently afraid of the dark, the human brain must come up with ideological constructs, no matter how illusory, to alleviate the helplessness rising inside itself.
Also, self-preservation.
I like the idea of seeking the immortality of the physical body, if only to be able to die on one's own terms.

reply to post by SparkOfSparks6


One can become weary of reflective self-awareness, you know. And there is nothing wrong with that. The void/nothingness is as much part of the whole as your marvelous experiences of the self/higher self. Sooner or later one would realize that the experience and the experiencer are one, so your idea of eternal playfulness would seem vapid.
Wanting complete oblivion does not make one less aware of deeper realities- perhaps quite the contrary.

I often feel deeply tired of this life, and all of the heaviness and suffering. And I don't think that we go on to some blissful heaven of eternal happiness. But I do have a mystical bent, and I believe that one lifetime isn't enough to learn what we need to learn, evolve, and move on. I think that the energy, the essence of who we are, continues on in some way after we die. I believe that many of us come back over and over again to resolve relationships, learn new lessons, and gain new experiences.

The book "The Lovely Bones", the author has a very interesting take on heaven. In my opinion, it's a very compassion view of the afterlife--that we move on in stages, and that we the have the opportunity to experience everything we wanted to in our earthly life. For example, there is a counselor in the fictional heaven who never felt that she fully helped anyone. In her Heaven, she's assigned to help new souls move on to the next stage, so she's able to to heal the pain of having felt impotent in her career during her life. I really like that. It feels to me that life is so huge and miraculous and intense that it would be cruel if we just died and our essence just stopped "being". It seems to me that it has to be "set up" so that we can evolve as we continue on through our journey to becoming whole, to unifying with the god-force. Mind you, I don't know what that is, exactly, but I feel it exists.

My husband is an existentialist and he believes that when you're dead, you're dead. I fully respect that point of view, but it doesn't ring true fully true to me. I've seen too much to believe that. And frankly, I'm too psychologically weak to deal with the suffering in life without believing that there is some deeper purpose to it.

reply to post by MsSobeit

I find the idea of blinking out to be comforting. Frankly the idea of existing for all eternity sounds exhausting.

Especially when your eternal afterlife is primarily God-centric. You spend all that time singing and praising and worshipping. Because spending forever doing that kind of stuff couldn't possibly get boring. Or monotonous. Or droll. Or bland. Or mundane.

You know why I like sinners? Because they're interesting. They have a story to tell. They've done and seen things. Religious people? Bah. They all do the same things for the same reasons. Sinners like flavor. They like to mix it up. They like to explore and not just content themselves with the same seat for the whole ride. You can't look at them and tell them what they do and why without ever knowing them. They are all unique, having gone through different hells for different heavens. They have experienced a freedom you don't get from having a god to tell you what to think or do. They were molded by their own choices, their own inclinations, their own natural consequences. They are a work of art because they were not factory produced by the local congregation. They are imperfect and more than a little battered, but that gives them depth. That gives them complexity, a shade of personal autonomy that grants a hell more freeing than any heaven built from ignorance and conditioning.

Tell me that isn't cool.

In my opinion, the afterlife is specifically for those who are resigned to getting gored by the bull and are just desperate to convince themselves there's more to life than such a despairing ending. They don't intend to ride it out for the eight seconds needed to walk away with a smile. They believe in their heart that they can't do it, that it's beyond their ability. So they need a consolation prize. And they're ashamed of wanting one, so they flesh it out some to make it this grand and glorious reward for their inexplicably heroic suicide.

Call it an emotional anesthesia for the Green Mile participant.

Bisman
an afterlife does sound awful.

if i am to exist forever, then i want my memories. i want to be able to continue to learn. and i want to meet new people. in any kind of existence.

otherwise whats the point.

Evermore newness and expansion of consciousness is the point. It can't be accomplished while in these finite structures with finite sensory systems.

Once you are honored with an infinitesimal glimpse of the Presence just one time in your life, everything of this world fades away as without any value.

reply to post by tkwasny

Once you are honored with an infinitesimal glimpse of the Presence just one time in your life, everything of this world fades away as without any value.

And we become ever-more obsessed with just that one thing, for all of eternity. I see that as being a special kind of hell. I don't want to spend my time becoming steadily less relevant to my own life than some almighty tool. If I don't matter to myself, what's the point of existing? And honestly, that sounds utterly, utterly evil. Keeping a few million souls sitting around just so they can spend eternity reflecting on how absolutely awesome you are? How is that even close to any kind of paradise? That's just disgusting.

Spookybelle

droid56
The idea that you will live for all eternity in a blissful world is something various religions offer as a main reason to join a religion.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to disappear in the near future.

But to exist for all eternity? That is an amazingly long time, clearly beyond my comprehension.

I'm not sure I want to exist that long.

Well according to some religions your soul will exist forever, regardless of what you do. The only difference is if you prefer to be in Heaven or in Hell.

Those are your only two options. I can't recall one religion that gives you the option of just blinking out of existence.

This may be true. However, I just want to point out that if you were thinking of christianity in regard to your comment, I can tell you that some christians believe in a post-resurrection "second death," which I've heard some interpret as "the death of the soul."

reply to post by droid56


I've often asked religious believers to explain to me what they will do for all eternity. Back when I was a believer I was equally afraid of both Heaven and Hell. In Hell you are in constant agony but it seemed to me that after the initial euphoria of Heaven wore off it would become its own kind of Hell.

Heaven in Christianity is generally depicted as a massive jeweled golden city with God seated on a throne being worshiped incessantly. It was quite commonly believed, until the last century or two, that you could actually watch the damned in Hell from your seat in Heaven. In fact many Medieval and ancient church writings tell of how blissful it will be to watch the sinners get burned and tortured.

At any rate the faithful in Heaven would be constantly in the presence of God. Sin would be impossible. And I think I speak for most people when I say that much of what we do for fun here on planet Earth generally counts as sin in one religion or another. Without the ability (or desire) to sin there goes your "Free Will" and the idea of being free to spend eternity enjoying yourself along with it. Removing the option to sin NECESSARILY limits the list of activities you can engage in, and if you want to fill ETERNITY you need LIMITLESS activities. In a world where sin no longer existed as a possibility there wouldn't even be fictional portrayals of it or the ability to fantasize about it. Imagine that, a world where not only are you incapable of doing what you want but the very idea of certain things is completely expunged from your life.

People can't even stop themselves from getting bored in the here and now, with plenty of things to do on this incredible planet we live on. Think about it. People pull out their cell phones after less than 10 seconds of silence because they get bored. Kids complain there's nothing on TV when they have 500 channels. We have the whole of the internet, almost all of mankinds knowledge directly at our fingertips, and we still get "bored".

Now remove all the gambling, drinking, porn, sex, drugs, violence and "sinful" thoughts, not to mention all the movies and video games that feature those things. Suddenly it makes sense why angels are always sitting around playing harps, because what else can they do? I mean the electric guitar and dancing have both been outlawed since they encourage sin, the only dancing you can do is to praise the benevolent prison warden, I mean savior, who trapped you, I mean blessed you with eternal life.

The best case scenario for an eternal life would have to be something like we see on Doctor Who, a species that can regenerate changing its appearance and personality but being the same basic person with the same basic memory. And even the Doctor gets weary of life sometimes, and he's only what 1-2 thousand years.

Eternal life, actually ETERNAL life, would an unimaginably horrible and cursed thing and after only a few millennia most people would likely long for death, actual, real, death.

reply to post by Titen-Sxull


That's exactly what I'm talking about. People going on about how great heaven will be sound like my two year old nephew waxing vainly over the prospect of being able to ride a real live tiger in the jungle. They literally have not an effing clue what it would be like, but just point that fact out to them and they'll get all defensive and crap because they know you're right.

Oh, and because of that spiritual pride bs.

I can understand where you are coming from however it is just as juvenile as the Christian belief.

First there is no "place" of heaven ...somewhere out there beyond the universe.It is "the heavens" which is where God lives in every man....The Kingdom Of God.All of that "boring" stuff" is symbolism and is proof of how it can't be explained...especially to those with no imagination.

Indulging in alcohol, drugs, sex etc(which aren't "sin"in and of themslevs) is all connected to one thing ..pleasure...a fickle emotion that quickly fades and needs constant attention and maintenance to continue in that state.

Those pleasures are the "candy" of immature adults who continually stuffing their face to "feel" good because life is all about "feeling good!".... and thinking indulging is the only thing that induces pleasure.It isn't that they are not easy to satisfy it is they are too easily satisfied with playing with mud pies when something infinitely more satisfying exists that pleasure is a faint shadow of.

Trying to explain "the heavens" to indulgers of religion (everything is religion) is like trying to explain Quantum physics to a fish.Many will not experience the heavens for ages because they have no real perception of it's existence.They have created a false reality in their carnal mind.They are on the extended "many" ages plan however one day(age) they will see.

What we do here in the physical realm is not the ultimate determiner of what we experience in the infinite realms of existence but it is a consistent preview.The fact is the Kingdom of God is not "somewhere out there".It is in this realm also.But it is hidden from the blind not by deception but by imperception.As a man thinks..so he is.

reply to post by AfterInfinity



Your Words……My Pause



Opinions are like…. You know why I like people?

They have a story to tell. You can't tell by a look at them, what they do and why, without ever knowing them. They've done and seen things. They all do the same things for the same reasons, because they're sinners.

Sinners like flavor. They like to explore and not just content themselves with the same seat for the whole ride. They are all unique, They have experienced freedom They were molded by their own choices, their own inclinations, They are a work of art because they were not factory produced They are imperfect and more than a little battered, resigned to getting gored, specifically despairing

They like to mix it up, convince themselves heroic suicide, is this inexplicably grand and glorious reward (emotional anesthesia) .That gives them their own natural consequences and complexity. Life’s built in depth; to smile, to think or do. Call it a participant’s consolation prize, that shade of personal autonomy.
God grants a freeing from flesh, from ignorance and conditioning beyond ability…


What I left out……


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edit on 21-10-2013 by MsSobeit because: Punctuation