This e-mail contains to focus points.
The first. About your article on eternity.
There are two
possible assumptions one could make about eternal life:
1. We retain our
current nature.
2. That nature changes.
In the case of one, as we
attempted to learn and experience everything, as
our minds
can only hold
a finite amount of information, we would begin to forget.
Therefore even
if we could learn eveything, and experience everything, we
would forget the
bulk of it, as our minds could only hold a fraction of
infinity, practially
speaking nothing. Thus we would forget we had learned
about or
experienced something, and so we could keep on learning something
new for
eternity, since to us it would always seem new!
In the case of
possibility 2, we still could never learn/experience
eveything, because by
the nature of infinity there would always be something
more. We could
expereince skydiving, then experience it from two people's
minds at once.
We could infititely change our nature to experience whatever
we
wished, and thus we could lose the ability to grow bored, being in the
same
mental state as a four-year-old who takes joy in wacthing the same
tv-show-episode over and over.
Additionally, since everyone is in
this infitity, since experiencing any
event from one perspective leaves and
infinity of other perspectives to
experience it in, and these perspecitives
and events multiply with time, one
could never actually experience
everything.
The second focus of this argument is on your comment at the
bottom of the
article, let's debate, and build. I am in the middle of
a sprawling
theological debate at my school. I have dared to take on
some born-again
christians, and try to prove to them:
1. god does
not exist.
2. if god did exist, there would never be a hell.
3. if god
existed, and there was a hell, he would never care if we knew what
his name
was.
This is exceedingly hard since they keep using the bible as
"evidence".
I was wondering if you had had any success along similiar
lines.
- Thanks,