Heaven or Hell regardless. Does anyone else think that eternity is a bloody frighteningly long time to spend ANYWHERE?
Can you remember spending those 13.7 billion years before your physical life in either of those places?
Funny that, huh?
“Longer than you think daddy! Longer than you think.”
/The Jaunt, by Stephen King
But I’ve never heard that we existed before we were born in the first place. And at even if that we did, we’d have a few decades on earth to look forward to to break the monotony.
Well, you’re hearing it now - at least I’m telling you that some people believe it.
Why don’t you?
This is just my opinion, but I don’t think eternity (if it exists) is a time-oriented phenomenon. I don’t think it can be, as there would be a first event and eventually a last event, or at least a present even-which would mean that eternity didn’t extend into the future (because it hasn’t happened yet).
Instead, when I imagine eternity, I imagine something akin to stasis. That’s the only way I could imagine an ‘eternity’.
An eternity of consciousness would be hell. Without the passage of time, (stasis) there is no consciousness. Without consciousness, it’s irrelevant to me, since it’s not, you know, me.
I suppose I could revel in all the mysteries of the universe. Travel to all 10[sup]22[/sup] stars in the visible universe, revel in the almighty’s unending love for a few eons, wait for and watch the last star the universe will ever contain burn out, and then count the particle evaporation from all the supermassive black holes.
I suppose I might still retain some sanity after that first googleplex years go by. Sadly, however, that’s not even a drop in the proverbial bucket. Long after all possible universes have exploded into existence and evaporated into nothingness, eternity will have barely begun.
It’s longer than you think, Daddy.
This is something that whacks my mind out, in a way. Death, one of the most defining moments of my life, I will have no chance of remembering, which makes every moment that I approach it exponentially more pointless from my perspective.
Good morning everybody! 
Poifect!!
Eternity != perpetuity.
Eternity is the state of the fullness of time seen as a single gestalt. It’s the state in which a photon exists, in which the passage of time is an irrelevancy.
In eternity, all time is present at once. The impact of the Chicxulub dinosaur killer, the events of 9/11, and the moment (5 billion years in our future) when the Sun going red giant evaporates the last standing water on Earth, are all present time simultaneously when seen from an eternal perspective.
That’s the concept of eternity. Whether it corresponds to something real in the actual world-as-we-know-it, of course, is a quite different question.
Actually, Poly, I’d suggest that what you’re saying there is that time does not really exist, only different configurations of the universe.
Which is what I’m saying over here.
I don’t believe in God, i don’t believe in Heaven or Hell.
However, I still look upon Death as just the next adventure. I’m not afraid of it, and I think it will be so different from our world you won’t feel time passing.
Time is a human construct, and you won’t be human anymore.
And if you’re wrong, and there’s no heaven or hell, and I’m wrong, and there’s nothing afterwards, we just die…and nothing is left to absorb us.
You mean like the grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all change to silver glass. And then you see it: White shores… and beyond. The far green country under a swift sunrise.
Why do you say this?
Why did Einstein include time in his theories if it is just a human construct?
Yes, exactly. That quote put my feelings about death in the simplest, most poetic way.
It doesn’t sound bad at all, actually.
Hah! Are you actually expecting me to defend this? Against Einstein? Ok, I think I’m bright, but not that bright.
I guess what I meant is the way we perceive time when alive and human is a construct, not so much time itself. If I can put it the way I think of it:
Time is not a river. Time is an OCEAN, and we are all in different currents. To me, my current may be going faster than yours, but in truth the ocean is moving at its own speed, and we are all headed for the same goal - infinity.
Now if Einstein included time in his theories I am no one to argue with Einstein! All I speak of is the way I perceive it.
Got it.
My oldest kid (jr. high) came home from school two weeks ago stating that his teacher had just informed him that time is not real, it is just a human construct.
Then when your post said the same thing, I had to ask.
[Woody Allen] Great, that means I’ll have to go to the Ice Capades again…[/WA]
The problem I have with this argument is that we are not the sort of entities (if any such ones could exist, which I very much doubt) who could subjectively experience time in this way, even if we were somehow gifted (or cursed) with eternal consciousness. The kinds of alterations that would have to be made to us for us to experience all time at once would pretty much obliterate our individuality and humanity.
It is the original recycling system, aka reincarnation!
Eternity is when or after time ceases to exist. Eternity is a long long time!