After Death.
Think about it: Forever is a very, very long time. Time to do just about anything you want. And do it again. And again, again, again…. You can start with the standard course of harp playing and you can play until you get really, really good at it, or, since it’s Heaven, you’re probably already really, really good at and can play just about anything without even needing music.
Hey, not only can you do just about anything you want, you can be really, really good at it as well. Golfers can get a hole in one on any hole, bowlers can get a 300 every time, race car drivers not only win every race, but absolutely stomp the competition, presumably driven by minions of the Devil. Sorta like winning rigged video games.
You can read every novel as many times as you want, you can know everything anybody’s ever known, you can understand the most intricate physics. Why you can be smarter than God!!! OK, that was a little hyperbole there, but you could be almost as smart as God and know almost as much as well, I mean, if you wanted to.
See what forever can do for you!
Oh yes, some will squander forever and just work on producing the loudest farts, the biggest turds, the longest pees. If sex is allowed in Heaven, these miscreants can have the biggest orgasms, the most fun. Maybe some will piss away forever by getting pissed forever. Druggies may just be high all the time on being in Heaven, not really giving a crap about it being the same forever and ever and ever.
So just how much meaning can there be in doing a lot of things over and over and over and oooovvvverrrrrrrrrrrr. How much meaning can there be in being the best you can be at everything you want to because you have forever to perfect your skills, whether it be physical, technical, fun or other? How much meaning can there be in the boring drudgery of Heaven?
Well, there are several possibilities here; you might be able to forget what you’ve done before so that you’re always starting over, making everything an interesting challenge again, you could have your abilities limited but not know that they’re limited so that you keep trying over and over to accomplish something that you can’t accomplish, you could have your abilities gradually fall off with degree of difficulty so that you can attain higher goals, but it would just take longer, or, hey, here’s a novel idea, you could just die, you know, have a limited lifespan that you can do as much or as little as you want to give it meaning, forgetting totally about Heaven and forever.
It has also been suggested that when one dies and goes to Heaven, he becomes a part of the essence of God and doesn’t actually need to do anything forever. While this solution gets rid of the forever problem, it’s hard to see how it’s distinct from just dying. I mean, you’re not you anymore, you’re just another infinitesimal cell in the whole of your God. If you’re not you, it doesn’t really matter if your so-called soul has a fate or not.
Dealing with the other suggestions, we find that forgetting what you’ve done before is also a lot like just dying: if you forget your previous actions and lives, be they on earth or in Heaven, each time you do so you’re essentially a different entity, a different person, starting over.
Having your abilities limited, whether it be totally or just to slow things down a bit doesn’t really solve the forever problem. You’ll just keep doing the same old stuff over and over and over, I mean forever’s a really, really long time and your forever life’s going to run out of any meaning pretty darn fast.
Nope, the only way to have any meaning to your life is to have a limited lifetime. That doesn’t mean that we humans should be content with our industrialized nations average lifetime of 80 years or our apparent biological maximum of around 120. We can and should do things to extend our lives for quite a long time. But expansion of lifetimes ultimately at very long times brings to bear some of the same issues as living forever in some sort of heaven.
There will be limits, of course, most likely the limits will be mental, since despite the common wisdom that we use only a small portion of our brains, resent findings suggest that we apparently use most of it and we have a limited capacity to remember events that happened a long time ago. So the longer we live, the more of our previous lives we’re going to forget, which essentially means that we reinvent ourselves to some extent every day. Over a long period of time we’d be nothing like the person we were when we were younger. So the maximum lifetime in which you are you might be arbitrarily set at, say, the oldest you can be and still remember events from your 10th year. After that you’re a new you and having a longer life again becomes indistinguishable from dying.
So living a long time by itself may be similar to one of the solutions to living forever; you’re continually being renewed, forgetting things in your previous life, allowing you to accomplish those things again if you choose to.
Don’t fear death. Forever in Heaven is a false promise, meaningless in its length, meaningless in its repetition. Your life only has the meaning you choose to give it in a limited lifespan.
