I've been reading some serious verbal diarrhoea lately! Some people have heads full of nonsense and believe it all to make perfect sense! I believe the term is cognitive dissonance. Holding two, or more, opposing views and (somehow) reconciling the differences. People who hold religious views argue that atheists have been 'brainwashed' by science which is "obviously the work of the Devil!" This apparent deception doesn't allow us access to the "truth" of the existence of 'God'. No! All that's happened is the acquisition of information that our brains have evolved to make sense of has shown overwhelmingly that facts speak louder than fantasy.
I, and many others, have stated that the only reason for a belief in an omnipotent deity, in this day and age, is to reassure them that they are going to live forever. Christians and Muslims alike (in many ways!), all hold the nonsensical belief that they have 'souls' that are eternal. And even more weirdly that these souls are the exact copies of themselves as people! What? Forget all the arguments about creationism verses evolution, or of morals verses religious values, or of history verses the Bible/Q'uran, or whatever, that's all hedgerow and scrub. The belief in an everlasting life is all that matters.
I'm going to recreate a thought experiment I've used elsewhere to try and dispel the idea of "eternity".
First a test of your visual imagination:
Imagine a room so dark you cannot see your hand in front of your face. I mean so black and devoid of light you can almost feel it. Now imagine that the only light you can see is a single tiny drop of luminous paint on the end of a needle. Nothing else. The rest of the space around you could be as vast as you need it to be. It could be twice the size of an aircraft hangar where sound doesn't reverbarate, but the only light source, the only thing you see, is that one miniscule drop of luminous paint. Try to keep that image.
Now, imagine yourself "dead" in the "spiritual" sense. That is; your "soul" has passed on through this Earthly veil. Whilst you're whistling hymns and telling god how wonderful he is, you come across a human brain. You remember that someone, somewhere told you that a brain consists of up to one hundred billion neurons. So you decide to count them! How long would it take you? I'm not going to be too accurate here, but my guess is around three thousand, two hundred years plus! But that doesn't matter because you now have "eternity". Now let's say that in each single cell you discover a brand new idea. One never before been used, or mentioned in life. You might think to yourself; 'I wonder if that's a good, or bad idea?' So you try these ideas out. One by one. You might even combine some to make even newer thoughts and ideas. Some may take a few seconds, some may take weeks, but you persevere. A conservative guess at a time-scale to achieve this small task might be ten million years, given that you're dealing with potentially one hundred billion plus new ideas! How many generations of new souls would be coming to heaven, I wonder? Around three hundred thousand at a rough guess! (Hope there's room in heaven!) Can you imagine how much you'd know? Everything there is to know! Knowledge must end. So now you can go off somewhere into infinite space and create your own universe. Within it, you can create your own planet that supports life and have these unfortunates worship you! You can make your own hell for those who "deny" you and you can curse them for their "sin of ignorance"! Hey - that means you would soon know as much as god! It might even mean that you have the time to become god! How wonderful! You could make universes just like this one over and over and over again. Each one taking four billion years or so to mature. You could make millions of them. Trillions of years could pass and think of all those souls you'd have to worship you.
Lets return to the image I set you earlier. One tiny speck of luminous paint in a blackened room. Even after you've learned everything "god" knows, and built and destroyed trillions of universes, that dim speck of light has done nothing to brighten up "eternity"! It never gets filled. It is endless and by its very nature; pointless! Now if that single speck of light represents all the time its taken you to become god, how much smaller must it be to represent your life-span?
Eternity makes this life pointless! I mean, what can we possibly learn in the short spell we have on this planet that we can't learn in eternity? If all god/allah (or whoever) wants is for us to worship him, why doesn't he allow us to do that in eternity? I'm sure, given an eternity, I could learn to love anything!
The only eternity there REALLY is is death. Once you're dead you never return! So make what you can of this life. It's all we've got.
