It seems clear to me that if there is an eternal world, or a heaven as some people call it, then this life has zero meaning. Unless of course there is a god who judges humans based on how they perform morally in this world. Then, this world is all-important as sort of a gladiatorial combat arena for the soul.

But I think that many religious people do not view the world that way, at least more enlightened ones. They may see that there is a moral order to the world, and that there is an "eternal" in each person. A soul, in other words. It seems to me that if there is an eternal world, and that if this life is not a testing ground, then life on this planet is utterly meaningless, and there is no such thing as committing an evil act. A genocidal maniac is on par with a saint. Simply because there are no real consequences to any action in light of the fact that this life is completely meaningless against infinity.

how about this life of ours is just a slice among infinity, and that any meaning we attribute to it is the meaning we give our lives.

Test and consequences occur on earth too. Most people have a moral conscious which suffers psychic pain from wrongdoing on earth and experiences joy from social bonds with other people. There is some hell and some heaven on earth.

If life goes on for eternity, then being judged on this life is as meaningless as judging an adult based on how they behaved for a fraction of a second when they were a toddler.

There's no logical problem with the present having an impact on the future, even if that future is infinite.

Here's a hypothetical example. In the afterlife, there's a "lived more than 10 years heaven" and "lived less than 10 years heaven." If a child decides to stick a fork in an electrical socket at 9 years old and dies, he's in one heaven. And then if he makes other decisions to live past 10 years old, he's in the other heaven.

There's a logically valid judgment being made about the child's life that has an eternal impact.

In a more mundane sense, imagine an infinitely long road with exactly one fork in it. You choose one direction or the other at the fork. That finite decision in the past takes you on an infinite journey.

There are certainly "real consequences" to actions. If you mean that they become insignificant relative to the infinite number of actions taken in an eternal world, then meh.

This seems like one of those objections that isn't solved by the contrary position. If there is no eternal life or world, how does that make actions any more significant or allow them to have "real consequences", as you phrased it?

If it were known that there is no afterlife, then a lot of people would try harder to maker their lives in this world better. Instead, I'd bet a lot of people place their hopes in an afterlife and settle for a lot less here.

I don't think most people would share you're 'meh' attitude. Just taking a quantitative view of life as a sum of actions isn't what most people do. Significance, meaning, these things are a bigger factor. Just like if someone were told they were going to prison for a month, they would have a much different experience of prison than if they were sentenced for ten life sentences. The "no getting out" factor completely changes things.

Whether people would try harder in life is purely speculative. I find it hard to believe there aren't some lazy atheists (I'm arguably one of them).

But those are different points anyway. Your issue with eternal life is that actions don't have "real consequences" and that life is "utterly meaningless".

People trying harder or caring more in a finite life does nothing to add either of those things.

This is pretty speculative. Indeed, one of the arguments for the notion of an afterlife generally asserted by atheists is that religious people fear death and need something to assuage those fears. At the root of that line of thinking is that this idea fills a gap in the human psyche that needs to be filled to keep things moving forward.

So there's kind of a "you can't have it both ways" type of response here.

Hmm, not sure how that relates to my comment. I'm referring to the idea that someone's eternal existence (such as their placement in either heaven or hell) being based on a judgement of what amounts to an infinitesimally small snapshot of their existence, at it's very beginning.

It being as meaningless as:
University acceptance based on their first spelling test.
Credit rating based on how they spent their first weeks allowance.
Determining their poker ability from how they played their first hand.
etc.

If you somehow think that something that happens early could not be a determining factor for things that come later, I'd be interested in hearing your theory of time.

I'll note that under this framework, nothing means anything because any finite amount of time is infinitely small compared to the infinite. So therefore no events should have any impact on anything in the future.

The common Abrahamic narrative is that your actions in this world determine your fate (or lack thereof pending on your denomination) in the next.

And obviously if there is an external world contingent on this one, then this world does matter.

Now whether there is grounds to believe that is another matter entirely, but I don't think we can just swat away the main portion of religious beliefs and then judge them as if they do not apply.

Still not really what I was referring to!

I don't think it's a controversial question of Christian theology, to ask why someone's eternal fate is based on whatever happens during the tiny beginning period of their existence rather than an 'ongoing assessment'? After a billion years-worth of data, how relevant is a judgement that was made based only on the first few decades (at most) of their existence? Unless there are periodic transfers between heaven and hell!

Getting slightly more off topic, I also don't see the importance of 'faith', meaning accepting Christ before you die, not after. What is the difference between someone who accepts Christ, and is killed by a lightning strike 3 seconds later, versus a person who has not accepted Christ, but would like to 3 seconds after they have died and are standing before God (or whatever scenario would match the idea)?

This:

Trying to claim "meaninglessness" doesn't actually raise any type of meaningful objection.

This is addressed in what I've said.

See the example of an infinite long path with a fork in the road.

Basically, you have raised what amounts to a nonsensical objection. There are plenty of ways to raise objections, but this particular line doesn't actually accomplish anything at all.

+
So what if your fork in the road said "Good people: go right". If a good person did go right a billion years ago, can you know whether they are a good person today, based on that billion-year-old decision?


Is this is a nonsensical objection?

I know its not your plan but using the "billions of years" of existence as a cudgel is questionable but in truth; man has been in this existence from the beginning, no matter how one structures the "billions of years".

Aside from the concept that the "time" as we are using it, is a function of solar,lunar, and planetary movements there was a "time" (no pun intended) when the movements of the heavens were not as we see today, which is another story.

Man entered into this realm of experiential being as "first being", not the last, or the insignificant, but the primary motivation (words are difficult here) of the creative divinity.

If one would be capable of looking into the past, as some do, one looks within man, or one's self and you would see the past in movement to the present and continuing on into the future. the kingdoms of nature; mineral, plant, animal are the "rejections" of the human being as man progressed into his future.

One difficulty is that it is hard to envision man without legs, arms, head, as presently constituted but consider that at one time he was not unlike a jellyfish floating in a "water" or fluid state but was not a jellyfish. At this state he was not fully incarnated within the "physical" which was at best a tenuous materiality but would act from "without" , but not totally so. LOL here.

The higher beings to which you refer in the negative were present is some comprehensible form and have developed , as has Man. The "angels in heaven have anxieties" that Man will not reach his futuristic goal and that Christ Being to whom you refer has been present in not only the human development but also is primary of cosmic development and movement into the future.

Life and our innate and future abilities did not start at our birth no matter how many DNA's marshal for the war of a materiality against the heavens of Man's source, his home to which he has fallen, and in this he returns refurbished , being more that his previous state, Man then becomes a true "Human Being".

Some of us like claims to be backed up by something verifiable. I know that in your book this makes us guilty of ugly skepticism, but hey... you're spreading your new age spirituality on a medium that was invented by people using evidence-based reasoning and enjoying a life made more comfortable with it.

So I feel the objection is reasonable.

If the definition of "good" is that people took the right fork, yes. There's no logical problem with that. You might object in the sense that you don't believe that this is how things are or how they should be, but that's beside the point. There's nothing about the logic of such as system that's inherently flawed.

I believe it still is. Any finite amount of time will be infinitesimal in light of the infinite. You can take your billion years and say, "But in another 10^100 years, this billion years is meaningless." And you can keep pushing that back as far as you would like in light of infinity. And so at no point can any judgment about anything ever be made. No decision (or collection of decisions) can actually matter because they're only finite specks in an infinite realm.

You and "your people" do not own "evidence based reasoning" but my purpose is that if one projects millions and billions of years in the past, in order to debunk a consideration of the spirit, then the speaker should be able to , in some way, give a presentation of what man looked like or his particular predilections at that time.

It may be and probably will be that the answer is impossible with the present scientific approach as this approach is specifically an "inanimate" thought process to which only the mineral kingdom is subscript.

The idea that because of a "red shift" the earth began as a big bang 13+(?) millions of years ago is absolutely mathematically correct but has little relevance to the earthly progress. The mathematics is right but at best is is only an inanimate skeleton of the human evolution.

This is not "new age spirituality" which ,in your lexicon, becomes a epithet of the dismissive . The idea of "billions of years" placed along side a few generations of historical life as a demur is fatuous ; note I do not find the writer "fatuous" but some ideas have to be called out.

This type of thinking one sees frequently in that all of history, written and unwritten, is arrogated by the "scientific" while the difficulties are placed upon the opponent.

As you know i have often referred to the "reembodiment of the spirit and destiny" and in this I am speaking of evidence based conceptions but it won't come about with an easy approach. There is no f=ma to which one can walk away from and and feel that they are purveyor of physics truths for this type of understanding can only come about through multiple perspectives .

You and I, did not start from a nugget of coal which developed via randomness only to have us incarnate , once, the children of this coal or even our uncle Tunis , the well worn conceptual chimpanzee in the family.

The best to you.

Let's grant that this isn't a necessary truth. Nonetheless, doesn't it seem counter to our general sense of morality to think that a few years on earth could be so central to the moral evaluation of the same being billions of years hence? Yes, the child is the father of the man and all that, but in billions of years you would be a different person. If you weren't, you'd still be a different person, because you would have lost the ability to change.

Not to my sense of morality, though it can to some. The concept of reincarnation (at least in my understanding of the Hindu version of it) tries to understand forward/backwards movement in terms of an incessant quest for "higher" levels based on the quality of previous lives, thus creating a sense of impermanence of anything.

But I have no problem with the idea that there's a threshold that is crossed at death that's substantively different and that beyond that there may be no turning back.

Why does the inability to change need billions of years to set in?

I never brought up problems of logical possibility, and don't know why you keep going back to it.

At any given moment of judgement, an existence with a beginning but no end will have existed for a finite period.
Yes, in another 10^100 years, that billion years would be meaningless. But then the entire 10^100 years is what would be meaningful, just as the entire billion years used to be meaningful, and even a single day might have been meaningful at that moment, but is no longer.

Because if it's logically possible and consistent, then you haven't actually raised a meaningful objection to anything. You're saying, "It's meaningless" and I'm saying "It doesn't have to be."

So according to your view, the past is meaningless and really ought not have any influence on the future because of that.

I don't even know where to begin with your last reply. Who are you and what have you done with Aaron W?

His disciples said to him, "When will the repose of the dead come about, and when will the new world come?"

He said to them, "What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it."