[PLUG-TALK] More Terri vs John.

[glen e. p. ropella]

=><=><= "rj" == Russ Johnson <russj at dimstar.net> writes:

>> why argue with you?  When you die, your opinions will die 
>> with you.
>> 

rj> Not if there's a God... If I'm wrong, then I'm going to hell, and my 
rj> opinions will still be around.

rj> If I'm right, then yes, my opinions that are not written down somewhere 
rj> (thank you google!) will die with me.

I could be wrong about this; but, it's my understanding that the old
description of the christian Hell being a place of fire and brimstone
was a bit of a misinterpretation.  I think it's common among
christians nowadays to admit that Hell is "the void" and God is
"light" (a.k.a.  energy and matter).  So, "going to Hell" is just a
euphemism for "going out of existence".  And "going to Heaven" is a
euphemism for "leaving the body and changing into some other form".

If you carry this to its extreme, you can imagine that all extant
things are in some bounded metric space whose origin is located at
God.  Then all things that don't exist are out beyond the boundary.
(Nobody ever gets my jokes... So, I'll just let you know that the
previous sentence contains _two_ jokes... I hope somebody's laughing.)
That would mean that we, as humans on earth are some distance from
God... Let's call it 5.  So, if we're at location H and the origin is
at location G, then H-G = 5.  Now, limbo, where innocent souls go when
they leave the body are closer to God but not at location H...  So,
let's say they're at location L.  H-L > 0 and H-L < H-G.  Perhaps L-G
= 3.  Purgatory, like limbo is an intermediate place on the path to
God; but, it's hard for me to tell whether it's between us and Hell or
between us and Limbo.  So, if purgatory is at location P, it could be
that P > H or L < P < H.  Of course, Hell, let's call it location A
for the Abyss, is obviously greater than H... in fact, it would have
to be greater than any location within the bound of the bounded metric
space whose origin is at G.  So, A is really a limit as the distance
from God increases.

So, Russ, I'm afraid Michael's right, if you go to Hell when you die,
then your opinions will be lost.  But, on the other hand, Heaven,
which is a kind of ball of some ambiguous radius around the orgin, G,
would seem to be a rather dense cluster.  So, with all those souls
packed into the same region, it's not clear whether any individual
opinions will survive, anyway.  I suspect it will all collapse into
one big fat soul, reverberating with the same message in a never
ending dull repetition... like a Britney Spears song or something.
Perhaps there are slight harmonic shifts to the message or a transient
coloring when the slightly out of phase content of the opinions of a
newly dead christian step-child is incorporated... like when a Jesuit
dies.  But, for the most part, the God attractor has got to be a
pretty stable, monotonic process.

At least that's what I gather from the christian literature I
read. [grin]

-- 
glen e. p. ropella              =><=                           Hail Eris!
H: 503.630.4505                              http://www.ropella.net/~gepr
M: 971.219.3846                               http://www.tempusdictum.com