Thursday, June 12, 2008

What Do You Do For Eternity?

When I was a little kid growing up and was taught the doctrines of exaltation and eternal life, I had one major question on my mind:

Just what do we do in a glorified state that lasts forever? Won't we get bored eventually?

As I got older, I figured the answer was no. My rationale was that infinite capacity for creation=infinite possibilities for activities.

In a book my mother-in-law insisted I read, Earth in the Beginning, author Eric N. Skousen made me think about this childhood quandary:

Simply put, if you are a being with an infinity of time before you, it is certainly consoling to know that you have an infinity of unorganized material to yet organize.

Eternal boredom, thus, remains an impossibility not necessarily because of our divinely-endowed capacities, but because of the infinite task at hand of organizing that which is not organized.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I love organizing!
On a more intelligent sounding note, good post. When I was little I don't remember ever wondering if I would get bored. I just thought, it would be fun to be able to make things that won't turn out ugly. That is probably still my greatest aspiration.

Bukran said...

My next most common thought along this vein:

Making dinosaurs AND people at the same time so they live together!

How cool would that be?

Dr. Lloyd Miller said...

Bukran, looks like you have interesting ideas too. Thanks for the promo in an earlier blog but you should have noted that the stuff you quoted from my Music 210R class was all disclaimed as merely ideas not fact and anyone could refute or disbelieve any of it anytime. I need to clarify a few things: first we discussed a lot about Afghan music and even learned to scan lines of poetry which few people can ever learn. But most students weren’t able to get into the deeper musical theory so we talked about problems of Westernization and destruction of musical cultures, a situation so dire that the U.N and UNESCO are working night and day to preserve what they term as “Intangible Cultural Heritage" (ICU). I only got 1 PhD and that was enough trouble. During the Islamic Tazi'eh I did join in but the light little chains I showed the class couldn’t really do much more than give a bit of a back rub. King Nebuchadnezzar did become a spiritual ascetic like a Sufi wandering in the wilderness eating grass and praising the Lord (see the Daniel tree stump dream interpretation). It was merely a conjecture that the people from the hijacked planes could be living in the Bahamas. And yes it is written in several places such as the 1931 Heber C. Kimbal speech that “Missouri will be swept so claen of its inhabitants that as President Young tells us, when you return to that place, there will not be left so much as a yellow dog to wag his tail.” Also John Taylor in Journal of Wilford Woodroof Dec. 16, 1877 pp. 179-193 affirmed “I saw the whole states of Missouri and Illinois and part of Iowa were a complete wilderness with no living human beings in them.” (Hey, maybe bigger floods or the nukes stored near Saint Louis.) The Mother Goddess Astarte cult requiring child prostitution for several years is stated in many books including Frazer. And it was a student who looked up the Hebrew letter equivalent of 6 and found it to be w so 666 could be www. In traditional societies 99% of the people in the world did marry a distant or near cousin or uncle but not in modern America. I don’t know if Ho Chi Minh was a Harvard grad but I think he went to college here. For a while we had finals in an Indian restaurant because the students voted to; democracy (like our dear president keeps saying.) And you forgot my main mantra that the Beetles and rock are totally the work of Satan to destroy culture and intelligence in the last days and it is working. Fondly, your old prof Dr. Lloyd Miller