Heaven--What a place! I can imagine being tormented by my own choices forever, but I can't really imagine being perpetually, completely, absolutely "happy" forever. What WOULDN'T get boring after 1,200,131,441,342,444,251,500,100,151,505 years? And that's just a start! But the human mind is the most marvelous thing in the universe--It can even contain "The Universe" in it as an idea and have lots of room left over! That mind has tried to imagine how to deal with "forever" by making it a single, unchanging state rather than a temporal sequence. "Forever" is not changing; it's an all-at-once. So the medieval theologians/philosophers/clerics saw this as the most profound, satisfying "rest" imaginable: The "rest" of perpetual peace, at one instant completely happy and unchanging. It was "rest" because there was nothing else to be done; nothing else to be accomplished; nothing else to be experienced. It was all there, at once, at rest. So even though this may not make much more sense today than the contradiction Mike brought up, at least it's not a complete contradiction.
(Byt the way: My spell checker suggested that I didn't really mean to say "all-at-once;" I meant to say "Clarence." Go figure.)
- phatic wrote:
The unstoppable Mike Geary wrote concerning the liturgy: (a) Eternal rest give unto the dead, O Lord And let perpetual light shine upon them(b) Whoever believes in me, even though that person die, shall live. I am the resurrection and the life.However, to the uninitiated it may appear contradictory that the Lord should both let the dead rest while also grant them eternal life...? No...?Best wishes, --- The more abstract the truth is that you would teach, the more you have to seduce the senses to it. - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil http://phatic.blogspot.com -- _______________________________________________ Surf the Web in a faster, safer and easier way: Download Opera 9 at http://www.opera.com Powered by Outblaze ------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.446 / Virus Database: 269.5.7/771 - Release Date: 4/21/2007 11:56 AM
-- -------------------------------------------------"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence and ignorance." -------------------------------------------------
John Wager john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx
Lisle, IL, USA
