Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2001 13:43:50 EST
Subject: On Your Article, and Debates.
To: darwin@atheists.net

This e-mail contains to focus points.

The first.  About your article on eternity.

There are two possible assumptions one could make about eternal life:
1. We retain our current nature.
2. That nature changes.

In the case of one, as we attempted to learn and experience everything, as
our minds
can only hold a finite amount of information, we would begin to forget.

Therefore even if we could learn eveything, and experience everything, we
would forget the bulk of it, as our minds could only hold a fraction of
infinity, practially speaking nothing.  Thus we would forget we had learned
about or experienced something, and so we could keep on learning something
new for eternity, since to us it would always seem new!

In the case of possibility 2, we still could never learn/experience
eveything, because by the nature of infinity there would always be something
more.  We could expereince skydiving, then experience it from two people's
minds at once.  We could infititely change our nature to experience whatever
we wished, and thus we could lose the ability to grow bored, being in the
same mental state as a four-year-old who takes joy in wacthing the same
tv-show-episode over and over.

Additionally, since everyone is in this infitity, since experiencing any
event from one perspective leaves and infinity of other perspectives to
experience it in, and these perspecitives and events multiply with time, one
could never actually experience everything.

The second focus of this argument is on your comment at the bottom of the
article, let's debate, and build.  I am in the middle of a sprawling
theological debate at my school.  I have dared to take on some born-again
christians, and try to prove to them:

1. god does not exist.
2. if god did exist, there would never be a hell.
3. if god existed, and there was a hell, he would never care if we knew what
his name was.

This is exceedingly hard since they keep using the bible as "evidence".

I was wondering if you had had any success along similiar lines.


- Thanks,