I didn't plan to write all of this when I started:
Human beings can never truly appreciate the concept of infinity. It is beyond our ability to grasp. Essentially, by saying that people would be tortured for eternity, what the religious are really saying is that it will be a really, really long time because your crime was really, really bad. It is needed because when the consequence is so far in the future, the implications of it have to be extremely harsh in order to have any effect.
Consider smoking. Smokers know that it may cause cancer in the future, but even that threat is too far off to deter many people. If every time you lit up a cigarette, however, you got punched square in the nose, I’d reckon more people would quit pretty quickly.
Still, as they try to deter us from disbelieving, religious people completely overlook the real implications of the sorts of time frames that they assert in their threats and bribes. I can only really use examples to illustrate how absurd the whole thing is.
Think back to when you were in kindergarten. Even for our youngest members, that was a considerable amount of time ago. Think about all the days that have passed since then. Think of all the things you have done, all the people you have met, all the meals you have eaten, and all the places you have been. Really try to quantify all of that. It’s a lot.
Now, let’s say that every single day from your first day in kindergarten until today, you had a dog in your basement roasting over a fire. Every time it lost consciousness, you had a device that would bring it back to life in order to allow it to continue to feel pain. Every single day.
OK, now let’s multiply that timeframe by 5, so that even for our youngest members, we have gone back far enough in time to be in the generations of our parents, grandparents, and possibly even great grand parents. Again, think of everything that has happened since that time. Think of all the births and deaths, all of the happy days and sad days, all of the weddings and funerals, all of the holidays and graduation parties, all of the sunny days and thunderstorms and snow showers. We’re talking a whole lot of time. We’re talking thousands of days and millions of seconds.
Now, let’s go back to our dog in the basement. Through out all of that real time, he’s still there, just being tortured for being a bad dog. The idea begins to get absurd even at this point. But from the “eternal torture” narrative, we haven’t even begun.
Let’s multiply that timeframe by another 5, so that even for our youngest members, we are still several centuries in the past. Think of where we would be in history. The Ottoman Empire would still be a world power. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade would be in full swing, and the power of electricity would still be hundreds of years away from being harnessed. For some of you reading this, your country might not even exist as a political entity as of yet. Think of all of the wars, all of the lives, all of the ups and downs, and all of the sunrises and sunsets that would have happened between that time and this. World Wars still have to happen. America still has to declare independence from Britain. The Indian subcontinent still has to endure empires, colonialism, and the India/Pakistan split.
And Still, our poor dog is in a basement being burned, over, and over, and over again, every day from that day until this. Again, we have not even begun any sort of significant time on the timescale of infinity.
Multiply this by another 5 and we are somewhere around the founding days of Christianity. (For our older members, we might be in the time of the Pharaohs—a time that lasted an equally impressive 2,000 years.) The world still has so much history to go through. Muhammad and his Islam aren’t even a blip on anyone’s radar. His “long” 23 year career as a prophet has not even come close to beginning. There was no battle of Badr, no one is worried about the battle of Uhud, and the Roman Empire is still the western world’s great power. There were no Umayyads, no Abbassids, no Fatimids, and no Safavids. England is still pagan. Moorish Spain does not exist. How many days are there from then until right now? We have not even managed to put a scratch on the waxy coating on the surface of eternity.
And our dog is still in a basement, burning, every single second of every single day, year in and year out. What sort of absurdity have we gotten ourselves into with this eternity business? And yet again, we really have not even started anything.
Take all of that timeframe and do what you will with it. 2000 years multiplied by 50. We are still in a relatively recent period of the history of the universe. We’d recognize as familiar many of the mammals, reptiles, and plants that would have evolved by this point in the earth’s history. Even our ancestors are at the later stages of their own evolution, resembling modern humans more than the common ancestor they shared with our ape cousins. We are somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 years in the past depending on how long ago kindergarten was for you, and at this point, even we have a had time understanding the amount of days and the real time that that all entails. We lump tens of thousands of years together at this point as though they were days and weeks, unable to really grasp the real days and weeks we are describing. Consider even the way I’m explaining it, 100,000-300,000 years ago—it’s a huge difference in time, but we can only understand it by lumping it all together as though the difference were inconsequential.
All of that, and we still have not even gone a million years back. Dinosaurs have still long been extinct. We are still ions away from the first sparks of life, the forming of the seas, and the cooling of our planet to a habitable temperature. We skip over huge swaths of calendar time completely unable to appreciate the hours and days involved. If we had to move backwards, day by day, second by second, watching the clock, to even the formation of our moon, we’d go completely mad. Our brains simply can not handle that sort of time when we relate it to our daily experiences. We jump over millions of years-trillions and trillions of seconds, minutes, hours, and days, until we come to the formation of our galaxy.
Let me remind you at this point of our poor dog. Every single second of the time I’ve been describing, he has been in the basement, burning, suffering, and agonizing in torment. EVERY.SINGLE.SECOND. Bring that time backwards to the point 14 billion years ago when the big bang busted our universe into existence and we have a timescale that we can not truly understand with our limited minds.
As our dog is being tortured, the fact of the matter is that this has not represented even one fraction of one second of eternity. All of that could happen a trillion times over, and it would still only be the very beginning. I don’t think religious people have any inkling of a clue what they are saying when they assert that someone deserves torture—or reward—for that amount of time.
But think about this. Think about how long you have been reading this, (assuming you are still reading) and imagine burning a real live dog in a firebrick oven for that amount of time. Could you do it?
Why would you worship a god that would do unimaginably worse to your fellow human beings just for believing the wrong thing about him?
Very nicely put. Once you try to implement the idea of eternity in reality, it sounds more and more like nonsense. By the way, do you mean 'worship' or 'believe'? Because if this God exists, our choice to not worship Him won't make much of a difference.
Topic: Question