26th March 2004, 3:42 PM
Darunia, a number of the so called flaws in the Bible are from your misunderstanding of it. First off, your main argument, why doesn't God simply proove himself once and for all? Honestly, if a giant being boomed from the heavens that He is the One, would you suddenly believe? Be honest. Would you believe, or would you rather assume that it was a hologram made by a cult. If you heard it in your mind, or were suddenly transported to Heaven to talk to God then sent back, would you believe? Maybe you would, but if you were intent on doubting, I have a feeling you would simply assume you were hallucinating or dreaming. Science itself states nothing can be proven 100%. In fact, the laws of physics prevent that. Things can be prooven 99%, which is what I think you want. However, the entire point of Chrstianity is that you are willing to have FAITH in God. Time and time again I've tried drumming this into your head. It's not faith if you know it already is proven.
Now then, your other points I must elaborate on. Concerning the imperfections of the human form, animals, and the universe itself, you need only remember "the curse". We WERE perfect life forms beforehand. Adam and Eve had bodies that were perfect, likely producing no waste. The very laws of the universe of course had to be different. A STATED example is that whereas before they had eternal life, after the first sin, they had mortal lifespans. Rather than our food all growing naturally with ease exactly when we needed it and never cluttering up things or rotting, we have to toil to get it to grow. Technology is basically an attempt to regain bit by bit everything God originally gave us, using what God let us keep.
You may wonder why God had to create Eve from a rib, or for example why it took an ENTIRE 6 days to make all that is. Well, He didn't HAVE to. He didn't HAVE to breathe life into man, as just before he merely created all the animals and such. He purposefully did things in a longer more complicated way for a reason. Likewise, God wasn't ACTUALLY exausted. The Bibles I've read merely say He rested, not that He needed to. This isn't some Greek god here. I rest a lot of the time even though I'm still pumped full of energy. Why? Relaxing JUST for the sake of relaxing is an enjoyable activity, and it would seem God is in favor of people having such a luxery as just being able to sit back. It's likely that human fatigue is merely His way of sorta putting a physical reminder to just sit back now and again.
Regarding how evil can possibly exist if God created all and God isn't evil, keep this in mind. Evil, defined by Christianity, only means "against God". Essentially, any choice that is against God's will is evil, and anything that is WITH God's will is good. If God's will was that someone destroy Mercury, and that person didn't do that, it would be evil. The only reason it's wrong to hurt people is because it's against God's will. It's against God's will because He, and only He, knows the way people should be. Now, here's an important thing. You may still be wondering "okay, but why do people choose to go against God?". There's the heart of the matter. God gave us free will. He gave us the ability to choose how we can live. If were were merely dolls, we wouldn't BE. There would be no point at all to our existing. God wants us to follow His will of our OWN choice, not because he turned us into robots. There is no point in us choosing to follow Him unless it is OUR choice to do so. That's exactly why things like the crusades were so evil. Again, it went against God's will both in the sense that, guess what, murder is WRONG, and it went against God's desire for us to follow Him of our own choice. It's what we THINK, not so much what we DO (what we do is merely the evidence that we truly think something).
Now then, you asked the childish riddle "If God can do anything, can He make a rock so big He can't lift it?". You say it's logically sound, but it's not. It's logically flawed and you know why. Grammer allows us to MAKE sentences like that, but that doesn't mean they make any sense at all. If God can do anything, no He CAN'T make a rock so large He can't lift it. You may say "then He can't do EVERYTHING can He?" but that's not an actual ability. It's a nonsense statement.
Here's another nonsense question. Is this statement true or false? "This statement is false." It's the same sort of logically flawed thing. That statement is null. It can't be considered either true OR false. If you tried programming it into a computer, for example, "if variable equals false, then variable equals true, if variable equals true, then variable equals false" it would result in an infinite loop, crashing the program (unless there's an error trap, but that's still an error). This is the same thing. Using administrator privilages, it would be like saying "admin always has priviliages to do EVERYTHING" followed by the admin disablling it's own privaliges to do... something, like I dunno access a printer. The program, if it made sure that admin ALWAYS has all privilages no matter what, would let the admin do that, but it wouldnt' have an affect, as it would immediatly be undone before the admin could even try to fail at accessing the printer. It's a fallacy in logic if it can't be programmed into a machine, even a theoretical machine from the future. I'm ignoring quantum mechanics here. However, assuming a quantum machine COULD allow such a ridiculous illogical thing to work, then I suppose God COULD do that couldn't He, via the very Quantum physics He created.
Other things are misunderstandings as well. Angels aren't needed at all really, but He created them anyway. Why? The Bible never really talks about it. I dunno... I'll find out one day I suppose. God not only COULD see Satan's betrayal, He DID. He did nothing to stop him because of the value God seems to have on free will. Again, I really don't know why God values our choice so much, but being created in His image, spiritually, we all likely have a good idea. It's no good if He just FORCED Satan to stop. God wanted, and likely still wants, to have Satan WILLINGLY change his mind. According to the Bible, God knows he never will, but God is still giving him the chance. After all, quantem physics DEMAND that free will is possible.
You state that humans don't have free will as well, or as much as that anyway. You say we are all predestined to think what we think, and thus salvation is out of our reach because we can't choose anything. If that's so, no one can be considered responsible for anything. However, it's not true. Quantum physics proove absolutely that our universe is unpredictable, and that it's impossible to know what will happen in the next moment EXACTLY, because there is a random element. At the simplest level, the universe is throwing dice to determine things. This isn't just something along the lines of how the beating of a butterfly's wings can have huge reprecussions centuries later. It's that if you REWOUND time back to that moment again, didn't change a SINGLE thing, and then ran it forward, things would progress DIFFERENTLY. That's right, if you rewound time, and played it agian, it would NOT happen the same way. The universe is not like a video tape. It's like a video game. Taken in a religious context, we ARE able to choose the life we want to live. We can't choose the DNA we get, and a lot of our environment is beyond our control, but we CAN choose an infinite number of things within these boundries. You may say that if there are boundries, it can't be infinite, but the fact is the universe itself has two boundries, the infinite density infinite heat state, and the 0 density 0 heat state, yet there are inifinite possilibities therein, and any percentage defined by more variables is a "lesser infinity", though infinite is infinite no matter how you cut it. You can take infinite away from infinite and there's still infinite left. Makes for a very long game of bottles on the wall countin'....
One other thing, you make a point about the perpetual void before creation. Here's the thing, the universe's starting point, the Big Bang, and God, work the same way in this sense. Scientists, physicists, have asked for some time, because they ARE scientists, why did the universe start at THAT moment and not any point infinitly before that? Simple, time doesn't exist until something CHANGES. The first change is the first instance of time. Steven Hawking put it in the sense that time is more of a sphere, with an imaginary time direction perpendicular to the normal time direction. Essentially, the Big Bang, or God, isn't the start of time, it's a pole, like the north pole or south pole. They are boundries outside which there is nothing. There was no time before God started creating. So, there was no before. Big Bang, God, same thing in THIS sense. The difference is in the feasibility. God requires the leap of faith in something with no evidence, none that can't be attributed to something else anyway, whereas the Big Bang is proven every time we hit a static station on the dial.
Here's another thing I've decided for myself lately. I believe that evolution CAN occur at this point, not really that it's how we got HERE, but that after we got here it can happen. For that matter, the universe could easily have been created long before God actually got around to making us during the 6 day period. It may seem I'm being backed into a corner by science and am being forced to give up things, but honeslty I haven't given up a single thing yet. For that matter, science and religion are NOT mutually exclusive. Many well renowned physicists are Christians themselves.
Anyway, a good number of things are from one other lack of understanding. You see, pre-Christ and post-Christ are two very different periods both in how humans were expected to behave and how God dealt with them. Confusing yes? Seems the eternally always right God is fickle suddenly doesn't it? Well, a little analyzing and you see God's point. You see, pre-Christ, human kind sinned. They were all eternally doomed. God was making a point before bringing in Christ that nothing mankind can do can save it. We do not have the ability to save ourselves. No good can wipe away the taint of evil. The good is still good on it's own merits, but it doesn't suddenly justify the evil that was done. For example, no matter how many lives a person may have saved, if they killed one person, they are still just as guilty as before. They can never gain back that life that was taken. It can never be undone. It can't be justified just because the same person is truly repentant and has done so much good since. All that can be done is this. Forgiveness. This is where Christ comes in. Before, God had a very complicated list of tasks to do. They didn't save the person, Christ did later, but God was trying to make a point. The slaying of animals with their blood was a representation of things, not the true salvation that was to come soon enough. It was a covenant with the people, evidence of their faith in the future salvation. Christ eventually came along and did His amazing thing, being both God and human at the same time, not a half breed, but a fusion. He died for all of us, so we no longer needed to use this "proof" of our faith, but rather just HAVE the faith because the deed is done. Really, the only reason all that pre-Christ salvation stuff was even done was because God really wanted to make a point, not because it was really needed, Christ the future salvation was the only part that was needed. So, God IS very forgiving, but pre-Christ He wanted to make a huge point of how guilty we truly are without forgiveness, yet with it we are truly saved. However, we must ACCEPT forgiveness. It's like a gift. We are given a final choice in the end. We can accept this gift, or, we are allowed to deny the gift. God COULD force us to accept the gift, to believe, but God values our free will, our willing choice.
And now, a final thought. You make it clear that you understand your own mortality, and you have accepted something that's logical considering the lack of proof otherwise, that you will simply cease to exist when you die. Your main objective then is to lengthen your life. Trust me, that desire is something we ALL want. Every single life form that has ever been succesful desires to life forever. Mating is merely a last ditch effort to make sure some bit survives, but all creatures want they themselves to live forever. This is deeply entrenched, the deep desires to eat and mate are merely representative of this deepest need way beyond these. You may well lengthen your life. However, realizing that won't be enough, you will want more. The thought that you will cease to exist, no one can simply settle for that. No one can sit by and accept it. You will want to lengthen and lengthen. You may even remove the aging process altogether. So long as you keep getting an outside energy source, it's perfectly physically possible to have eternal life. You will realize though that the Earth is doomed, that's why humans, deep down, want to leave. We know the sun won't last forever. Even those fine with things as they are will readily admit they want future generations to leave rather than all die in a horrible hell fire. However, that's not enough. Eventually we will need to leave our Milky Way galaxy (which will eventually be the Milky Andromeda galaxy, or maybe Andromeda Way sounds better...), as everything will be sucked into the depths of the super massive black hole at the center, which will only grow when Andromeda's black hole merges with it. Travelling in the vast void between galaxies, you'll know (and maybe me too, there's a lot I'd like to do in this physical reality before I go), that we can't have perfect efficiency, and some energy will inevitable seep out. We may find ways to get energy, likely loosing so little that the distant light of far off galaxies we will be drifting to will be enough to keep our super colony going. Maybe gravity waves will power incredibly efficient motors to give us back the energy we loose, maybe all of the above. At any rate, eventually we will notice something. That black hole that ate the fused galaxy seems to have exploded. Somehow, it gave off particles one at a time, via the strange quantum ability of the universe to randomly create particles from nothingness while at the same time subtracting an equal amount from some other area, and these appear in pairs, so that rather than the virtual particles that may appear just outside that black hole colliding like usual, the gravity of the hole will grab one particle and suck it beyond the reach of the other, thus half the mass that just got subtracted manages to STAY sent outside the black hole, and with the black hole surrounded by nothing new to absorb, over a google years, it will eventually evaporate away until it doesn't have the mass to hold itself together, and BOOM. This thing will be happening all over the universe. You will also notice stars all over slowly blipping out of sight. They aren't suddenly being sucked up, no, they are being shot so far away by the expansion that we will never see them again. For you see, the universe is not just expanding, it's ACCELERATING. One might expect gravity to slowly, VERY slowly, slow the universe down, or at least it would be so imperceptible that it would appear to be the same speed, but no, it's speeding up. The vaccuum has an energy of sorts that pushes out, shoving things out of itself. The more vaccuum you have, the more push you have. This "dark energy" will only push harder with more empty space between everything, and the gravity will weaken. You shall see this keep up all over the universe, with no way to stop it. Your own colony, maintained well enough by the little energy it can get from distant light and gravity waves, will soon run out. Both of us, standing there, looking into nothing, shall see that everything has been pushed so far from everything else, thinned out so much by dark energy, that in effect there is nothing. The void has won. Soon, the ship too will fall into disrepair, we eternal life forms will die due to the inability to have perfectly efficient machines (a physical impossibility). This desperate moment is the utter end of all things. The ship too shall suffer the same fate, as bit by bit, the energy is all send wayward, and the ship breaks apart, and soon all is seperated. This is how the universe ends. We are standing there, looking into this fate. We both by now have realized there is NO possible way to lengthen our lives any further, and no point. Nothing but nothing is ahead of us. I have the afterlife to look forward to. You however, I am afraid, are left with nothing at all. I don't mean to frighten you or anything. However, a life lived only to lengthen itself only has THIS bleak future. The universe has been doomed from the start. It will never collapse in on itself as some used to think, the Big Bang is doomed to end in the Silent Wimper.
Now then, your other points I must elaborate on. Concerning the imperfections of the human form, animals, and the universe itself, you need only remember "the curse". We WERE perfect life forms beforehand. Adam and Eve had bodies that were perfect, likely producing no waste. The very laws of the universe of course had to be different. A STATED example is that whereas before they had eternal life, after the first sin, they had mortal lifespans. Rather than our food all growing naturally with ease exactly when we needed it and never cluttering up things or rotting, we have to toil to get it to grow. Technology is basically an attempt to regain bit by bit everything God originally gave us, using what God let us keep.
You may wonder why God had to create Eve from a rib, or for example why it took an ENTIRE 6 days to make all that is. Well, He didn't HAVE to. He didn't HAVE to breathe life into man, as just before he merely created all the animals and such. He purposefully did things in a longer more complicated way for a reason. Likewise, God wasn't ACTUALLY exausted. The Bibles I've read merely say He rested, not that He needed to. This isn't some Greek god here. I rest a lot of the time even though I'm still pumped full of energy. Why? Relaxing JUST for the sake of relaxing is an enjoyable activity, and it would seem God is in favor of people having such a luxery as just being able to sit back. It's likely that human fatigue is merely His way of sorta putting a physical reminder to just sit back now and again.
Regarding how evil can possibly exist if God created all and God isn't evil, keep this in mind. Evil, defined by Christianity, only means "against God". Essentially, any choice that is against God's will is evil, and anything that is WITH God's will is good. If God's will was that someone destroy Mercury, and that person didn't do that, it would be evil. The only reason it's wrong to hurt people is because it's against God's will. It's against God's will because He, and only He, knows the way people should be. Now, here's an important thing. You may still be wondering "okay, but why do people choose to go against God?". There's the heart of the matter. God gave us free will. He gave us the ability to choose how we can live. If were were merely dolls, we wouldn't BE. There would be no point at all to our existing. God wants us to follow His will of our OWN choice, not because he turned us into robots. There is no point in us choosing to follow Him unless it is OUR choice to do so. That's exactly why things like the crusades were so evil. Again, it went against God's will both in the sense that, guess what, murder is WRONG, and it went against God's desire for us to follow Him of our own choice. It's what we THINK, not so much what we DO (what we do is merely the evidence that we truly think something).
Now then, you asked the childish riddle "If God can do anything, can He make a rock so big He can't lift it?". You say it's logically sound, but it's not. It's logically flawed and you know why. Grammer allows us to MAKE sentences like that, but that doesn't mean they make any sense at all. If God can do anything, no He CAN'T make a rock so large He can't lift it. You may say "then He can't do EVERYTHING can He?" but that's not an actual ability. It's a nonsense statement.
Here's another nonsense question. Is this statement true or false? "This statement is false." It's the same sort of logically flawed thing. That statement is null. It can't be considered either true OR false. If you tried programming it into a computer, for example, "if variable equals false, then variable equals true, if variable equals true, then variable equals false" it would result in an infinite loop, crashing the program (unless there's an error trap, but that's still an error). This is the same thing. Using administrator privilages, it would be like saying "admin always has priviliages to do EVERYTHING" followed by the admin disablling it's own privaliges to do... something, like I dunno access a printer. The program, if it made sure that admin ALWAYS has all privilages no matter what, would let the admin do that, but it wouldnt' have an affect, as it would immediatly be undone before the admin could even try to fail at accessing the printer. It's a fallacy in logic if it can't be programmed into a machine, even a theoretical machine from the future. I'm ignoring quantum mechanics here. However, assuming a quantum machine COULD allow such a ridiculous illogical thing to work, then I suppose God COULD do that couldn't He, via the very Quantum physics He created.
Other things are misunderstandings as well. Angels aren't needed at all really, but He created them anyway. Why? The Bible never really talks about it. I dunno... I'll find out one day I suppose. God not only COULD see Satan's betrayal, He DID. He did nothing to stop him because of the value God seems to have on free will. Again, I really don't know why God values our choice so much, but being created in His image, spiritually, we all likely have a good idea. It's no good if He just FORCED Satan to stop. God wanted, and likely still wants, to have Satan WILLINGLY change his mind. According to the Bible, God knows he never will, but God is still giving him the chance. After all, quantem physics DEMAND that free will is possible.
You state that humans don't have free will as well, or as much as that anyway. You say we are all predestined to think what we think, and thus salvation is out of our reach because we can't choose anything. If that's so, no one can be considered responsible for anything. However, it's not true. Quantum physics proove absolutely that our universe is unpredictable, and that it's impossible to know what will happen in the next moment EXACTLY, because there is a random element. At the simplest level, the universe is throwing dice to determine things. This isn't just something along the lines of how the beating of a butterfly's wings can have huge reprecussions centuries later. It's that if you REWOUND time back to that moment again, didn't change a SINGLE thing, and then ran it forward, things would progress DIFFERENTLY. That's right, if you rewound time, and played it agian, it would NOT happen the same way. The universe is not like a video tape. It's like a video game. Taken in a religious context, we ARE able to choose the life we want to live. We can't choose the DNA we get, and a lot of our environment is beyond our control, but we CAN choose an infinite number of things within these boundries. You may say that if there are boundries, it can't be infinite, but the fact is the universe itself has two boundries, the infinite density infinite heat state, and the 0 density 0 heat state, yet there are inifinite possilibities therein, and any percentage defined by more variables is a "lesser infinity", though infinite is infinite no matter how you cut it. You can take infinite away from infinite and there's still infinite left. Makes for a very long game of bottles on the wall countin'....
One other thing, you make a point about the perpetual void before creation. Here's the thing, the universe's starting point, the Big Bang, and God, work the same way in this sense. Scientists, physicists, have asked for some time, because they ARE scientists, why did the universe start at THAT moment and not any point infinitly before that? Simple, time doesn't exist until something CHANGES. The first change is the first instance of time. Steven Hawking put it in the sense that time is more of a sphere, with an imaginary time direction perpendicular to the normal time direction. Essentially, the Big Bang, or God, isn't the start of time, it's a pole, like the north pole or south pole. They are boundries outside which there is nothing. There was no time before God started creating. So, there was no before. Big Bang, God, same thing in THIS sense. The difference is in the feasibility. God requires the leap of faith in something with no evidence, none that can't be attributed to something else anyway, whereas the Big Bang is proven every time we hit a static station on the dial.
Here's another thing I've decided for myself lately. I believe that evolution CAN occur at this point, not really that it's how we got HERE, but that after we got here it can happen. For that matter, the universe could easily have been created long before God actually got around to making us during the 6 day period. It may seem I'm being backed into a corner by science and am being forced to give up things, but honeslty I haven't given up a single thing yet. For that matter, science and religion are NOT mutually exclusive. Many well renowned physicists are Christians themselves.
Anyway, a good number of things are from one other lack of understanding. You see, pre-Christ and post-Christ are two very different periods both in how humans were expected to behave and how God dealt with them. Confusing yes? Seems the eternally always right God is fickle suddenly doesn't it? Well, a little analyzing and you see God's point. You see, pre-Christ, human kind sinned. They were all eternally doomed. God was making a point before bringing in Christ that nothing mankind can do can save it. We do not have the ability to save ourselves. No good can wipe away the taint of evil. The good is still good on it's own merits, but it doesn't suddenly justify the evil that was done. For example, no matter how many lives a person may have saved, if they killed one person, they are still just as guilty as before. They can never gain back that life that was taken. It can never be undone. It can't be justified just because the same person is truly repentant and has done so much good since. All that can be done is this. Forgiveness. This is where Christ comes in. Before, God had a very complicated list of tasks to do. They didn't save the person, Christ did later, but God was trying to make a point. The slaying of animals with their blood was a representation of things, not the true salvation that was to come soon enough. It was a covenant with the people, evidence of their faith in the future salvation. Christ eventually came along and did His amazing thing, being both God and human at the same time, not a half breed, but a fusion. He died for all of us, so we no longer needed to use this "proof" of our faith, but rather just HAVE the faith because the deed is done. Really, the only reason all that pre-Christ salvation stuff was even done was because God really wanted to make a point, not because it was really needed, Christ the future salvation was the only part that was needed. So, God IS very forgiving, but pre-Christ He wanted to make a huge point of how guilty we truly are without forgiveness, yet with it we are truly saved. However, we must ACCEPT forgiveness. It's like a gift. We are given a final choice in the end. We can accept this gift, or, we are allowed to deny the gift. God COULD force us to accept the gift, to believe, but God values our free will, our willing choice.
And now, a final thought. You make it clear that you understand your own mortality, and you have accepted something that's logical considering the lack of proof otherwise, that you will simply cease to exist when you die. Your main objective then is to lengthen your life. Trust me, that desire is something we ALL want. Every single life form that has ever been succesful desires to life forever. Mating is merely a last ditch effort to make sure some bit survives, but all creatures want they themselves to live forever. This is deeply entrenched, the deep desires to eat and mate are merely representative of this deepest need way beyond these. You may well lengthen your life. However, realizing that won't be enough, you will want more. The thought that you will cease to exist, no one can simply settle for that. No one can sit by and accept it. You will want to lengthen and lengthen. You may even remove the aging process altogether. So long as you keep getting an outside energy source, it's perfectly physically possible to have eternal life. You will realize though that the Earth is doomed, that's why humans, deep down, want to leave. We know the sun won't last forever. Even those fine with things as they are will readily admit they want future generations to leave rather than all die in a horrible hell fire. However, that's not enough. Eventually we will need to leave our Milky Way galaxy (which will eventually be the Milky Andromeda galaxy, or maybe Andromeda Way sounds better...), as everything will be sucked into the depths of the super massive black hole at the center, which will only grow when Andromeda's black hole merges with it. Travelling in the vast void between galaxies, you'll know (and maybe me too, there's a lot I'd like to do in this physical reality before I go), that we can't have perfect efficiency, and some energy will inevitable seep out. We may find ways to get energy, likely loosing so little that the distant light of far off galaxies we will be drifting to will be enough to keep our super colony going. Maybe gravity waves will power incredibly efficient motors to give us back the energy we loose, maybe all of the above. At any rate, eventually we will notice something. That black hole that ate the fused galaxy seems to have exploded. Somehow, it gave off particles one at a time, via the strange quantum ability of the universe to randomly create particles from nothingness while at the same time subtracting an equal amount from some other area, and these appear in pairs, so that rather than the virtual particles that may appear just outside that black hole colliding like usual, the gravity of the hole will grab one particle and suck it beyond the reach of the other, thus half the mass that just got subtracted manages to STAY sent outside the black hole, and with the black hole surrounded by nothing new to absorb, over a google years, it will eventually evaporate away until it doesn't have the mass to hold itself together, and BOOM. This thing will be happening all over the universe. You will also notice stars all over slowly blipping out of sight. They aren't suddenly being sucked up, no, they are being shot so far away by the expansion that we will never see them again. For you see, the universe is not just expanding, it's ACCELERATING. One might expect gravity to slowly, VERY slowly, slow the universe down, or at least it would be so imperceptible that it would appear to be the same speed, but no, it's speeding up. The vaccuum has an energy of sorts that pushes out, shoving things out of itself. The more vaccuum you have, the more push you have. This "dark energy" will only push harder with more empty space between everything, and the gravity will weaken. You shall see this keep up all over the universe, with no way to stop it. Your own colony, maintained well enough by the little energy it can get from distant light and gravity waves, will soon run out. Both of us, standing there, looking into nothing, shall see that everything has been pushed so far from everything else, thinned out so much by dark energy, that in effect there is nothing. The void has won. Soon, the ship too will fall into disrepair, we eternal life forms will die due to the inability to have perfectly efficient machines (a physical impossibility). This desperate moment is the utter end of all things. The ship too shall suffer the same fate, as bit by bit, the energy is all send wayward, and the ship breaks apart, and soon all is seperated. This is how the universe ends. We are standing there, looking into this fate. We both by now have realized there is NO possible way to lengthen our lives any further, and no point. Nothing but nothing is ahead of us. I have the afterlife to look forward to. You however, I am afraid, are left with nothing at all. I don't mean to frighten you or anything. However, a life lived only to lengthen itself only has THIS bleak future. The universe has been doomed from the start. It will never collapse in on itself as some used to think, the Big Bang is doomed to end in the Silent Wimper.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)