DCP shares his own witness of the Book of Mormon

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Meadowchik
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Re: DCP shares his own witness of the Book of Mormon

Post by Meadowchik »

It's sad that people have to pay so much for things they can have for free. And sad people believe God is so covetous as to require payment.
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Physics Guy
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Re: DCP shares his own witness of the Book of Mormon

Post by Physics Guy »

However probable or not any afterlife may be, the scenario in which we simply go on existing forever just as we are now seems like an exceptionally unlikely afterlife case. Who in the year 1500 could have imagined how the world was going to be in 2000? Who at age five could imagine life at age fifty? What foetus can imagine anything at all about life after birth? Dramatic change, rather than static tedium, seems to be the rule even for this limited world. So I am not worried about getting bored in an afterlife.

An afterlife would seem to require a God who decides to keep us around in an extended run of sequel episodes, possibly with some major rebooting, rather than cancelling our shows after one series. Our neurons will rot and our atoms disperse, so something like a God outside time would seem to be needed for eternal life. Even such a God isn't quite a sufficient condition, however. Conceivably God exists and loves us, but we are just not the kind of thing that can go on forever; perhaps God appreciates us as great short stories that run from beginning to end, and conclude.

Looking forward to endless unimaginable possibilities rather than extinction is a plus point, all right, but the rub is that it's inherently hard to have any evidence either way about that kind of next-universe afterlife. Believing in the Book of Mormon because if it were true, then that would be evidence for an afterlife, seems pretty strange, logically. This is like saying that I should believe I have ten bucks in that old piggy bank, because if I had a lot of money hidden around in my house, I could buy a new house.

How it makes sense is as a forward defence strategy, where you fight to hold a position that is well ahead of the position you actually need to defend. You deploy your troops in that forward bastion, and let them fight with zeal to defend hearth and home, without letting the fighting come close enough to hearth and home to threaten or disturb them. If that forward bastion (the Book of Mormon) is more defensible than your home base (eternal life), then fighting on that more favourable battleground is a great gambit, if the enemy will accept it. If the forward bastion is actually a weak point, however, then fighting there, rather than defending your home castle itself, wastes your troops and makes your home castle surer to fall, just to give the castle-dwellers a temporary illusion of safety.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
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