Jesus as Lord - why is this appealing to so many?

[polymath257]

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I'm not all that concerned about the hotel or the library either.  My point is that you started talking about sets, because then you can have a concept, but my question is about what that concept represents.  

My problem is that it is easy in concept to just say that it is complete.   This is because nothing ever needs to be complete (which is good, because by definition infinity is never complete)  The problem is how do you have an actual infinity when there is always something more.   In concept, we can use the magic ellipses  1+2+3....+N  to say that the set is complete.  However those ellipses represent something, and that representation keeps going on forever.    In what way is it complete if it keeps going.   What I am asking (and doubting) is that you can ever tie this abstract to something physical.   Even if you are granted any  starting condition you like (infinity always requires more).

In this case, the ellipses do NOT represent something that goes on forever. If I write, for example, 1,2,3,...,1000, that is a finite list of numbers. I could write this list out completely, but I won't. It isn't necessary to do so to know there are a thousand numbers in that list.

I can do the same thing for 1,2,3,....1000000000. That is still a finite list of numbers, but I am not going to write out the complete list since it would take a gigabyte of text to do so. I could easily have a completer program write this out, but again that would be pointless. We already know the numbers on that list.

But I can go farther. The list 1,2,3,....,10^1000 has more numbers in it that there are particles in the observable universe. It is still a finite list of numbers, though. Actually writing out this finite list is impossible on anything like a human time scale. But it doesn't go on forever and it is a completed list.

Now, the list 1,2,3,4,.... does 'go on forever', but we can *also* consider it as a completed list. We don't have to write down everything in the list to know what is on the list any more than we did for any of the other lists I gave. Every counting number is in that list. There are also numbers not on that list  (negative numbers, fractions, etc). That doesn't prevent it from being considered as a whole, your intuition notwithstanding. There is no *logical* contradiction to discussing this list as a whole.

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This "Completed Infinity" stuff is just nonsense. You have put two words together that are contradictory. Just like "married bachelor". Your phrase literally contains no meaning.

Sorry to blow your Aristotelian mind, but you are wrong. The set of integers is a 'completed infinity' of numbers. The set of real numbers is a *larger* completed infinity. These are meaningful constructs that are well-studied and well-understood.