Eternity

[Belacqua]

I submit that most people want eternity to be "time without end". "Timelessness" is a way to evade the problems I describe but it is not something that most folks can actually relate to (and, therefore, want). Besides, a non-dual state of no-past and no-future sounds even more claustrophobic than an open-ended timeline. To me, anyway. People pushing timelessness are basically just saying, "trust me, you'll like it, even if you can't conceptualize it at present". That's not very compelling.

Here you seem to be assuming that people describe heaven in whatever way makes them happiest. That timelessness is invented purely as a way to avoid certain kinds of unhappy outcomes. No doubt this is true in some cases, but I don't think we can project that motivation onto Plato, Plotinus, and the others who worked out why, in their opinion, the timeless ideal world is more real than the contingent one, and why, later, heaven was associated with that ideal world. 

We can't always assume that theological and philosophical ideas were just invented to keep people happy. 

As you know, in the Old Testament salvation and the coming kingdom of God are only about a future safe and secure nation state of Israel. 

In the New Testament, the coming Kingdom of God is described very ambiguously. There are a lot of times when it sounds like an earthly utopia in which regular non-dead people live with perfect economic justice. Other times it sounds post-death. But it is very little described. 

The heaven of the theologians is far more rooted in Plato. As you know, he wrote that there is an ideal world, immaterial and unchanging. The idea of time passing there makes no sense. The easiest way to picture such a world is through numbers -- the number 2, for example, exists as an eternal idea, immaterial and unchanging. Plato's God is the same. 

The Neoplatonics like Plotinus developed these ideas further, and had a profound influence on Christian theology. For Plotinus, our true home and destination is the One -- an unchanging and undivided source of all things. There can be no time there, because there is no division, and time requires division -- before and after. Naturally there are differing ideas and variations as the Christians took the wisdom of the Greeks for their own. 

But it would be wrong to say that the idea of a timeless ideal world was invented purely to avoid worries about getting bored in the afterlife. The ideal world of Plato came long before the New Testament was written, and there is no reason at all to think that Plato was explaining things in this way just because it made him happy. In fact there would be far happier ideas of an afterlife we could dream up, if that was our only goal.