What do you do in Heaven?

[John V]

Re: John V - thank you for prefacing your reply with the honest "I don't know", though given what followed about the Universe being the size it is purely for our post-mortem benefit, I rather suspect that your pastor, good man though I'm sure he is, may not perhaps be the best source of information in this sort of area. I hesitate to throw words like "idiot" around; as I say, I know nothing of the man besides what you share here. On the other hand, I wonder if he realises the sheer scale of the Universe as we know it - and that's only the observable Universe, remember. Even if everyone who has ever lived and died here on Earth, including all those to come until the final days of our planet, were each granted a star system of their very own, I severely doubt that the human presence would extend much beyond just this galaxy.

Considering your own limitations, it's good that you hesitate to call others idiots, and it would be better if you also refrained from hinting at it. I said explorers, not settlers. The point is that exploring the universe would give people something to do for a very long time, and if God contimues adding to the universe eternally, it gives them something to do forever.

As for the question of where are all the new things in this life, I'm sorry but that's quite startlingly parochial. Even if we go back just a century, the advances in such things as transport, comunications, medicine, media technology etc are simply and truly astonishing. Back a century before that, and even the discovery of things we take for granted today, such as electricity, would seem like magic if not for the enquiring minds that abounded round about that time. It has been said that reverse engineering the average flying saucer, supposedly being so highly advanced or conceptually alien, would tax even the most brillant minds of today in much the same way that a nuclear submarine would do for Leonardo da Vinci. That's the sort of scale we're talking about here. Where was the Iron Age internet, for instance?

Regardless, all the books, DVDs, internet porn, whatever, that could ever be conceived can only be a distraction akin to scratching your nose, compared to the unending vastness of eternity. As I said, even if eternity lasts until the heat death of the Universe, there's only so many times one can read Harry Potter or watch Star Trek before going psychopathically insane from sheer boredom. In the case of the former, once would do it for me.

Thoughts?

Again, you miss the point. The new things that you mention were all produced by people. There will still be people in heaven. We have no reason to believe that the people in heaven can't write new books, make new music, invent new technology, and so on. Reading Harry Potter once might drive me crazy, but heaven will conceivably have a bigger library than that, and one that is ever expanding with new works.