Apart from the desire to enjoy communion with God specifically in the life of the Trinity, the desire to live forever is not much more than the desire to be rather than not to be. But merely being forever without such enjoyment would not be fulfillment: it might even be painful. So any non-Trinity-centered desire to live forever is the end, amounts to the fear of death. But the revelation of the Trinity shows us that living forever is desirable...intensely desirable. And it makes living in the present more beautiful, dramatic, fulfilling.
Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Comments