Therefore absolutely everything is destined for oblivion, as if it never had been. Hence modern nihilism and despair.
Some religious people believe that earthly mortal life is an illusion - and that reality is eternal, spiritual, infinite. Nothing that happens, or ever could possible happen, during earthly mortal life really matters at all - because it is a drop in an infinite ocean - hence of infinitely-minor significance.
From our mortal perspective, this amounts to much the same, in the end, as mainstream modern secularism which says that mortal life is everything but finite - because either way this actual mortal life is rendered utterly trivial, meaningless, pointless.
These two are the usual world-views of modern non--religious people: the first is materialism the second is modern New Age spirituality - derived from a sampling of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Christianity tries to make important both this mortal earthly life, and eternal life beyond the grave - so that mortal life is significant eternally. (This makes Christianity the religion we should most want to be true!)
But most Christian explanations are unsatisfactory - giving either too much significance to the contingencies of mortal life (eg. that the specific state of mind at the instant of death determines eternal salvation or damnation); or not enough importance to mortality (eg. that most mortal life is so depraved and corrupt - due to original sin - that life is 'a bad thing', and such Christians yearn for death, try to approximate Heavenly death-in-life, and at root feel it would be better never to have been born into mortality).
Such metaphysical problems are built-into mainstream Christianity from the early centuries of the church, and I personally feel they have been overcome by the Mormon revelations concerning theology - but either way, what Christianity wants to be, and strives to explain to itself, is as follows:
- Our mortal incarnate life is important, because it has permanent effects on our eternal life.
- But this effect of mortality on eternity is qualitatively transformed by the work of Christ - so that our eternal lives have, as it were, all the good memories of mortal life perfectly preserved and made real forever; but none of the bad.
- So Heaven is not just 'me living in a Paradise'; it is a transformed me, yet still me living in a Paradise... and that is the difference.
