We are learning some interesting fucking shit in WHAP, actually. Still don't really like the class, but damn.
We were learning about Hinduism and Buddhism, and the differences between Western and Eastern Religions.

What some people didn't seem to think was so cool was that apparently Hinduism is older than not only Christianity but the Judaism it sprang out of.
Although, I guess, being a Christian, you probably don't believe in evolution and you believe the world started with God creating it and therefore there can't be an older religion than Christianity.
So, I guess an orthodox, literalist Christian will have to regurgitate some things they disbelieve in that class...

Anyway, I've started to fall in love with Hinduism. I'll need to learn some more about it but damn it makes so much more sense than Christianity to me.
Recently I started an attempted rereading of the Bible (last time I stopped halfway through Leviticus, too many just stupid rules) and ordered a copy of The God Delusion, and maybe I'll look through Hinduism as well, although the sacred texts of Hinduism, the big ones, the Vedas, are hard to find, and thousands and thousands of pages long.

So, I wanted to look at how different people say the world'll end, specifically, the Hindus, the Christians, and Science.

The Hindus say that the world will never end. The world, the entire world, and the entire universe and all the people and things in it, are God, and God is the world. Also there was never a before God and there will never be an after God. God was and is and shall always be everything, to say that there was a before implies both that there's something outside of God, which is obviously impossible, and that perhaps something more powerful created God, which is impossible cause God is the universe.
Sometimes the world may be destroyed but then it will just be built back up. In fact one of the things they're about is how things have to be destroyed for new things to come in their place.
That's why Hinduism says that both the world will never end and also we'll never die, because we're all a little piece of God, and God is everything. They have a circular perception of time, nothing really ends, just gets destroyed and replaced by new things.

The Christians have a more arrow view of time. There was a beginning of the Earth, was there a before God? The Bible doesn't address it, or how God came into being. He's just there.
But anyway there was a before the Earth, and a before man, and also a before each of us, and an after the Earth, and after man, and after each of us.
They see it more as you get one shot, and how you live that one life determines whether your eternal afterlife gets spent in abject pain or pleasure. (I think, sometimes, kinda convenient how God wants us to avoid pleasure as much as possible now, for promises of having it later... mmmmm....)
So when you're born, that's when you start existing, before that, you didn't. After that, you stop existing, you're dead, although your everlasting soul lives in heaven or hell. (Gee, I sure hope they built hell to last, especially, cause with how many people we have on Earth now we're just creating souls by the billion, I hope hell doesn't get too crowded. Heaven, that'll never get too crowded I don't think, what with all the non-Christians fucking up the world)
And with the second coming of Christ, there'll be an end to the world too, although as to when that is, who knows, one guy said something back in 1100 CE, Harold Camping would have us know that the world actually ended back in May.
But there was a before everything except perhaps, God, and, for some reason, water, and there'll be an after everything, except heaven, hell, God, and who knows, maybe water'll still be sloshing around too.

And according to Science, well, the Universe started some 14.6 billion years ago, and has been expanding ever since, and will also be expanding for the rest of time. The Earth will end in about 1-2 billion years when the expanding Sun heats up the surface so much that liquid water can no longer exist on the surface of the Earth and theoretically everything will die. (Which is kinda sad, no one'll be around to witness when our galaxy runs into the Andromeda Galaxy in 3 billion years. I imagine that'd be awesome)
And in about like 5 billion years or so Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun and it's mass added to the sun and perhaps live in the white dwarf that will likely be what's left of the sun in that amount of time.
After Earth is gone, our galaxy as we know it too will be gone after a while when in about 10 billion years all the galaxies of our Local Group likely fuse into 1 really big galaxy.
And as the universe continues to expand and everything gets further and further apart, eventually it'll be that someone on a planet looking up into the night sky will see their galaxy, a few galaxies beyond in their galactic neighborhood, and then nothing beyond that. Those galaxies will be too far away to see anymore.
As the expansion continues and everything gets colder, eventually, in 100 trillion years, stars will stop being produced, galaxies will stop shining, eventually, all there'll be is perhaps a few planets in largely dark galaxies huddled around little brown dwarves that live for about 10 trillion years.
But then even that will end.
Slowly, all the dark, dead stars will be flung out of their dark galaxies off to wander the by now unimaginably vast, dark space.
The rest will fall into the super massive black holes in the center of each galaxy, and all the rest of the black holes will probably fall into those too.
The proton and neutron will slowly decay, bringing about the end of matter and atoms as we know them.
For many years, all that will be left will be supermassive black holes, although even those slowly emit radiation and will fade into the dark in about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years from the beginning of it all the last of the black holes will be gone, leaving only a catastrophically massive, empty, cold space full of nothing but an undetectably dim light, the only evidence left of the once proud matter that used to live there.

Although I also heard this one cool thing about the laws of physics where it's possible that, and I don't understand this at all, the "vacuum" of space is actually a "false vacuum", and at some point, catastrophically perhaps, space could revert to a "true vacuum" state in an instant.
That means that it's possible that in an instant, with no indication whatsoever, the laws of Physics as we know them could just change, every atom in our body would disintegrate, all matter would just fall apart in an instant.
Creepy shit man, although I guess there's nothing we can do about it.

So, I only really find beauty in the 1st and 3rd ideas... Although the 1st seems a lot more optimistic, although the 3rd is beautiful in a sad way...
What do you think of the end of the world?