How many angels....

LOL...I knew it wouldn't take ya long to get back to this post Cav. You can't resist the debate......

Who knows.....you maybe right.

But your statement: as an angel, you can only achieve free will by being cast out of heaven

Why'd they get cast out of heaven....how? If they didn't have some free will to start with, they would have never had the nerve to piss off the big boss....lol

Hmm, good point there. I'm going on Milton here, best Satan ever....

LOL...I knew it wouldn't take ya long to get back to this post Cav. You can't resist the debate......

Who knows.....you maybe right.

But your statement: as an angel, you can only achieve free will by being cast out of heaven

Why'd they get cast out of heaven....how? If they didn't have some free will to start with, they would have never had the nerve to piss off the big boss....lol

And it needn't be mentioned (although I will) that the REALITY may be that what we refer to as "the universe" might actually be nothing more than the outermost atom at the head of a pin in an infinitely larger UNIVERSE.

Which would mean that the number of angels that could dance here would be...

...well, I guess it is LOTS, in any case.

Re: How many angels....


Hey Cav where do you go dancing?

The answer is of course : the sum of the set of all real numbers/0

Heehee - some minds think alike!

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7096


and:

Questions About Angels (by Billy Collins)

Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and
forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think of millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

But could they not will, freely, to REMAIN in heaven?

Who says spirits take up no space? WHY do they take up no space?

Dlowan....No, I don't think they couldn't remain freely in heaven. God is the creator of all...

Angels are created spirits, without bodies, having understanding and free will. Angels are spiritual beings inferior to God and superior to man.

QUOTE:

STRAIGHT ANSWERS
Fr. William Saunders
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is There Free Will in Heaven?
I have always assumed that any human who merits heaven after this valley of tears is in heaven forever. However, in view of the fact that the bad angels were in heaven (I presume) and rebelled against God, it is not possible that those of us who are saved could rebel against God in heaven? I guess my question is, do we exercise free will in heaven?—A reader in Fairfax

This question is very difficult to answer because we must delve into areas beyond our human time frame , the time before the creation of the world and the time after our death. Moreover, the Bible provides little detail concerning either of these issues. Nevertheless, gleaning what is in the Bible and the <Catechism>, and what the great saints have written, we can form an adequate answer.

We believe that God has given each of us a free will. The <Catechism> states, "God created man as a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions" (No. 1730). With this free will, each of us makes the fundamental choice to love God or to reject Him.

Having chosen to live for the Lord, we look forward to the time when we will share eternal happiness of Heaven. Here we will share a perfect life with the Holy Trinity and in communion with the Blessed Mother, the angels and the saints. Our souls will now be purified of sin and any hurt caused by sin. We will have the beatific vision, seeing God as He is. St. Paul wrote, "Now we see indistinctly as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face" (1 Cor 13:12), (Cf. <Catechism> 1023, 1024).

In heaven, we will also find perfect happiness. God alone can satisfy our human desires, whatever they may be. We find that infinite satisfaction in Heaven since we are enwrapped in God's perfect life, truth and love. St. Augustine (d. 430) in his <Confessions> wrote, "Our hearts will not find rest until they rest in Thee"; this perfect rest comes in heaven.

Therefore, while we retain our free will in heaven, we naturally choose to love the Lord. Now it would be contrary to who we are to choose to sin and thereby to reject this perfect life, truth and love that is God. For example, an eighth grade student asked me once, "Can God murder someone?" "God could because He can do all things," I replied. "But God would not because to murder is evil and to do evil would be against His all-good nature." Likewise, in the original question, "Is it possible, but not probable at all because of the beatitude we share in heaven with God."

What about the angels who rebelled? The early Church Fathers upheld the doctrine that God had created the angels from the beginning and through Christ, "through whom all things were made" as we recite in the Creed. The angels were created before any other creature and were endowed with gifts of reason and freedom to form personal, moral decisions, including choosing to love God. St. Augustine in his <City of God> commented: "For it was this time God who, in the beginning, created the universe and filled it with all those things that the eye can see and all those realities which the mind can know. Of all such creations the highest were the spirits to whom He gave the gifts of intelligence and the power to behold God and to be filled with His beatitude" (XXXII, 1). St. Justin the Martyr (d. 165) also wrote, "Because God knew that it would be good. He created both angels and men free to do what is righteous" (<Dialogue with the Jew Trypho>). However, some of these angels, led by Lucifer, rebelled against God and were cast into hell as attested to by our Lord Himself (Mt 25:41). These fallen angels made a radical and irrevocable choice to reject God and His reign. Note that the Church definitely teaches that "the devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing" (<Lateran Council IV>).

However, if these angels were in heaven, why would they rebel against God? Both Ignatius of Antioch (d. 110) and Clement of Alexandria (d. 211) speculated that at the beginning, the angels did not possess the full beatitude of heaven. Instead, they underwent a period of trial and those that made the choice to serve and to love the Lord and to remain faithful to Him attained the full happiness of heaven, whereas those that rebelled were cast into hell.

St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) expanded this notion of the angels undergoing "a period of trial." Right after their creation, the angels had "to choose" God to remain in heaven, just as each of us must choose God during our lives on earth to attain heaven. (Here arises the problem of time: We conceived time as past, present and future in accord with our created matter and space, whereas the angels live in a time , past, present and future , but without the restrictions of matter and space. The Medieval theologians called this kind of time aeveternity, the time of the angels between eternity and time). Some angels merited the beatitude of heaven by a free-willed act of charity, motivated by grace; others were cast into hell by their free-willed act of pride. In <Paradise Lost>, Milton penned for Satan the words, "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven." St. Thomas further posited that the "beatified angels" (the good angels in heaven) cannot sin "because their beatitude consists in seeing God through His essence,... the very essence of goodness"

Well they certainly do in my home. Why just the Scotch uses up an entire shelf of the...ahhhh...oh, you mean the other kind of spirits.

Never mind!

I have those too....mine like Coca Cola....it just seems to disapear on its on......lol

But, Makemeshiver, I do not believe in god, or angels! Lol!

Therefore my angels can be free and enheavened, and dance where they list!

Well......I don't claim to be a "Christian", just a believer in God and his power.

I have come to realize reading through some of the religous threads that there are alot of non-believers in A2K. And dlowan, if it wasn't for your curiosity or the others that started these threads..(which most are non-believers that do) you wouldn't be here reading, debating these opinions. To either find out your right and I'm wrong or vice-versa.

All I can say is that its your right to believe in what you want to. Maybe one day, if not I...someone will have the power of words to change the thoughts and opinions of non-believers. Maybe I'm that someone....lol

hello
I think you missed the point of the question, better yet why it survived. The question, devised in Medieval Philosophy, if you can even call it that, before St. Augustine wrote his Confessions integrating philosophy into Christian theology and certainly before Descartes the spectacular doubter. All it does is show how nonsensical metaphysical questions formed a quagmire of prerationalism and perverse Aristotelian logic. It's a question, often used as a reminder, to show how far philosophy had fallen before its "divine" resurrection.

How much does a parking ticket on Mars cost?

It's grammatically true, noun verb, so on so forth, yet it's a nonquestion, specifically because you can form questions certainly doesn't mean they have meaning or a sensible conclusion.

above all its illogical. 'The limits of my language is the limits of my world.' - Wittgenstien

Re: hello


We can assume from this, therefore, that Wittgenstien's English grammar was appalling?

Answer to the original question:

NO angels can dance on the head of a pin. They're all Baptists.

Good point . . . you know, Equus (and btw, where the hell you been?), Baptists are opposed to sex, because it might lead to dancing . . .

Has anyone ever wondered about how the neccesity of having a Social Insurance Number means that you must embrace S.I.N.?

That joke's gonna fall a little flat down here, Cavmaster--we call it a social security number.