For you to assume that God will “shovel us all into Heaven, wholesale” (even Satan and the demons!)...
There may be a disconnect here. I believe that most are not saved and only the saved will experience eternal life. It is, after all, what the bible teaches.
My post was about the fate of the lost: those who DON”T enjoy eternal life. And my point is that they are simply destroyed, not tortured for linear time neverending. They don’t have eternal life. That is what the bible clearly teaches.
My post was about the fate of the lost: those who DON”T enjoy eternal life. And my point is that they are simply destroyed, not tortured for linear time neverending. They don’t have eternal life. That is what the bible clearly teaches.
All right... I'll leave aside your apparent "predestination of the damned" belief for the moment, and address your last point: when you say that this is "what the Bible clearly teaches", I simply don't see it. You're injecting your own definition of "life" into the Biblical text, when it obviously means something else.
In order for your statement to be true, you'd have to be taking "life" to mean "conscious existence", and "death" would be "unconscious non-existence"; you take "separation from God" to mean "utter annihiliation". In other words, you're plagiarizing an atheist, materialist definition of "life" to which neither Scripture nor the Church ever confined itself.
Just as a quick example:
And you he made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience." (Ephesians 2:1-2)
...and:
"[...]remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world." (Ephesians 2:12)
Obviously, St. Paul does not mean that the Ephesians were *physically* dead through their trespasses, etc.; he means that they were *spiritually* dead (i.e. without sanctifying grace, oriented toward damnation). They were physically alive, ever while they were separated from Christ; so there should be no talk of "separation from Christ always means annihilation". The second passage is even more explicit, saying that they were not only separated from Christ, but "having no hope and without God in the world"; so "without God" cannot simply be read as "annihilation". There's obviously at least some way (or ways) to be "without God" and still exist... or else the texts simply lie.
Secondly: there's obviously a way to "die" without being annihilated; the blessed (i.e. those who are bound for Heaven) are an obvious example of "dying" physically without annihilation. But (as shown above) there's also a way to "die" and/or "be dead" spiritually, while still not being annihilated. To maintain that "spiritual death" (as referenced in Revelation, etc.) must mean "annihilation" (i.e. ceasing to exist) is simply wrong.
Given that: on what possible basis do you say (apart from personal preference and personal taste) that the damned do not suffer in hell for all eternity, when I (and others) have cited Scripture passages which claim explicitly that they DO?