Maybe not for Physics, but the idea of time for us people does contain a past and a future. These two states, the past and the future, comprise an understanding of the present which is different for each one of us. As the stories of the past coalesces into straighter and straighter lines, more of us share a similar past. This similar past becomes an origin, or a genesis which informs a present and provides the data for an interpretation of a future, which as the lines straighten we people also begin to share.
For Christianity the shared past is usually described as a fall, the shared present is described as a search for salvation, the shared future, while it remains mysterious does seem to be a reunion with paradise for the obedient and redeemed and some sort of snake-pit for the disobedient and irredeemable.
For Baxter and I the Christian understanding stops at the philosopher Epicurus, were rules for a good life are a salvation from unhappiness and begins to flounder when it reaches expressions like "Total Depravity" to describe the original state of the human condition.
True, whether it be the sails of Viking Marauders hell bent on plunder and maidens, or that pervert Uncle Sprat back from whatever he does on the Mainland, the future can lurk in an often irredeemable, totally depraved manner. But when contemplating the future a mind does have a number of possible directions to take, not all of them horrible.
Epicurus was born on the Athenian Island of Samos around the time Plato died (348 BC). He was a very wealthy man who had lost his fortune to a shipwreck. His followers, they paid no fee to hear him speak, saw their teacher as a guide who offered Salvation. He was less "getting a law degree and passing the bar exams" he was more an eye for "good conversation and positive attitude."
His cure for Anxiety went this way: Don't be afraid of the Gods. Don't worry about Death. What is Good is easy to get. What is Terrible is easy to endure.
The question for both Epicurus and Zeno, the founder of stoicism, both of them earth bound thinkers long settled into the polytheist story of a cadre of jealous Gods occasionally dabbling in human affairs who preferred to remain safely in their heaven while the souls of mortals were destined to a class bound underworld where nothing special happened, has to be : "Did Epicurus and Zeno, Plato for that matter, preach redemption and salvation."
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