Monday, April 6, 2020

Immortality of the soul

Robespierre, like Hitler and like Jefferson, was a Deist - a postChristian. Among the concessions made to Christianity was the immortality of the soul.

The soul isn't immortal in this our cosmos (obviously). But our cosmos is finite in this section of observable spacetime and, even if it lasts eternal, will always be countable. Whatever you think of Tapscott (I find him an egotist), Christianity at large has a point in positing the soul's immortality. That must mean: the soul's migration beyond this cosmos. For orthodox Christians, Jesus's return to life on earth is a sign of that. (In Docetic interpretations like post-Nisâ Islam, Jesus has not returned thus removing His example from consideration.)

In the crawling chaos without, elements of our consciousness already exist. So all possibilities of our future exist. That is what uncountability means. But these soul-fragments exist in chaos; they exist in hell. After we die, that final snapshot of our personality picks up where it left off.

The Interloper's famous promise is that we shall be "as gods". This is, as are the most diabolical statements, factual, but incomplete. We shall be (or are already; time has no meaning there) weak intelligences in a powerful plasma. I do not trust that I can withstand the fires of this gehenna, as YHWH did.

For us there is but one hope. It happens that God created a free-willed universe. To turn a phrase: from a chaos by Lovecraft, with love has God crafted. Since God loves, He loves the best of what has arisen in His creation. He will wish to protect us from chaos - whilst we inhabit this garden, and beyond it in His presence.

Many if not most of human religions have understood this at a basic level. Their aim is to explain this by some myth or other. The dying and resurrected god is the best such myth, a gift from the Neolithics. And Christianity offers the best balance of which I know.

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