Death...according to Pantheopsychism

[phenomenal_graffiti]

James…well, James is gone.

In A Place To Die, the first episode of the fourth season of the dramatic 70’s sitcom: Good Times, the family patriarch, James Evans Sr., the pillar of the family (alongside his wise and efficient wife, Florida Evans) dies in a car accident in his home state of Mississippi while trying to find work there in a plan to relocate his family from the derelict projects of Chicago.

In the episode a funeral is given for James, through which Flo remains stoic, her lack of grief worrying her children, close relatives and friends. She sheds nary a tear the entire episode until, while putting away dishes after funeral dinner she drops a large glass bowl, screaming "Damn...damn...damn!" as the awful finality of James’ absence strikes home. It is a famous (and oft parodied) moment of cathartic grief. Her children, alarmed, enter the kitchen to see their mother in existential distress, saddened but relieved she at last is able to release the agony of loss.

Florida’s catharsis of grief at the close of the funeral dinner, after which the prospect of continuing without James looms like a dark, heavy fog, mimics the surprise grief that at times days, weeks, or even months following a funeral, besets one having lost a loved one in real life. Flo sets every plate save for that of James, whose plate she has set for years with nary a thought the day would come when James would no longer approach the dinner table. After dinner, Flo takes up every plate save for that of James, which (for the first time since her marriage) she did not set. She will never set James’ plate again; James will never sit at the table again; James will never appear at the table again. In her moment of catharsis, Flo has the epiphany that she will never see James for the rest of her life.

Because James…well, James is gone.

But how is James “gone”?
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ATHEISTIC OR GODLESS VIEW OF DEATH

Posthumanist Max More in his online paper, The Terminus of The Self expressed the logical behavior of persons knowing a deceased person following the individual’s death:

Permanent death and theoretical death both may involve a shift in our attitudes toward the person. A belief in the person's permanent or irreversible loss means that we will no longer think of the person interacting with us in the future, or having further experiences. We will no longer include them in our plans. This shift in attitudes will be reflected in our customs and in the law. The rights and status of the deceased person will change: They can no longer be rewarded or punished, cannot make contracts, and will not be considered in our plans for the future.

Karen Gervais in her book, Defining Death states her belief regarding the fate of consciousness at death:

"[H]uman death, understood as the death of a person, is a state in which the function of consciousness has been irreversibly lost as a result of one of several possible combinations of damage to the brain substratum" [150]. "[T]he individual's essence consists in the possession of a conscious, yet not necessarily continuous, mental life; if all mental life ceases, the person ceases to exist; when the person ceases to exist, the person has died" [157-58].
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In atheism, the belief that physical brains create and generate consciousness and that consciousness can only exist if and when there is a brain and there is some electronic process in the brain that produces a certain type of experience or amalgamated content of the seven types of conscious experience at a particular moment in time, requires consciousness to exist by the magic of something that does not exist unfathomably existing or coming into existence in response to something that already exists, and death requires the magic of something in existence (conscious experience) unfathomably becoming non-existent when the object (the brain) responsible for maintaining the existence of consciousness ceases to function.

It is interesting to note that self, identity, and all psychological forms of consciousness do not resemble the neurons that purportedly generate them, and importantly, do not resemble objects and events of a purportedly existing consciousness-absent external world. In the mythology that brains inexplicably have the power to produce consciousness that mimics and thus “reveals” the existence of consciousness-independent objects and events in the external world, psychological phenomena such as dreams, memories, and occurrent thought may contain aspects or copies of these objects or, following Hume’s observation of fantasy, amalgamated elements of previous “experience” of consciousness-independent objects, but psychological phenomena do not and are not “experiences” or reflections of the real-time dispositions of the external world or objects and events occurring in real-time. There is only one aspect of consciousness devoted to that task: visual perception. All other sensory perceptions in regard to real-time behavior of external objects and events are invisible, intangible, person-only-experienced reactions to visual mimicry of external objects and events.

In terms of the process of consciousness preceding atheistic death, one must believe that something that exists can cause something that does not exist to exist. But how does something that does not exist come into existence outside or independent of the transformation of pre-existing material? As the thing that comes into existence did not exist before it exists, it does not borrow or use the substance or material of anything in the whole of existence to form itself or be formed by a pre-existing “creator”. The existence and nature of that which first did not exist then somehow begins to exist, must be entirely arbitrary, as it does not gain its nature transparently and logically from something that already exists: there is no material or existential connection between something that does (or did) not exist and something that has always existed (remember the 1st Law of thermodynamics in this relevant example), and the thing that comes into existence, its substance and content, is purely random, arbitrary, and coincidental…in the mythology that there are consciousness-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception in the external world.

In terms of how James Evans Sr. is “gone”, atheism asserts the existence-magic of creation ex nihilo, in terms of the brain having the same powers as the Judeo-Christian God (as commonly believed) in his ability to summon light and the universe ex nihilo. James, i.e. the self, identity, and consciousness of James no longer exists: James, having once existed and interacted with others, is now as real as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny (and God, according to atheism).

It is useless to argue against the atheistic view of death to demonstrate it’s falsity, as it’s falsity cannot be demonstrated; one can only point out the logical disconnect and untenable-ness of creation ex nihilo and/or the belief that things that do not exist can come into exist and things that exist can go out of existence. Adolf Grunbaum (ironically atheist) has extensively argued against creation ex nihilo (the Judeo-Christian version, remaining silent about the brain-consciousness-creating version despite the fact that his arguments against God applies equally to the brain) and strongly asserts that (save in the case of consciousness) logically, nature is eternal (as it consists of physical energy under the 1st Law of Thermodynamics) and consists solely of transformations of an eternal and indestructible substance:

Even for those cases of causation which involve conscious agents or fashioners, the premise does not assert that they ever create anything out of nothing; instead, conscious fashioners merely TRANSFORM PREVIOUSLY EXISTING MATERIALS FROM ONE STATE TO ANOTHER; the baker creates a cake out of flour, milk, butter, etc., and the parents who produce an offspring do so from a sperm, an ovum, and from the food supplied by the mother's body, which in turn comes from the soil, solar energy, etc. Similarly, when a person dies, he or she ceases to exist as a person (my interjection: ‘when a person dies, he or she ceases to exist as a person’? Doesn’t this undermine the logic asserted before and after this sentence-fragment? Everything else in infinity is existentially indestructible save for consciousness? How?). But the dead body does not lapse into nothingness, since the materials of the body continue in other forms of matter or energy. In other words, all sorts of organization wholes (e.g., biological organisms) do cease to exist only as such when they disintegrate and their parts are scattered. But their parts continue in some form.

-Grunbaum, Adolf: The Pseudo-Problem of Creation In Physical Cosmology; Philosophy of Science, Vol. 56, No. 3, Sept. 1989, University of Pittsburg.
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THE PANTHEOPSYCHIC VIEW OF DEATH


_Energy Consciousness is neither created nor destroyed; it merely changes form.

-_{The First Law of Thermodynamics} The First Law of Psyche


What is the fate of the consciousness of James Evans Sr. if James were a real rather than fictional character and Pantheopsychism or Pantheopsychic Christianity is true?

[Author’s Note: I entertain and keep in the pocket the hypothesis that beings believed and depicted as fictional in “our” universe or “Matrix” of consciousness actually exist in “other universes” or other sub-dimensional “pocket universes” within the mind of the Crucified Man. Just as one experiences that one exists as a real person, the fictional being experiences oneself as real, but in the experience of the former the latter is depicted by an actor, appears or is written about in words on printed paper, or exists in the former as an imaginary invention of the former created out of the substance of the formers thought, the former never realizing the latter actually exists outside the former’s mind and outside other written or televised mediums as an actual person in another “universe” beyond the reach of “real” persons.

This phenomenon is the subject of the Will Farrell-led film: Stranger Than Fiction, albeit Farrell’s character, a “fictional” character created in the mind of a female author, existed in the same universe as his “creator”. The woman imagined Farrell’s character, believed she invented him from non-existence, and made best selling novels with Farrell’s character as the protagonist. She had no ide that “her character” was an actual person in her world who, strangely enough, was forced to behave according to the things she typed in her novels (to a “real world” extent). At the climax of the film, at the urging of Farrell’s character’s psychiatrist and the female author’s agent, the author and her “character” meet and discuss the amazing coincidence.]

In this hypothesis of the nature of reality, there are no fictional characters save those, following Hume, that are logically contradictory. If this is true, in the domain of Pantheopsychic Christianity the suffering and scope of the crucifixion is greatly enhanced (Wow, imagine how many fictional characters and worlds there are in every comic book and written novel, let alone every movie and television show ever produced!) as Christ experienced every negative experience of every “fictional” character that has ever existed, alongside every negative experience of every “real” person. At one time, as I shall continue to do in this article, I called the gamut of Christ’s experience what it is like to be every real and fictional person Hyperchristianity.

In Pantheopsychic Hyperchristianity, James Evans Sr. as portrayed by actor John Amos in “our” pocket universe residing in Christ’s mind, has a doppelganger, an existing James Evans Sr., the identical twin of John Amos residing in another pocket universe of conscious experience in a separate sub-dimensional area of Christ’s mind. As John Amos behaved as if he were James Evans Sr. before a set of people aiming at him with cameras, there are no cameras or production crew before the “unfictional” James Evans. His experiences with “unfictional” Flo and his “unfictional” children were real, prior to his death.

So Hyperchristian or “unfictional” James died. What is death for him in Pantheopsychism and Pantheopsychic Christianity? What is death or what does death entail in Pantheopsychic Christianity?

PANTHEOPSYCHIC CHRISTIAN DEATH

In Pantheopsychism, consciousness does not come into existence after previously being something that did not exist, nor is it something that goes out of existence after having existed: it merely changes form. Consciousness rather than physical energy (which does not exist in Pantheopsychism) has always existed, and has always existed not in particles of consciousness or anything else, but has always taken the form of a Person and persons within the person. At no time in infinite time (eternity) has consciousness and the substance of consciousness been in the form of something other than a person and the experience of a person (within a person).

The external world is not an infinite space filled with nothingness or consciousness-independent objects and events, but is in fact a Person, one that fills the void of infinity. All other beings, necessarily, exist within this single Person and are created or formed from the “dust of the ground” or “clay” of the Person’s consciousness or first-person subjective experience. In the same way that a fiction writer forms people living within his or her mind from the “dust of the ground” or “clay” of the person’s own consciousness (thought-consciousness, as it is impossible for a human to form a fictional character from one’s sensory-consciousness: people composed of the person’s sensory-consciousness are “real people” or avatars of other consciousnesses existing outside the “Matrix” of the subject’s consciousness), the Infinite Person in Pantheopsychism imagines the existence, appearance, nature, personality, and actions of all other beings living within its mind. This form of creation is either deliberate, taking place in the context of full wakefulness or lucid dreaming, or the creation of others is accidental and beyond willful control, in the case of non-lucid dreaming.

[Author’s Note: It seems that another difference between God and man is that man can only create fictional characters using only thought-consciousness or thought-experience, whereas God can create fictional character with sensory, emotional, and thought experience from just his thought-experience, which like stem cells in biomedical context can branch off to form emotional and sensory experience comprising and occurring within his subjects.]

Subjects within God’s mind in a Judeo-Christian variant of Pantheopsychism mistakenly believe their consciousness is and can only be their consciousness when in fact it is a fragmented blob of God’s consciousness broken off and formed into the shape of their consciousness.

And he is not served by human hands
as if he needed anything,
for he himself gives all men life,
and breath, and everything else.

-Acts 17:25
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THE CRUCIFIC TRANSFORMATION OF JAMES EVANS

In Pantheopsychic Christianity, Man is a re-enactor and doppelganger of those persons whom Christ experienced as if he were those persons, and persons viewed and experienced only in third-person in a non-lucid Dream within the mind of Christ as he died upon the cross.

And then I will declare to them,
‘I never knew you; depart from Me,
you who practice lawlessness.’

-Matthew 7:23

In Pantheopsychic Christianity, those whom Christ knew are those Christ experienced in the first-person, alternately thinking of himself as that person and his indigenous self, wearing the visual form of the person in his mind as he died upon the cross. Those whom Christ ‘never knew’ are those Christ did not experience in the first-person, whose form he never assumed in his mind while dying upon the cross. In Universalism, those whom Christ ‘did not know’ that he tells to ‘depart’ are sentenced to a temporary rather than eternal punishment (in Pantheopsychism, the Hell of Retribution minus the Hell of Annihilation), in which the person gradually gains non-Cluster B personality disorder and the required faith in Jesus (while reliving each pre-death act of predation upon another from the victim’s point of view, trapped in the form of the victim and suffering at the hands of a philosopher’s zombie in the form of one’s pre-death self), whereupon the person is allowed entry to Heaven.

If Universalism is false and Annihilism true, those whom Christ ‘never knew’ after punishment in the Hell of Retribution are immediately cast into the Lake of Fire and burned to “non-existence”. They "become non-existent” in the sense that their base substance is the indestructible consciousness of God in non-lucidly dreaming form, but following the 1st Law of Psyche the consciousness of the wicked can only be melted by the psychic fire into non-person consciousness---not burned out of existence.

The Lucid Dreamer, in the time when the Crucified Man is on the verge of waking (thus losing the original and revised Hells of Crucifixion) is capable of using the fading dream to maintain the forms and personalities of the wicked as he punishes and destroys them. As their former mentality can only exist and sustain so long as Christ remains crucified, the wicked cannot maintain their conscious existence when Christ is no longer crucified.

If “Hyperchristian” James Evans Sr. exists, did Christ ‘know’ James or ‘never knew’ him?

Watching the television series Good Times, it is apparent that James is a strict disciplinarian, a father of “no nonsense” that strove to ensure his children became decent, law abiding human beings. He loved Florida with a naturalistic, wholesome affection that was heartwarming to see whenever the gruff man let down his guard. Hence, he possessed love and the capacity to love, and empathy and conscience, as he strove to enhance the good in the world. He was never abusive to his children, providing a firm rock behind which the family stood. The family attended church, thus James was Christian. As things go, if Pantheopsychic Christianity is true, being Christian even in ignorance of Pantheopsychic Christianity is “half the battle won”.

James, having empathy and love for his wife and children certainly possessed the Divine Spark.

In Pantheopsychic Christian terms, the Divine Spark is the morality of God manifest in human form, the morality of human beings being allegorical manifestations of the morality of God or the morality of God practically appearing in the form and nature of human beings who, as Paul put it:

Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do
by nature things required by the law, they are a law for
themselves, even though they do not have the law.

-Romans 2:4

That is, there are humans who unthinkingly and naturally obey the Law and follow the Golden Rule and do so without having to think before one acts or make a concerted effort to do or be “good”. They are unthinkingly and spontaneously “good” such that the Law, to them, is an aspect of their nature. Although there are degrees as well as kinds: any human being that is not a psychopath naturally and unthinkingly obeys the Law when one loves or expresses love: the expression of genuine, unfeigned love at any moment between birth and death is the perfect manifestation and expression of the Law. Beyond the “step on a crack, break your mother’s back” fastidious effort to not sin embarked by many Christians, unthinking, reflexive love for another is the simplest fulfillment of the Law.

James Evans, then, possessed the Divine Spark: an allegorical manifestation of the morality of Jesus Christ cast in James’ strange form and form of expression. Possession of conscience and empathy, an allegorical expression in human form of the morality of God, is the primary indicator that one is a glamour of Christ: one of the dream-characters in the mind of Christ crucified that he experienced in the first-person, whose form he wore and in whose shoes Christ walked in the Sacrificial Dream. James, by having the “mark” of conscience, empathy, and love, is revealed as a glamour of Christ.

Glamours of Christ not having the faith of Jesus embedded in Pantheopsychic Christianity (faith in Jesus in the sense of faith that one is a copy or doppelganger of a dream-identity of Jesus as he died upon the cross) are not to remain ignorant of their inextricable relation to Christ:

In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but
now commands all men to repent. For He
has set a day when He will judge the world with
justice by the Man He has appointed. He has
given proof of this to all men by raising Him
from the dead.

-Acts 17:30

‘He will judge the world with justice by the Man he has appointed’=God will judge whether or not a human is an aspect of or has an existential relation to ‘the Man he has appointed’, i.e. judging whether or not one is a glamour of Christ—that is, whether or not Christ experienced a person while dying on the cross, such that Christ and the individual are two wires that are existentially spliced.

“Hyperchristian” James, then, being a glamour of Christ but having no knowledge of Pantheopsychic faith in Jesus, is preserved after death in the pre-Heaven “limbo” of Abraham’s Bosom, where he will learn the appropriate faith and the actual circumstance of his existence.

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CRUCIFIC V.S. NON-CRUCIFIC CONSCIOUSNESS

Everyone, and I mean everyone exists within the mind of Christ and is born into and takes part in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ:

I have been crucified with Christ; I no longer live,
but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body,
I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and
gave himself for me.

-Galatians 2:20


As he died upon the cross, Christ dreamt of every human that shall ever exist, inventing future humans in that Christ accidentally invents a person when he non-lucidly dreams of being the person, experiencing prior to the person’s birth the identity, appearance, and negative experiences the person will sustain in future, sub-dimensional mimicry of Christ’s suffering.

(In the case of non-glamours of Christ, Christ dream-interacts with dream-humans whose identities he does not assume, experiencing this “second order” human in the third-person)

The identity with which you are born, the identity that evolves in the various forms of age, the consciousness that you possess and the world that your consciousness experiences is the Identity of Death (for glamours of Christ, the ‘Identity of the Lord’s Death’): the self that enters the world from mother’s womb and resides until death under the power of the Devil.

…how he went about doing good and
healing all who were under the power
of the devil, for God was with him.

-Acts 10:38

One is under the power of the Devil if one is susceptible to ‘physical’ and mental pain. The power of the Devil is derived from the mind of crucified Christ in the non-lucid Sacrificial Dream, as Satan’s existence and the content of his mind and control over human existence depends upon and is derived from the content of the mind of crucified Christ.

When Christ awakens (future tense invoked in the hypothesis of an Einsteinian non-linear time perception in which we actually exist in the past in an external future in which Christ has resurrected/awakened), Satan will cease to exist.

The consciousness one possesses while possessing the Identity of Death is Crucific Consciousness (the term: ‘crucific’ invented by the author to mean: ‘derived from or referring to the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ’). The self one experiences “in the here and now” from birth to death is a Crucific consciousness accidentally invented in the mind of Christ as he is crucified, a dream-character in a non-lucid dream that meaninglessly originated whom (if one is a glamour of Christ) Christ experiences in the first-person as if were the person.

James Evans Sr. is a Crucific consciousness. The function of the Lucid Dreamer, the third personality or “alter” of the Judeo-Christian God, is to slowly dismantle the sub-dimensional version of the Sacrificial Dream through the causation of the death of every human that shall ever exist, which has the ancillary effect of ablating the dream-counterparts of the deceased from the mind of crucified Christ, which has the ancillary effect of depleting the Hell of Crucifixion and the consciousness of Satan. Every human death is yet another “neural cell death” supporting the consciousness of Satan and the manifestation of the Crucified Man.

Non-Crucific Consciousness, by contrast, is consciousness outside the Sacrificial Dream in original and sub-dimensional form that does not experience or re-enact it’s content. If, according to the 1st Law of Psyche:

Consciousness is neither created
nor destroyed;
it merely changes form

:a deceased person (a Crucific consciousness) is removed from full or partial “doppelganger-ism” of the content of the mind of crucified Christ. Under the 1st Law of Psyche consciousness does not become non-existent at death but transforms from Crucific consciousness into Non-Crucific consciousness. The nature of Non-Crucific consciousness, as the consciousness of the “here and now” is Crucific consciousness (with non-Crucific alterations made this side of the grave by the Lucid Dreamer using the “crayons” of the forms of Crucific consciousness) is unknown. In the hypothesis of Pantheopsychic Christianity, Non-Crucific consciousness is the Identity of Life (as opposed to the Identity of Death): the identity, self, and consciousness a deceased person possesses under the deliberate, wakeful imagination of the Impervious One.


CONCLUSION: THE PANTHEOPSYCHIC FATE OF JAMES EVANS SR.: FROM NON-CRUCIFIC TO CRUCIFIC CONSCIOUSNESS

To open the blind eyes, to bring out the
prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in
darkness out of the prison house.

Isaiah 42:7

When it comes to death and God’s explanation for why He allows and causes death, you can’t get a better explanation than Isaiah 42:7.

In case God seems a bit vague, Paul simplifies with the following:
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Anyone who has died has been set free from sin.

-Romans 6:7

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There you have it. You have to understand that to God, “this” life is an illusion, so to speak, that was never meant to last, that he can interrupt at any time, because this life is absolutely unimportant (or important only in the sense that to God, it’s something he must rescue all men from). Beyond the next business lunch, the next shift at work, the deadline that must be met at 5pm…lies God and his transformation of Crucific consciousness into Non-Crucific consciousness. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the real deal: the truth of the matter is that we exist on the Judge’s timetable, which supercedes and interrupts all else. You have plans, but these do not matter as God is out there, in the dark of the external world, and your plans mean absolutely…

…well, they mean absolutely nothing.

If you doubt it, ask the COVID-19 victims that have died, including the medical personnel that treated them but succumbed as well. Ask my brother, who stumbled out of his room on the afternoon of May 13th, 2018 to cry "I CAN'T BREATHE!" to his children before collapsing to the floor with a ruptured artery.

Everything they were, everything they were doing, everything they had planned for themselves in the “here and now”, gone in the veritable blink of an eye.

Gone, because to God, they---but not their lives---mattered. Their lives in the "here and now" are eternally and irrevocably interrupted so that God can:

1. ‘...open the blind eyes’

2. ’...bring out the prisoners from the prison’

3. ‘and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.’

The point being, you never know when the Judge will, despite the protestations of the Warden (Satan), order your release from the prison that is this current world and consciousness. You’re either a glamour of Christ or (if Annihilism is true) a non-glamour. If you’re a glamour of Christ you have nothing to worry about. Death is freedom, and your life and whatever it was before death, whatever you had planned, never really mattered and is going to be something infinitely better. This life we live, this personhood and identity we have now, is tied to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and as such is something that is and has always been something to be taken away, as this life (if Pantheopsychic Christianity is true) is a “watered down” and “relatively peaceful but still troublesome” version of the absolute horror of the original Sacrificial Dream. God’s intent is to remove the horror entirely, regardless of whether or not it exists in “full strength” (The Original Hell of Crucifixion) or in “Bud-Light” form (The Revised Hell of Crucifixion): he can act in this removal at any time, according to his (not your) schedule.
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Returning to the question at the beginning:

How is James “gone”?

If Pantheopsychic Christianity is true, transformation from Crucific to Non-Crucific consciousness is how James “goes” and God wanting to release him from the prison of re-enactment (even partial and stymied “would be re-enactment” in the Revised Hell of Crucifixion) of the Hell of Crucifixion is the reason why James “went”.

So there goes James Evans Sr. tooling around Mississippi in his car, job-hunting for a new life for himself and his wife and children when out of the blue, the Judge forces the Warden to serve James his release papers in the form of a fatal automobile accident. Here, the Warden grudgingly (or unknowingly?) uses a scene experienced by Christ himself (if “Hyperchristianity” is true) to unwillingly take James out of the crucific equation.

It doesn’t matter what will become of James’ wife and children, for one day they too will be taken out of the crucific equation. The forms of the Crucifixion, the absurd forms, appearances, and experiences (albeit shortened and stymied by the Lucid Dreamer in the sub-dimensional partial-reenactment of the original Hell of Crucifixion) of the dream-characters that Christ while crucified believed were himself—like items in a store going out of business—“must go”. Death is a Fire Sale. These forms of the Lord’s death must go. Like the Ten Little Indians, we are systematically taken out of the Crucifixion.

That’s what’s going on, friends. That’s what’s important to God, and it takes precedent over anything we want, feel, or desire. This world is, by way of analogy, the Titanic. Sure there’s a book you’d like to keep reading as the ship sinks (maybe you’re in disbelief or denial the Titanic is sinking), but God unexpectedly and to your and everyone else’s surprise seizes you, places a grappling hook on a rope around you, and pulls you away from the ship with his helicopter. The Warden hates to see you go, as there were more torments to exact (depending upon whether or not those torments existed in the Sacrificial Dream), but the Judge required you to face Judgment. As stated before, if you are a glamour of Christ, there’s nothing to worry about: the Judgment is simply education, growth, and eternal re-enactment of the content in the mind of no longer the Crucified Man, but of resurrected Christ.

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[Terrapin Station]

That's some Time Cube-level stuff right there.

[Count Lucanor]

There's so much nonsense in that one post that it would be a waste of time. I'm just curious where this idea came from:

In terms of how James Evans Sr. is “gone”, atheism asserts the existence-magic of creation ex nihilo,

I mean, does anyone know if such a ridiculous assertion (coming from atheism) has ever been documented?

[phenomenal_graffiti]

In terms of how James Evans Sr. is “gone”, atheism asserts the existence-magic of creation ex nihilo,

I mean, does anyone know if such a ridiculous assertion (coming from atheism) has ever been documented?

It's "documented" whenever one states that consciousness ceases to exist at death.

[Count Lucanor]

I mean, does anyone know if such a ridiculous assertion (coming from atheism) has ever been documented?

It's "documented" whenever one states that consciousness ceases to exist at death.

But that will be only your interpretation of what has actually been asserted (consciousness ceasing to exist). The "existence-magic of creation ex nihilo" was added by you, so why not say that it is your interpretation?

[phenomenal_graffiti]

The brain being capable of the existence-magic of creation ex nihilo...is my interpretation.

[Count Lucanor]

The brain being capable of the existence-magic of creation ex nihilo...is my interpretation.

Which means that actually no atheist ever said that. So what needs to be addressed is your interpretation, no what atheists never said.

[phenomenal_graffiti]

Whether ir not no atheist in the history of human existence has said the brain uses the existence-magic of creation ex nihilo to form consciousness is horribly besides the point. The magic of creation ex nihilo is the only logical power one can infer the brain possesses if one believes that persons cannot exist unless they are produced by a brain, and, as Karen Gervais asserts in the OP above, persons cease to exist when the brain ceases to function.

[Count Lucanor]

Whether ir not no atheist in the history of human existence has said the brain uses the existence-magic of creation ex nihilo to form consciousness is horribly besides the point. The magic of creation ex nihilo is the only logical power one can infer the brain possesses if one believes that persons cannot exist unless they are produced by a brain, and, as Karen Gervais asserts in the OP above, persons cease to exist when the brain ceases to function.

Your interpretation is completely gone off the rails. No one is invoking weird magical powers as explanation of death, and certainly it does not imply creation of something. A person is a conscious body, in the same sense that a building is an assembled structure. Once it permanently ceases to be assembled, it ceases to be a building. No one goes crazy to say that this implies that an assembly of materials magically created a building out of nowhere. A thermometer is a temperature measuring device, once it permanently ceases to measure temperature, it ceased being a thermometer. No one goes crazy to say that this implies that temperature magically created a thermometer out of nowhere.

[phenomenal_graffiti]

A person is a conscious body?

What body is 'conscious'...the one created by the brain or the one not created by the brain?

Aren't bodies, according to the ridiculous belief that there are consciousness-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception existing outside brains in the external world, bodies that aren't produced by brains and as such are not conscious?

In typical or stereotypical atheist mythology, reality is split between things existing only as part of a person's consciousness (which disappears when the person becomes unconscious or dies)--created or produced from a baseball glove shaped clump of neurons in a skull...and everything that does not originate from a brain within a skull.

In this mythology, before there were brains there was no consciousness. Or did consciousness exist before atoms accidentally and unknowingly created brains? (as atoms, in the absence of consciousness did not know they existed, much less know they created brains).

The point being, unless you're stating consciousness can exist without the brain, the only 'conscious bodies' are the percepts that "airbag deploy" from the brain, as opposed to bodies that are distal objects ("percepts" and "distal objects" terms used in description of the process of perception) or the bodies not created by the brain that purportedly exist outside the skull in the external world.

[Papus79]

Hmm, some of this reminds me of the Anthropsophic take on the Crucifixion (ie. Rudolph Steiner, Max Heindel, etc.) where they brought it out into a panentheistic context and in Steiner's depiction if I remember correctly he was crucified in the trough of the iron age (cyclical time).

I was raised Catholic but the more I looked into everything, from the main corpus of Christianity and how it holds together in the context of regional beliefs and philosophies of the time (especially Platonism and Hermeticism) or the sensational blur and razzle-dazzle that I've only seen mirrored in quality with Madam Blavatsky's Las Vegas parade floats of ascended masters, it makes the historicity of the whole thing seem impenetrable. Polycarp vouching for John in Irenaeus's works was interesting, unfortunately the synoptic problem is tricky as well and one also has to remember that the fictitious villages or villages that didn't exist yet in many cases had names and concepts point at other things. There's also a census that seems to have suffered the same blurring in Roman records.

I would say though, if Jesus had never walked the earth or been crucified and yet people saw him all the time in NDE's and mystical visions, and those NDE's and mystical visions were even accompanied by all sorts of miracles and bold synchronicities, the universe would be every bit as strange as I think it is.

[phenomenal_graffiti]

Hmm, some of this reminds me of the Anthropsophic take on the Crucifixion (ie. Rudolph Steiner, Max Heindel, etc.) where they brought it out into a panentheistic context and in Steiner's depiction if I remember correctly he was crucified in the trough of the iron age (cyclical time).

I was raised Catholic but the more I looked into everything, from the main corpus of Christianity and how it holds together in the context of regional beliefs and philosophies of the time (especially Platonism and Hermeticism) or the sensational blur and razzle-dazzle that I've only seen mirrored in quality with Madam Blavatsky's Las Vegas parade floats of ascended masters, it makes the historicity of the whole thing seem impenetrable. Polycarp vouching for John in Irenaeus's works was interesting, unfortunately the synoptic problem is tricky as well and one also has to remember that the fictitious villages or villages that didn't exist yet in many cases had names and concepts point at other things. There's also a census that seems to have suffered the same blurring in Roman records.

I would say though, if Jesus had never walked the earth or been crucified and yet people saw him all the time in NDE's and mystical visions, and those NDE's and mystical visions were even accompanied by all sorts of miracles and bold synchronicities, the universe would be every bit as strange as I think it is.

Interesting. Thanks for that. Honestly speaking from a purely metaphysical stsndpoint, aside from our existence and experience of the "here and now", every statement of the nature of reality that goes beyond this is purely speculative, even the fictional imagination of atheism.

Given the problems you mentioned above, I can admit that Christianity works if the stereotypical atheist model is wrong, and panpsychism or dare I say my variant, Pantheopsychism in an atmosphere of Berkeley's Idealism is true.

[Papus79]

Given the problems you mentioned above, I can admit that Christianity works if the stereotypical atheist model is wrong, and panpsychism or dare I say my variant, Pantheopsychism in an atmosphere of Berkeley's Idealism is true.

The big cultural and historical archetypes are definitely strong attractors, I'm increasingly wary for some of the reasons you mentioned above. The apathy in the system for human happiness and well-being is palpable. Maybe the only hints of a lack of complete apathy would be our strange orientation to the mildest cycle of ice-ages and the ways in which we haven't had a non-testing nuclear weapon detonation since WWII.

I tend to think Donald Hoffman's done the best at pointing a finger in the right direction as far as what we might be dealing with, ie. a social network of conscious agents where it's a bit like seeing different aspects of a superorganism and it's internal workings from a very stereotyped lens - ie. one that's almost completely built and narrowed around the factors of our survival in competition with other humans to live long enough (and these days - to get one's income and social status high enough) to get our genes into the next generation. That pattern's quite likely to take us into neo-feudalism or a new dark age because rivalrous competition and accelerating technology (for turning the commons and our biological substrates into widgets faster than it can replentish).

Seems like there's hardly a better time in history to just read and learn whatever you've always wanted to and realize things are enough of a dumpster fire at the moment that it's either make use of your own time and space wisely or get pulled into the cluster B melee that the world is turning into.

[Count Lucanor]

A person is a conscious body?

Have you ever seen a disembodied consciousness? Show me one.

What body is 'conscious'...the one created by the brain or the one not created by the brain?

The body of anyone being born. Have you ever seen anyone not being born from another person? Show me one.

Aren't bodies, according to the ridiculous belief that there are consciousness-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception existing outside brains in the external world, bodies that aren't produced by brains and as such are not conscious?

There are non-conscious bodies, like rocks, if that's what you are asking. As far as I know, rocks are not produced by brains.

In typical or stereotypical atheist mythology, reality is split between things existing only as part of a person's consciousness (which disappears when the person becomes unconscious or dies)--created or produced from a baseball glove shaped clump of neurons in a skull...and everything that does not originate from a brain within a skull.

I have never heard of that "atheist mythology", but since we have already caught you in the bad habit of putting words in atheist's mouths, I must assume that's just what you (badly) interpret from atheistics point of views. Anyway, the problem is that any good atheist, unless he is not a materialist, will not think reality is split. The split is for dualists. But the split between an objective reality and the subjective consciousness (sometimes referred as the soul) has been around since well before any atheist was ever seen around. Otherwise, an important church father like St. Augustine, unlikely an atheist, would not have thought that material bodies existed apart from his soul. Yes, it may come to a surprise, but most believers in history have been dualists, and I really hope you realize what that means: the split between a material reality and a ghostly spirit. There, your "atheist mythology"!!!!

In this mythology, before there were brains there was no consciousness.

The interesting part is that you consider the material existence of brains (a body of tissue) a myth. So why are you talking about something you don't even believe is real?

Or did consciousness exist before atoms accidentally and unknowingly created brains? (as atoms, in the absence of consciousness did not know they existed, much less know they created brains).

What's the point, I mean, you have made clear you don't believe in those doppelganger atoms, do you?

The point being, unless you're stating consciousness can exist without the brain, the only 'conscious bodies' are the percepts that "airbag deploy" from the brain, as opposed to bodies that are distal objects ("percepts" and "distal objects" terms used in description of the process of perception) or the bodies not created by the brain that purportedly exist outside the skull in the external world.

Nope. You need a living person with a body that has a brain to have consciousness. A dead body has a dead brain and that makes a dead person. A dead person is not conscious. It's not very complicated.

[Sy Borg]

Is there a summary of the OP?

PG, you seem very keen to take up the theism v atheism cudgels. Why? Does it much matter to you what others think?