People will believe whatever they need in order to believe the other stuff that they want to believe. Like people arguing what communion wafers actually are. 
Dualism, spirits, physical vs spiritual resurrection: It’s all wacky, emotive speculation, given the current unknowns. So, people will cling to their preferred dogmas.
I’m sort of taking that in a jabbing way, and I’m not sure if you intended that or not. But that seems a little dismissive of those trying to work out their worldview. Saying people will believe whatever they need to, even if it’s wacky, just to have their way and snuggle up to their dogma makes a general statement over even those who are honestly searching and accepting things that aren’t easy.
I apologize if I have read your tone wrong, however. It’s difficult to tell through this medium of communication 
I would disagree with that – it wasn’t really fragmentation, it was multi-location, being in more than one place at once. But it’s a good point.
Interesting, and totally new to me!
True words, those! And forums are good place to practice using and expanding vocabulary since we don’t have the benefit of seeing body language, facial expressions, hearing tone, etc.
Could be taken that way (and Argon will have to speak for himself in that regard.) But it might also charitably be taken as epistemic humility, if not uttered as a problem only for everyone else that the utterer considers themselves uniquely exempted from. We all do want to believe some things, and we’ll all struggle with varying degrees with the challenging task of letting our preferred views get influenced by inconvenient observations. There’s not much shame in that until it gets increasingly out of hand and has us protecting rampant denialism in ourselves. But it’s a pretty human thing to have some degree of influential desire. Vulcanism (a la Star Trek) is not real - at least not in any pure sense. It only exists as a kind of conceptual archetype that some might idealize.
Right! We all find certain things to be desirable over others. That is true, and I should give Argon credit for that without being defensive. I’m sorry.
I wonder if this connects to the way Christians (or maybe others, too) hold views in a hierarchy.
For example, I do not find physicalism to be desirable. I’d rather have a soul, if I am honest. But I also don’t want to shy away from that reality if it is true, and I could probably find my footing again if it is.
But as for the concept of the Christian God and Jesus being Lord, I find that desirable and am willing to try and make things fit into that worldview with more effort before letting go of it. I’ll admit that, and as you said, I shouldn’t be ashamed of and shouldn’t deny being human.
As people have said before here, Christian faith is not just a set of doctrines, but a commitment to God. He’s not just another doctrine or intellectual claim to me. I want to make the relationship work and be willing to reinterpret my dogmas to fit a truer worldview.
Maybe this is a good example of “There’s a personal story behind every question.” 
I think atoms are only the tip of the iceberg. Trying to locate ourselves at the atomic level or in fingerprints, memories or idiosyncrasies misses the point. We are a nexus of many relationships, we share that with God though to a much more limited extent. You can’t put God in a box and neither can you encapsulate your self.
Chapter 3. “The Rejection of the Fluidity Model in Ancient Israel”
Main Thesis: Other biblical authors strongly oppose the fluidity model. This chapter describes a rival theology.
Principal Opponent: Deuteronomy.
Major Themes:
Result: The Hebrew Bible preserves two competing views:
| Fluidity Model | Deuteronomic Model |
|---|---|
| Multiple manifestations | One heavenly location |
| Divine embodiment | Divine transcendence |
| Near Eastern continuity | Reform movement |
Sommer argues the Deuteronomic side eventually became dominant.
I totally resonate with that … and maybe even further than you left it as stated here - as in I’ve committed myself to not let go of aspiring to be Christ’s disciple and live with him as Lord. But I treat that more as a faith choice than some well-evidenced conclusion from rationality. I don’t want it to be irrational of course, but my application of rationality to my faith is more after-the-fact and has my faith conviction for its home and its context going forward rather than as some conclusion that cleanly emerged from it.
Not being jabby per se and I’m sorry if it comes out that way. It’s more of an observation of phenomena I’ve seen. There are two components. Elliot Sober, a philosopher of biology notes that we don’t test theories or hypotheses completely individually or by themselves but as attached to larger bundles of theories and hypotheses. So there are multiple, sometimes unspecified, ideas we mix into our analyses. The other is natural bias and suspicions that we all bring into our choice making. I am guilty myself. This discussion seems to encapsulate two issues: a physicalist vs dualist basis for consciousness and sense of self, and the act of resurrection.
Honestly, I do not see a straightforward resolution to the question of how human resurrection would be implemented. A dogma is that it will occur. The implementation seems unspecified. Are ‘souls’ placed into another ‘substrate’? No idea. Are bodies physically reproduced? No clue. If bodies are reproduced, what is necessary to provide ‘‘continuity” of self? We don’t have access to the information or a means of evaluation. Are we dealing with disembodied, immaterial ‘souls’ or essences of ‘being’? Is it patterns or substrate processes that provide the basis? I think the facts on the ground are very limited.
The only things we can (largely) objectively observe and test is that human consciousness can be halted and altered by physical perturbations: e.g. chemical, electrical, surgery, intense magnetic fields. We do know if we obliterate the brains, there is no recovery we can provide.
I personally lean toward the position that consciousness includes or requires processes that run on a substrate. This is physicalist. That can accomodate the Ship of Theseus problem with gradual replacement of parts. It does not cover complete copies - Personally, I would not jump into a Star Trek transporter. I think a copy would only receive the illusion of continuity while I’d be a dead mass of atoms and energy. I lean toward physicalism because there observational support (not perfect or complete) and non-physical/dualist notions don’t seem to lead to anything that can be tested or understood.
The mechanism of potential resurrection appears a mystery. It would seem to involve an omnipotent being and a direct act that causes something to happen that wouldn’t otherwise occur via ‘regular physics’. If there is going to be a physical resurrection then one possibility is the “Ship of Theseus angle”. Resurrectees could experience ‘true’ continuity if enough of the original materials were re-formed into a physical body, I suppose. On the other hand, a soul, previously floating in the void, could be reattached to something and provide a sense of continuity. Who knows? Given the paucity of actual details, I don’t think one can make probabilistic assessment of what an omnipotent God could or could not do, or what limited options God would have in enacting His will. Can God collect most of the atoms from brains of dead people and create restored brains out of them? How does one determine that? Can ‘souls’ exist outside of substrates and be reimplanted in new bodies? Well, we haven’t identified souls or how they work but I suppose if that’s how things are then God can do what He wills. And maybe it’s not about personal continuity but continuity of the patterns you were.
I guess my overall point is that in the absence of understanding how our consciousness works, let alone what a ‘soul’ is, I don’t see how anyone makes progress determining how resurrections would be accomplished - There doesn’t seem to be much solid ground to build upon. I leave it as a ‘question mark’.
Pretty much. I’m a bit allergic to certainty. And woo. But definitely don’t mean to target @seamitchell with that brush, who’ve never displayed those characteristics.
I believe it was my own fault for reading something into your statement that wasn’t there.
Words like “dogma” are often used in a context that demonizes them, even though they aren’t a bad thing in themselves. That was perhaps why I bristled. We all have biases, like you said, and we all appeal to some things we believe are true that can’t be put under a microscope in a lab.
Yeah, I realize that talking about afterlife and resurrection is an imaginative activity. And maybe we’ve hit that wall again. These sorts of conversations further enforce the word “faith” for me, which is what we all eventually have to settle on.
If keeping further conversations hinged on scientific discussion and less speculation is more productive, then we can do that.
Thank you for your contributions, Argon!
Agreed! Back at you!
What’s the saying? “There’s faith, and then there’s religion”. Faith is like an axiom, and religion is what gets bundled in.
There seemed to be different versions of this kind of beliefs, so it could be really fluid.
For example, in the ancient Egyptian creation myths the local god was put into a central position. The local story often incorporated alternative stories in a way that preserved elements of both. When the local god (for example, Ptah) created, it may have been through another god, often Ra. In the combination, heart could be one god (for example, Horus), mouth another (often Thoth) and the god that created a third one (for example, Ra).
Different stories may have presented a god in several positions (for example, rising sun as Kheprer, midday sun as Ra, and descending sun as Atum).
Different traditions could amalgamate depending on changing political power (for example, Amun was combined with Atum-Ra, so that in the New Kingdom people worshiped Amun-Ra instead of the previously worshiped Atum-Ra).
Deities could be described with different names, often as a result of merging traditions, and the gods got differing roles.
There were also beliefs that all gods were ‘limbs’ of one creating spirit or god. That belief was not far from the forms of Hinduism that believe in one divine force behind all the thousands of gods.
In the dynamic diversity of beliefs, one might claim support for a wide variety of hypotheses (speculation). All these speculations are just speculation. It might be compared to the wide variety of colours in the universe. If two objects are red, it does not mean that the objects are related.
From the perspective of an ancient Jew who believed in resurrection, this would be a false dichotomy since “spiritual” did not mean necessarily “non-physical”.
Since I value the wisdom I find in stories, I wonder if this book will suggest anything. (I plan to find out.)
Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, this incredible life-after-death novel asks us to consider how much of our memory, of our bodies, of the world as we know it – how much of what we love can we lose before we are lost? And then what happens?
For @Terry_Sampson here is a positive Goodreads review of it:
One of the most heart wrenching, astounding, eloquent and haunting books I have EVER read! Following a girl in the afterlife desperately longing to remember her name and the life that she lived previous ~ this is a book that will stick to you.
ChatGPT predicts that you’ll like it more than I would. Bet I’d agree.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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