Dualism (Identity)

by dhw, Sunday, March 29, 2015, 19:11 (3526 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: There is, believe it or not, a lot of debate over that [Luke 23,43]. But here are the facts:
•	The punctuation did not exist in original Greek, and therefore you have to go by context.
•	"I say to you today.." Was a Hebrew/Greek idiom to indicate the special importance of what was being said. 
•	When taken in context, and put against the back drop of the other events happening immediately before, and immediately after, this statement, the placement of the comma after the word today is the only place it logically makes sense. 
•	Of the oldest known manuscripts of this verse that contain ANY form of punctuation, the dot (similar to a comma) is placed AFTER the word today. 
Feel free to look all that up and correct me if you see that I am mistaken.-Thank you as always for the immense trouble you take to answer my questions. I feel quite guilty at making such demands on your time.
 
Yes, meaning depends on context, but the conventional punctuation makes perfect sense if the context is the common belief in the survival of consciousness after death, regardless of the Hebrew/Greek idiom. Three days leave ample time for there and back, after which the fully conscious “dead” Jesus appears to prove the point. I googled “St Luke modern translations”, and immediately found four that corresponded to the St James version, and none to yours. One was translated from Aramaic (Jesus's own language?), and the others were under biblestudytools, American Bible Society (Bible Gateway), and Catholic Online.
 
Dhw: Matthew 17, 1-5 has Jesus chatting with Moses and Elijah (who turns out to have returned unrecognized as John the Baptist). In 1 Samuel, 28, Saul commands a medium to contact Samuel, which she does, and Samuel speaks to Saul. In Revelations, the souls of those slain for their beliefs call out to God to avenge them. [...] In all the above examples, the spirits of the encountered dead people are clearly conscious. 
TONY: The first, Saul, falls under what I was saying about Satan misleading people. The last, Revelations, is allegorical. One regarding Christ and Elijah, I need to do more research on.-The spirit of Samuel tells him what is going to happen as a result of his disobeying God, and it all comes true. Nothing misleading. In Revelations, what is meant to be true or allegorical is a matter of interpretation. -TONY: DHW, surely even YOU would agree that when an addition/change can clearly be PROVEN to come from an outside source, with clear, substantiated documentation backing that up, that change is an adulteration of the original document. -Yes, it happens all the time that reports are inaccurate, for whatever reasons. We don't even know how accurate the original biblical writings were, especially since many were written by authors who could not possibly have witnessed the events they were describing. Some modern translators may also have their own agenda.-DHW:...As I understand you, there are now two forms of spirit: one unconscious - the spirit of life - and one containing all the information that gives the person his/her identity. But you say Christ's resurrection was as a spirit: i.e. a combination of the life spirit and the conscious-identity spirit...Are the accounts of Christ's reappearance as a conscious spirit therefore the work of Satan?
TONY: Perhaps to avoid future confusion we can refer to the unconscious 'spirit' as what it is, pure information, and reserve the word 'spirit' for the conscious creatures that live in that other plane of existence.-You have said that after death the unconscious spirit returns to God, but there is a back-up of all the information that constitutes its original identity, and this will be inserted into the body at the time of the resurrection. Now you are introducing an altogether different type of “spirit” - angels and demons:
 
TONY: Angels and Demons are both spirit creatures, just on different sides of a conflict. What the NDE's see are rightfully called 'Spirits". The question is not whether or not they see spirits, but whether or not the spirits they see are who they believe they see.-According to you, Christ appeared to the disciples as a conscious spirit. What the disciples saw was what NDE patients often see: someone they can identify and converse with. Are you now saying Christ was converted into an angel, and the people NDE-ers see are demons? Or was Christ an optical illusion created by Satan to deceive the disciples? If the conscious spirit of Christ was the true Christ, then why can't the conscious spirit of Mrs Y be the true Mrs Y?
 
TONY: ...an open mind actually has to be open, not simply an argumentative closed mind. Challenging beliefs is all well and good, and something that all of us on here do on a regular basis. [...]We have all closed off certain parts of our thinking to other beliefs that are opposite to ours...-I have never claimed to be open-minded about EVERYTHING. I have strong opinions about many things. But two of the subjects I am open-minded about are NDEs and the existence of God.