Problems with this section; for Frank (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Thursday, November 26, 2009, 00:18 (5476 days ago) @ dhw

This is a long post that I'll get to when I have time. I'll just respond to this: "I wonder, though, which of them comes closer to your own deep-down convictions."-What deep down convictions? I'm not sure I have any. I have theories only.-Well, let's see...I'm pretty well convinced that if there's a God, he knows as much as it is possible to know, but that he does not have arbitrary power over matter. In knowing everything it is possible to know, he has as much perspective as possible, which would make him as good as possible, because what he tries to do is influence conscious beings to be like himself, which mystical experience reveals as beautiful and wonderful beyond measure.-To backtrack a little: "yet I still feel that I'm "me", that there's a fundamental core which is my individuality." You would feel that you are you even if you experienced total amnesia. Even a schizophrenic jumps from persona to persona, always sensing that he is he. That sort of suggests that the consciousness itself stems from something more primordial than a past history, which is what I've been saying all along.-"God's non-physical consciousness runs through me, but it's mine..."-That's the illusion of separateness.-"...given to me at birth..."-You're talking as if consciousness is "something." This is a category mistake.-"At death, that non-physical form ... the individual identity ... does not stop running, but returns to and lives on in the all-embracing consciousness and love of God from which it first came."-This is incoherent. Near death, you may have no consciousness whatsoever, or it may be severely impaired over what it was six months earlier. The "individual identity" you speak of isn't even a singleton in schizophrenics. In health, you experience continuity only because the physical structure of your brain doesn't change that much from day to day. I'm quite amazed if you don't secretly realize all this and that once again you're playing "devil's advocate."-So I wound up commenting on more than I intended to at first. I'll try to get back to the first part of your post later.