RE: How to have a soul and an afterlife without magic
Hi, friend @baerdric,
This is quite the fascinating article.
"I want to feel that my friends among the atheists will somehow survive this life, and that we can have some awareness of each other afterwards. Because good friends are hard to find."
As one of your "minority" non-atheist friends, I can understand your sentiment. And, while I am not a "bible-thumping proselytizer," I appreciate that you understand my interest (as a believer that Jesus is the Creator/God of the universe) in communicating that belief to all of my friends.
One problem I see you facing with even a mechanistic, "flip-book" implementation of consciousness was touched on in at least one of the articles you referenced. That problem is, of course, entropy. Even if I were to stipulate that you are correct, and that there would be someone around to "flip the pages," our "awareness of each other afterwards" would come to an end with the entropic heat death of the universe.
And so I'll simply close my comment by extending an invitation to you, my friend, as well as to all of your readers and following, to consider what I.M.H.O. is a far better offer of a truly endless life in a restored and perfected universe. Here is an article that generally describes my beliefs, and I welcome anyone who cares to read it to interact with me should you have any sincere questions or wish to investigate the possibility of following Jesus.
Then I must not have made myself completely clear. Even if the Universe reaches heat death, all that time still exists. Because time is not the ticking clock our brains make us see it as, it is a broad multidimensional matrix which we are only aware of single points in, while alive, but which we can mostly likely apprehend more widely once the filter of our entropy based perception is removed.
"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Cor 13:12"Further, I don't believe this description contradicts any Biblical or Christian tenets of the afterlife except the most child-like idea of an actual place in the clouds. In fact, for God to be eternal, what I describe must almost certainly be true. Just as we exist across our time, He exists across all times.
Lastly, I consider myself a Christian and follow the Bible, just not blindly. It's the other Christians who judge me as not really Christian, because I don't believe the unBiblical and edited for children Christianity they were taught in kindergarten Bible Class.
The afterlife you probably envision is eternal, so is this, it probably includes a fully human and undecaying body and so does this, it probably is in God's perfected and eternal Kingdom and so is this. All I have done is make it possible within the laws of nature and physics. God's nature and physics.
Thanks for responding to my observations, and for your additional clarifying comments. ;)
I obviously need to "munch on this" some more, and probably ask some more questions. I do understand God to have access to the entire "timeline" if you will, and (much as I love time-travel stories) I do view history as immutable. So, here's a question (and probably indicative of my simplistic understanding of what you've had to say):
Supposing we've fast-forwarded into an eternal afterlife. With the "flip-book" "non-directional-time" physics-based view of eternity, wouldn't the afterlife of atheists be nothing more than an ability to replay particular sequences of their historical life? Or am I still misunderstanding your concept? ;)
And, I hope that my prior comment didn't imply judgement of you or your position? If so I apologize, not what I meant at all, just want to dialog here with you a bit. :)
BTW, I decry the cartoonish "floating on clouds" views of eternity and expect far more. And also BTW, I did read the "Don't You Dare Read This One" article... which (if true) would support a view of uni-directional time... ;)
None of what I hypothesize says anything about how someone might enjoy the eternal awareness of all things.
The probable existence of multiple nonspatial dimensions implies that even without time, some things might happen in another direction. After the action of K and B Mesons are fully understood, I hope they will fit more reasonably within my ideas. Perhaps:
Oh, I misunderstood your question.
No, if true, all persons would be eternally aware of every moment of their life at all times as a whole. As well as every part of the Universe that has e er affected them in the slightest. The eternal awareness of Now, this instant, would encompass all time.