Rambling Thoughts About a Conscious Afterlife
for that matter, this life!
I have a great deal of sympathy for David Congdon's diagnoses of what ails Christianity, even if not for his radically deconstructive prescriptions.
Sparked by this tweet, then:
Rambling Thoughts About a Conscious Afterlife - for that matter, in this life!
We egregiously overestimate the time any of us actively engage the cognitive mapmaking of our conscious minds. We'll access them even less when we no longer engage in gnomic willing?
Most don't understand that so very many of - even our most significant - value-realizations will much more so involve our participatory imaginations and other such fast & frugal epistemic heuristics, which've been long-studied by diverse philosophers, but still rather poorly understood by neuroscientists.
It's not that such facilities don't function propositional-like or without normative impetus, it's just that they are not fully conscious & rely heavily on subdoxastic routines & heuristic subroutines.
For example, we have Maritain's connaturality, Polanyi's tacit dimension, Newman's illative sense, Fries' nonintuitive immediate knowledge & Peirce's abduction.
Theo-anthropologically, in my view, it's primarily through these epistemic furnishings that the ubiquitous, pneumato-Christological, universal presence abundantly gifts us all, incarnationally operating to awaken us all to our radical solidarity & to coax us all toward our unitive destiny.
This is not to deny, in the least, the superabundant, Christo-pneumatological, particular presence & attendant incarnational dynamics, as variously professed.
I do mean to deny that the transformation of creation's shadows, vestiges, images & likenesses necessarily involves their eschatological obliteration vis a vis their particularities, especially not those that are personal, autonomous agents. In my view, our eschatological destiny remains personally unitive not ontologically unitary.
Even my appropriation of Aurobindo's Absolute (as a heuristic device) does not deny post-mortem recognition of particular persons vis a vis, for example, dynamical karmic bundles.
Finally, based on his lively & entertaining exchange with Feser a few years ago, I doubt that DBH eschews even traditional secondary beatitudes (I'm thinking of his dog, who once had a twitter account), much less our post-mortem inter-personal continuities. His critical methods, while de/re/constructive, don’t at all engage a metaphysical ignosticism, radical apophaticism or thoroughgoing theological skepticism.
One’s questioning of the duration & purpose of eschatological perdition might produce a theologoumenal minority position but it wouldn’t require a wholesale theo-makeover alien to the tradition. The same goes for his other historical, liturgical, exegetical, patristic & conciliar critiques. His theo-makeovers don’t seem radically divorced from other age-old minority stances, only from certain majoritarian incoherencies.
Christianity’s prophetic tradition has perennially gifted the church a self-critical aspect through its voices of prophetic protest. We best include them with others, who’ve been marginalized, to whom we owe a preferential option.