I have made a couple of references to my belief that humans will evolve into something like the science fictional Q-Continuum. "Men Like Gods" to borrow that title from H. G. Wells (and yes, I am well aware that he was not a Christian) is a way to express this future that may not be as far off as we think. Why do I think that humans have such a bright future? First of all, I do not think ALL humans have a bright future. I think that only humans who focus on: 1. immortality (and not the transhumanist kind), 2. wise financial planning, 3. ethics (genocide, slavery, mind control, and invasion of privacy have no place in civilization), 4. morality (without which one corrupts oneself into dissolution), 5. science, 6. higher IQ instead of AI (artificial intelligence), 7. planning for aeons (billions of years) instead of foolish planning for the next quarter (as on Wall Street), 8. intergalactic travel (this would take a whole separate website to fully explain), and 9. Jesus (one's faith) will become like the fictional Q.
I might add one more item: 10. Stubborn refusal to let the warmongers, polluters and r-selection overpopulating majority win. The last refers to r/K selection theory from ecology.
A year ago, I would not have had an answer to the question: "Hey Toni! How exactly are we fallible humans who keep screwing up supposed to transform into something other than Borg? People worship gadgets and want to become gadgets despite the crashes, the hackers, and all the obvious problems with information technology. How exactly are we supposed to have a bright future other than that depressing Robot Apocalypse? How exactly are we supposed to get to this Promised Land? This continuum?" If I was asked all that a year ago, then I might have cleared my throat, hemmed, and uh, you know, not have an answer other than the pathetic: "It will take a lot of time and work."
Now I have a working plan to get from point A to point B. Or since this is Q&A, from point A to point Q. I listed the key parts of the plan in the first paragraph above. In another year, I might really scare you with the detail. But for now, we are using our faith in God instead of letting our Christianity rot or gather dust. We are using science and research instead of being deliberately stupid like the science haters (climate change deniers, anti-evolutionists, and those who want astronomers to have security clearances) and flat Earthers. The great thing about being a Christian Immortalist is that we harness the power of the supernatural and the natural not one or the other. Both.
In this respect, you need to know something about your self that bad religion, bad education, and bad pop culture have not bothered to tell you. You are a person. The transhumanists and the corporate world regards you as just data in their databanks of Big Data. The US Supreme Court has demoted you to second class citizen below corporations (so-called corporate personhood) and the rest of the government regards you as just some thing to be controlled and spied upon, but in the eyes of God, you are still His son or His daughter. You are an individual being composed of several aspects:
1. your divine nature -- the Bible says God is in us, born again Christians invite Christ in. The word "Christ" means anointed. Since we believe Christ is the Messiah (the One to come), I think that I am right in looking to the past, the present, and the future. The past includes knowledge of Judaism, First Century AD Palestinian Jews, Aramaic, the Hebrews, the Ancient Israelites, and the context of the culture of those times rather than trying to pretend that it was like today. Demonic people delight in destroying archaeological sites and slitting the throats of Christians and Jews. They embrace death (and will get it) while we embrace life. Literal immortality not nonsensical figurative immortality or metaphorical immortality. God is not dead. Neither should you be dead.
2. your spirit -- I used to think that this was exactly the same as your soul.
3. your soul -- I used to think that this was exactly the same as your spirit.
4. your will -- Also called volition or free will. One reason that Christians and Jews always harbor a suspicion of Big Government is that government employs Thought Police and uses taxpayer money to invade the privacy of taxpayers. Project MKULTRA is a fact. Look it up. They even experimented on children. No government (not the US, Russian or Chinese government) understands the concept of decency. All the major nations including the USA use torture and assassination. The US government was doing it before School of the Americas. The latest disappointment (there are so many where government is concerned) is finding out that author James Bamford somehow managed to underestimate how evil the NSA is. They invade everyone's privacy not to protect us from terrorists (they failed once again on 9/11) but in order to satisfy their perverted voyeurism and to have blackmail leverage on everyone, which makes them terrorists themselves. The FBI under cross-dressing J. Edgar Hoover tried this with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and recently the Pentagon tried to smear Julian Assange. I am proud to say that most Americans see right through this. We all know that Big Government only wants to crush the individual. Despite that, some scientific research indicates that free will is a reality however intangible it might be. And God is on the side of the individual not the government.
5. your mental intellect -- Your conscious thoughts. In most people, the ability to think is sadly underdeveloped. Thinking skills are taught sporadically if at all. Politicians, salespeople, advertisers, and some religions prefer that you not think at all but just do what you are told. "March into that hail of gunfire!" "Forget your rent money, buy my crappy product!" "Nevermind free broadcast television and PBS. Pay for cable!" "Buy this fast food full of sugar, salt and saturated fat! Throw the trash on some stranger's lawn instead of using all those plastic bags for litterbags!" (okay maybe the second part is implied) "Internal combustion is better than electric! Better because it deafens and destroys your hearing! Better because it fills garages with carbon monoxide! Real men like being covered with grease and having the car break down all the time!" "Have more children! Never mind that you cannot afford to send any of them to college!" "Strap this bomb on and blow yourself up in a crowd of pregnant women!" There are actually people who say things like that. Despite what atheists say, not all religion is anti-thought. Judaism in particular expects one to think. In yeshivahs, students are supposed to question and be able to cogently argue a point. We Christians could learn a few things from Jewish people. And I would not place too much credence on the anti-religious statements of atheists since communist atheists in Russia slaughtered about forty million people (pagan Hitler only killed six million Jews and another six million Gentiles) and the Chinese communist atheists have killed almost as many and continue to kill in Tibet. With a population of 1.4 Billion people, the communists figure that no one will notice missing people.
6. your emotions -- Humans have long noticed that thoughts and feelings sometimes are moving parallel in alignment, sometimes are moving in opposite directions, and sometimes simply are not on the same page. Another word for emotions or feelings is sentience.
7. your subconscious -- Your subconscious is there all the time but takes over from the conscious mind when you are asleep or dreaming. You can occasionally become aware that you are asleep and that is lucid dreaming when your conscious mind takes over from your subconscious. Likewise, during waking hours, you can daydream or fantasize and that is your subconscious taking over from your conscious mind. Do not confuse subconscious with unconscious where you have no thoughts at all but are not dead.
8. your conscience -- Also do not confuse conscious mind or subconscious with conscience which is the part of you that knows good from evil without being told. It is your moral sense or moral compass. Catholics in particular place stress upon heeding your conscience. If you violate your conscience, then you cannot and should not expect God to forgive you. For example a Brethren, Quaker or Mennonite conscientious objector believes that violating the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is a sin and so they refuse to serve in the military or they do alternative service or they go to prison or die rather than kill or they move to a country that won't make them serve in the military. Your conscience might be a part of your spirit or your soul or some other aspect of you and so I am not sure that it should be listed as an independent part of you. Also, sociopaths such as politicians and CEO's of polluting companies kill people by the millions by the orders they give. Sociopaths have no conscience with which to feel guilty. You probably know someone who is one of these walking dead. Philosophers might call them "philosophical zombies". I am not sure how someone can walk around with a vital part of themselves missing. Mind without body is a ghost. Body without mind is a zombie or golem or a gentile to believe some people. Forgive that last bit of humor. And since we are on the subject of missing parts, some black people during the Sixties believed that after five centuries of suffering abuse from white people that we white people lacked souls. That's where the terms soul brother and soul sister derive. Haitians who practice voodoo (until they get it right) believe that spirits (demons if you prefer) lurk waiting for a body to possess. Now if being in a soul cage as Sting puts it in his songs and if being on the mortal coil (as Shakespeare puts it) is such a bad thing, then why are the souls without bodies so anxious to get themselves a body? Demons must love all those Hindus and Buddhists (God bless them) who want to stop the endless cycle of reincarnation. Asia must be a good place to pick up a body if you are a demon. I put aside the question as to whether 21st Century Christians should believe in the existence of demons. Most people (atheists included) have no problem believing in Lucifer Satan Devil (LSD) because you can see evil everywhere. Somehow though they get amnesia about good in the spirit world and say something stupid like "God does not exist." The universe is pretty good evidence that God exists. The Jews are conclusive proof that God exists. With everyone (including Christians at certain junctures of history) trying to exterminate them, how have they survived? Being smarter than Gentiles? Perhaps. And perhaps God helped out (despite that European Holocaust incident). The point is that those humans who have sense will not get rid of their bodies not a thousand years from now and not a billion years from now. Speaking of bodies . . .
9. your physical body -- the biochemical part of you. Even your brain is different from your mind. Your brain is considered the part of your physical body where your mind hangs out so to speak. Long ago, humans used to think that the heart was the seat of the soul and the mind. After countless incidents of people being conked on the head over the millennia, we now know better. In recent years, researchers have discovered that the body has a second brain in the upper intestines or mesentery. Literally, all those times that we said someone had good gut instincts, we might have well guessed at the truth. This second brain obviously does not behave or perform in the same way as the primary brain in our skulls. However, it is well known in neurology that not every time we move instinctively or quickly (say to remove our hand from a hot object) are nerve cell messages going all the way up to the brain and then back down to muscles to yank our hand away. That would cost extra milliseconds and so evolution decentralized certain instincts for quicker response. The nerve cells relay to the nearest rami or nerve cluster and then immediately to the muscles. Sort of like the difference between a supermainframe and a server. This still begs the question of what the second brain is doing. It might be storing memories but not the kind of memories stored in the first brain upstairs. People who work with dancers and athletes and martial artists know that the body has a memory of sorts and that with training, you do not have to think about something to do it. In fact, thinking too hard (can't believe I said that) can be an obstacle to being "in the zone" of peak performance. To make this even more complicated, there are peak experiences that do involve thinking and the first brain. Meditation and miracles and healing and superior business management and classical composers and scientific genius are examples.
Are there any other aspects of the person? Actually, there might be.
10. your body electric -- No, we are not talking about wiring you up to be a robot or Borg. That is devolution and degeneration and becoming a gadget. Medical doctors have long known that the body is more than chemicals organized as organelles into cells which in turn are organized as tissues which in turn are organized into major organs (including the skin) which in turn are organized into about fifteen systems (nervous, circulatory, muscles, lymphatic, endocrine, etc.). But doctors prefer to cut (surgery), dose with artificial chemicals (pharmaceuticals) and zap (mostly cancerous X-rays but thank God there are now alternatives) because cutting, dosing and zapping is where the money is. What are doctors deliberately ignoring? That the body is also electric. If you do not believe that, then consider basic chemistry. Protons have positive charge. Electrons have negative charge. Physiology might be thought of as chemical cascades but the chemistry does not work without ions and flow of electrons and electrical fields. Consider that sensitive instruments can pick up microvoltages (pressure) from the body. Ask yourself how humans who are a system of microamps (current) can survive being hit by lightning but 90% of people struck do survive (though with nervous system and other organ damage). However, most bolts are negative. The rare positive bolt can exceed one billion volts and be hotter than the sun. [God is quite capable of reducing you to ashes in milliseconds.] The point is that we humans have detectible electrical fields and magnetic fields. There is even a little known field of medicine called biomagnetics but it is a very new field and still considered alternative health. Moreover, it is for treatment as opposed to diagnostics.
11. you may extend to more than three spatial dimensions -- Physics has long accepted that the universe has more than the dimensions that we can easily see. Perhaps you extend into an information dimension. Here we are talking about Chaos Theory. Instead of degrading humans to data as the singularity fanatics and transhumanists wish, we are raising people to fulfillment of Scripture and transcendence.
12. you exist in time as well as space -- Just as space has more than three dimensions, time has more than one dimension. A point in time has no dimensions. A timeline is a series of events such as you might study in history. When physicists talk of relativity or quantum mechanics and certainly when they talk of other universes, they are admitting the existence of many timelines. A timeline has one dimension. Two timelines exist in a "time plane" or two temporal dimensions. Many time planes exist in a time solid or three temporal dimensions. Beyond that would be hypertime with four temporal dimensions. Because talking about a fifth dimension is uncommon outside of the music world and mathematics, I will pick up the thought experiment when people are interested and can speak of time without referencing space. That is not likely to happen.
Knowing that humans are far more than objects to be stepped on by atheist communists or vermin to be incinerated by pagan Nazis or cattle to be herded by corporations that have taken rights that should belong only to individuals; we can begin to consider why God put us here in the universe. Duh! To explore the universe would seem obvious. Jesus promised eternal life and He even resurrected. Resurrection of a sort is now commonplace in emergency rooms. So with all this in mind, should we not consider making life more utopian and making the universe a paradise? Should we not do this instead of letting the mindless ephemerals (childlike at best) continue to make life hell?
Get the sociopaths out of office. Boycott the corporate polluters. Make the world a better place.
I might add one more item: 10. Stubborn refusal to let the warmongers, polluters and r-selection overpopulating majority win. The last refers to r/K selection theory from ecology.
A year ago, I would not have had an answer to the question: "Hey Toni! How exactly are we fallible humans who keep screwing up supposed to transform into something other than Borg? People worship gadgets and want to become gadgets despite the crashes, the hackers, and all the obvious problems with information technology. How exactly are we supposed to have a bright future other than that depressing Robot Apocalypse? How exactly are we supposed to get to this Promised Land? This continuum?" If I was asked all that a year ago, then I might have cleared my throat, hemmed, and uh, you know, not have an answer other than the pathetic: "It will take a lot of time and work."
Now I have a working plan to get from point A to point B. Or since this is Q&A, from point A to point Q. I listed the key parts of the plan in the first paragraph above. In another year, I might really scare you with the detail. But for now, we are using our faith in God instead of letting our Christianity rot or gather dust. We are using science and research instead of being deliberately stupid like the science haters (climate change deniers, anti-evolutionists, and those who want astronomers to have security clearances) and flat Earthers. The great thing about being a Christian Immortalist is that we harness the power of the supernatural and the natural not one or the other. Both.
In this respect, you need to know something about your self that bad religion, bad education, and bad pop culture have not bothered to tell you. You are a person. The transhumanists and the corporate world regards you as just data in their databanks of Big Data. The US Supreme Court has demoted you to second class citizen below corporations (so-called corporate personhood) and the rest of the government regards you as just some thing to be controlled and spied upon, but in the eyes of God, you are still His son or His daughter. You are an individual being composed of several aspects:
1. your divine nature -- the Bible says God is in us, born again Christians invite Christ in. The word "Christ" means anointed. Since we believe Christ is the Messiah (the One to come), I think that I am right in looking to the past, the present, and the future. The past includes knowledge of Judaism, First Century AD Palestinian Jews, Aramaic, the Hebrews, the Ancient Israelites, and the context of the culture of those times rather than trying to pretend that it was like today. Demonic people delight in destroying archaeological sites and slitting the throats of Christians and Jews. They embrace death (and will get it) while we embrace life. Literal immortality not nonsensical figurative immortality or metaphorical immortality. God is not dead. Neither should you be dead.
2. your spirit -- I used to think that this was exactly the same as your soul.
3. your soul -- I used to think that this was exactly the same as your spirit.
4. your will -- Also called volition or free will. One reason that Christians and Jews always harbor a suspicion of Big Government is that government employs Thought Police and uses taxpayer money to invade the privacy of taxpayers. Project MKULTRA is a fact. Look it up. They even experimented on children. No government (not the US, Russian or Chinese government) understands the concept of decency. All the major nations including the USA use torture and assassination. The US government was doing it before School of the Americas. The latest disappointment (there are so many where government is concerned) is finding out that author James Bamford somehow managed to underestimate how evil the NSA is. They invade everyone's privacy not to protect us from terrorists (they failed once again on 9/11) but in order to satisfy their perverted voyeurism and to have blackmail leverage on everyone, which makes them terrorists themselves. The FBI under cross-dressing J. Edgar Hoover tried this with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and recently the Pentagon tried to smear Julian Assange. I am proud to say that most Americans see right through this. We all know that Big Government only wants to crush the individual. Despite that, some scientific research indicates that free will is a reality however intangible it might be. And God is on the side of the individual not the government.
5. your mental intellect -- Your conscious thoughts. In most people, the ability to think is sadly underdeveloped. Thinking skills are taught sporadically if at all. Politicians, salespeople, advertisers, and some religions prefer that you not think at all but just do what you are told. "March into that hail of gunfire!" "Forget your rent money, buy my crappy product!" "Nevermind free broadcast television and PBS. Pay for cable!" "Buy this fast food full of sugar, salt and saturated fat! Throw the trash on some stranger's lawn instead of using all those plastic bags for litterbags!" (okay maybe the second part is implied) "Internal combustion is better than electric! Better because it deafens and destroys your hearing! Better because it fills garages with carbon monoxide! Real men like being covered with grease and having the car break down all the time!" "Have more children! Never mind that you cannot afford to send any of them to college!" "Strap this bomb on and blow yourself up in a crowd of pregnant women!" There are actually people who say things like that. Despite what atheists say, not all religion is anti-thought. Judaism in particular expects one to think. In yeshivahs, students are supposed to question and be able to cogently argue a point. We Christians could learn a few things from Jewish people. And I would not place too much credence on the anti-religious statements of atheists since communist atheists in Russia slaughtered about forty million people (pagan Hitler only killed six million Jews and another six million Gentiles) and the Chinese communist atheists have killed almost as many and continue to kill in Tibet. With a population of 1.4 Billion people, the communists figure that no one will notice missing people.
6. your emotions -- Humans have long noticed that thoughts and feelings sometimes are moving parallel in alignment, sometimes are moving in opposite directions, and sometimes simply are not on the same page. Another word for emotions or feelings is sentience.
7. your subconscious -- Your subconscious is there all the time but takes over from the conscious mind when you are asleep or dreaming. You can occasionally become aware that you are asleep and that is lucid dreaming when your conscious mind takes over from your subconscious. Likewise, during waking hours, you can daydream or fantasize and that is your subconscious taking over from your conscious mind. Do not confuse subconscious with unconscious where you have no thoughts at all but are not dead.
8. your conscience -- Also do not confuse conscious mind or subconscious with conscience which is the part of you that knows good from evil without being told. It is your moral sense or moral compass. Catholics in particular place stress upon heeding your conscience. If you violate your conscience, then you cannot and should not expect God to forgive you. For example a Brethren, Quaker or Mennonite conscientious objector believes that violating the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is a sin and so they refuse to serve in the military or they do alternative service or they go to prison or die rather than kill or they move to a country that won't make them serve in the military. Your conscience might be a part of your spirit or your soul or some other aspect of you and so I am not sure that it should be listed as an independent part of you. Also, sociopaths such as politicians and CEO's of polluting companies kill people by the millions by the orders they give. Sociopaths have no conscience with which to feel guilty. You probably know someone who is one of these walking dead. Philosophers might call them "philosophical zombies". I am not sure how someone can walk around with a vital part of themselves missing. Mind without body is a ghost. Body without mind is a zombie or golem or a gentile to believe some people. Forgive that last bit of humor. And since we are on the subject of missing parts, some black people during the Sixties believed that after five centuries of suffering abuse from white people that we white people lacked souls. That's where the terms soul brother and soul sister derive. Haitians who practice voodoo (until they get it right) believe that spirits (demons if you prefer) lurk waiting for a body to possess. Now if being in a soul cage as Sting puts it in his songs and if being on the mortal coil (as Shakespeare puts it) is such a bad thing, then why are the souls without bodies so anxious to get themselves a body? Demons must love all those Hindus and Buddhists (God bless them) who want to stop the endless cycle of reincarnation. Asia must be a good place to pick up a body if you are a demon. I put aside the question as to whether 21st Century Christians should believe in the existence of demons. Most people (atheists included) have no problem believing in Lucifer Satan Devil (LSD) because you can see evil everywhere. Somehow though they get amnesia about good in the spirit world and say something stupid like "God does not exist." The universe is pretty good evidence that God exists. The Jews are conclusive proof that God exists. With everyone (including Christians at certain junctures of history) trying to exterminate them, how have they survived? Being smarter than Gentiles? Perhaps. And perhaps God helped out (despite that European Holocaust incident). The point is that those humans who have sense will not get rid of their bodies not a thousand years from now and not a billion years from now. Speaking of bodies . . .
9. your physical body -- the biochemical part of you. Even your brain is different from your mind. Your brain is considered the part of your physical body where your mind hangs out so to speak. Long ago, humans used to think that the heart was the seat of the soul and the mind. After countless incidents of people being conked on the head over the millennia, we now know better. In recent years, researchers have discovered that the body has a second brain in the upper intestines or mesentery. Literally, all those times that we said someone had good gut instincts, we might have well guessed at the truth. This second brain obviously does not behave or perform in the same way as the primary brain in our skulls. However, it is well known in neurology that not every time we move instinctively or quickly (say to remove our hand from a hot object) are nerve cell messages going all the way up to the brain and then back down to muscles to yank our hand away. That would cost extra milliseconds and so evolution decentralized certain instincts for quicker response. The nerve cells relay to the nearest rami or nerve cluster and then immediately to the muscles. Sort of like the difference between a supermainframe and a server. This still begs the question of what the second brain is doing. It might be storing memories but not the kind of memories stored in the first brain upstairs. People who work with dancers and athletes and martial artists know that the body has a memory of sorts and that with training, you do not have to think about something to do it. In fact, thinking too hard (can't believe I said that) can be an obstacle to being "in the zone" of peak performance. To make this even more complicated, there are peak experiences that do involve thinking and the first brain. Meditation and miracles and healing and superior business management and classical composers and scientific genius are examples.
Are there any other aspects of the person? Actually, there might be.
10. your body electric -- No, we are not talking about wiring you up to be a robot or Borg. That is devolution and degeneration and becoming a gadget. Medical doctors have long known that the body is more than chemicals organized as organelles into cells which in turn are organized as tissues which in turn are organized into major organs (including the skin) which in turn are organized into about fifteen systems (nervous, circulatory, muscles, lymphatic, endocrine, etc.). But doctors prefer to cut (surgery), dose with artificial chemicals (pharmaceuticals) and zap (mostly cancerous X-rays but thank God there are now alternatives) because cutting, dosing and zapping is where the money is. What are doctors deliberately ignoring? That the body is also electric. If you do not believe that, then consider basic chemistry. Protons have positive charge. Electrons have negative charge. Physiology might be thought of as chemical cascades but the chemistry does not work without ions and flow of electrons and electrical fields. Consider that sensitive instruments can pick up microvoltages (pressure) from the body. Ask yourself how humans who are a system of microamps (current) can survive being hit by lightning but 90% of people struck do survive (though with nervous system and other organ damage). However, most bolts are negative. The rare positive bolt can exceed one billion volts and be hotter than the sun. [God is quite capable of reducing you to ashes in milliseconds.] The point is that we humans have detectible electrical fields and magnetic fields. There is even a little known field of medicine called biomagnetics but it is a very new field and still considered alternative health. Moreover, it is for treatment as opposed to diagnostics.
11. you may extend to more than three spatial dimensions -- Physics has long accepted that the universe has more than the dimensions that we can easily see. Perhaps you extend into an information dimension. Here we are talking about Chaos Theory. Instead of degrading humans to data as the singularity fanatics and transhumanists wish, we are raising people to fulfillment of Scripture and transcendence.
12. you exist in time as well as space -- Just as space has more than three dimensions, time has more than one dimension. A point in time has no dimensions. A timeline is a series of events such as you might study in history. When physicists talk of relativity or quantum mechanics and certainly when they talk of other universes, they are admitting the existence of many timelines. A timeline has one dimension. Two timelines exist in a "time plane" or two temporal dimensions. Many time planes exist in a time solid or three temporal dimensions. Beyond that would be hypertime with four temporal dimensions. Because talking about a fifth dimension is uncommon outside of the music world and mathematics, I will pick up the thought experiment when people are interested and can speak of time without referencing space. That is not likely to happen.
Knowing that humans are far more than objects to be stepped on by atheist communists or vermin to be incinerated by pagan Nazis or cattle to be herded by corporations that have taken rights that should belong only to individuals; we can begin to consider why God put us here in the universe. Duh! To explore the universe would seem obvious. Jesus promised eternal life and He even resurrected. Resurrection of a sort is now commonplace in emergency rooms. So with all this in mind, should we not consider making life more utopian and making the universe a paradise? Should we not do this instead of letting the mindless ephemerals (childlike at best) continue to make life hell?
Get the sociopaths out of office. Boycott the corporate polluters. Make the world a better place.