Originally posted by RJHinds
The following is part of what the apostle Paul wrote to the Corintihian Church about salvation.
For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, if indeed, ha ross. However, he may find himself naked with little reward for what he has done here on earth.
I'm not really sure how this addresses the question that I posed to checkbaiter. You say that any S1 that accepts Christ will map over to some S2 in heaven. But, suppose, S1 nevertheless has extreme character failings (suppose S1 is, say, Hitler or some such). Will the associated S2 exhibit similar character? If not, what reason do I have to believe that this S1 and S2 are one and the same person?
Also, based on the text you quoted (particularly the lines such as "We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body..." ), it seems that you are probably committed to some conception of the person as, at bottom, a disembodied soul or some such. Again, this is fundamentally a different view from galvo's, which prompted my inquiry. Again, my problem with such a view as your soul is that I completely fail to understand how such a thing could comprise a person, given that the properties normally associated with personhood, including psychological properties, seem to require a body. Do you have any actual evidence whatsoever that psychological capacities can exist absent some body?
Just to be clear, you do understand how the different views here in play differ, right? You seem committed to the idea that the person can persist absent a body. Galvo is not committed to this, since he maintains that person S1 ceases to exist at natural death, but is somehow reinstantiated later as S2, which he claims is one and the same person as S1, when God creates S2 in bodily form from memory. You, on the other hand, seem to think S1 persists regardless of whether S1 has a body or not.
So, again, my question for galvo is what reasons do I have to think S2 and S1 are numerically identical. My question for you would be what reasons do I have to think the psychological capacities we normally attach to personhood can exist in the absence of a body.