So. I guess I would say that where Abrahamic religion strikes me as uniquely valuable
Is that it conceives of the person and the religious polity as in time in a different way, an open-ended way.
The end-state of a person is NOT ACTUALLY KNOWN, nor knowable
Covenants of communities are broken and repaired
(I am speaking of course of Abrahamic religion as it can be, not as it usually is)
I broke with Buddhism for two reasons: one, that it took the end-state for known and static. It will be like a moment of illumination and plenitude, except for ever and ever, it will be an ecstatic death. And two, that a person’s quiddity was simply a mask and an illusion. Those were my two reasons. Neither of those two things can be quite right. We labor in ignorance. We are seeds of something we can’t understand, but are reaching toward. We will arrive in places whose existence we could not have guessed. But we will arrive as selves which also we could not have guessed, but which are threaded on an unbreakable thread to who we are right now, individual and indelible. Change is real. History is real. Our past is real.
Are we immortal? I don’t know. In some sense, maybe. But just as certainly, we have to really die. Those three days, Good Friday to Easter, are not optional, not notional. The resurrection wasn’t theater. Jesus was stone dead.
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