My thesis is DONE!

[Sethomas]

a soul is already in Heaven or Hell even before the human is conceived (on the scale of within the universe)... or does it make no sense to say this, given that the soul exists wholly outside of time?

In the early days, I held the view that heaven and hell were eternal states that exist parallel to all time, so in a sense it would be true that the soul is in them before its very conception. A few months ago I came to the concession that if the afterlife were eternal, it wouldn't be actively experienced and so it would be pointless, so I abandoned belief in the afterlife. A couple weeks ago I found a loophole in that the Catechism never affirms the eternity of heaven, so I took to the theory that the universe's expansion would slow down sometime in the future. So, the current idea is that if the afterlife exists at all, it does during the eon itself and is therefore not actually eternal, though by a technicallity it's endless.


If the universe is designed by the ethereal collective, why is it that causation exists?

I think that a large part is that coherence is more aesthetically pleasing than stochasticism. I know that this is not a particularly strong answer, but I've yet to really tackle this issue. Another thing is that I think that the laws of mathematics would be true no matter what, i.e., there could never be a universe in which 2+3=7.

But if you concede determinism, why should ethics matter?

I think that ethics matter for the perpetuation of the human race, but not nearly so much at the personal level as contemporary religion holds. I didn't write so much about it because I want to avoid stepping on toes, truthfully. There was a lot that I wanted to borrow from the last chapter of The Illusion of Conscious Will, but I figured I had quoted Wegner enough already.

What is it about the soul that makes it 'us'

I actually believe that it's best to leave this issue to whatever religion one abides by, simply for the fact that it's nothing that can be tested or scrutinized in a rigorous manner. I actually considered writing that the Hindu look on this makes a great deal of sense in Coeternalism, but I left it out for now. I do think it's possible that people share souls, or borrow souls, or whatever, but for now I'm just going to stick to the Catechism in my writings. Maybe later, though.