Nearly everybody nowadays (except young children, and maybe some residual tribal people) believes that the universe was originally unalive, and most of it is still unalive.
And this is a shared assumption among mainstream modern materialists, and all of the major Western religions.
The assumption that there was a time when the universe was just physics, biology came along much later - and consciousness later still.
The addition of God doesn't make all that much difference; because God is supposed to have created unalive physics first, then plants then animals; and only to have added conscious humans at the end of the process...
So that the unalive world of physics is still asserted to be the first and predominant reality.
Modern people - religious and atheistic - conceptualize themselves as islands of life (plus or minus consciousness) in a vast ocean of unlife.
This unlife-assumption is one of the iron chains that unbreakably binds modern Man's soul to the ideology of atheistic materialism. Because the assumed possibility - and even worse predominance - of unlife, negates the divine in ways that are crippling.
For instance, the unlife-assumption renders the individual here-and-now powerless whenever that individual lacks the material power to change the unalive environment.
the sheer mass of the unalive seems to be a colossal inertia, such that (with such a picture of reality in our minds) it feels like an individual spirit cannot overcome that mass.
If the physics world of the unalive is given temporal priority and spatial predominance (i.e. the unalive came first and comprises most of reality); then the spiritual is thereby rendered secondary in importance and minority on influence.
These assumptions make it very hard to believe, to convince ourselves, that the spiritual in me (e.g. here and now); can really affect the vast ocean of unlife in which I am supposed to be dwelling.
Little me thinking versus All That Stuff... How can "I" possibly make a significant difference?
It is so hard to believe, because it is so hard to understand - we can't make sense of it, with such a world-model we can't think of a plausible mechanism of action.
Thus, the context of a prior and predominant unalive universe; makes it very hard to grasp how "the individual spirit", - for example my own current conscious aspirations and commitments - really can and does make an ultimate difference to reality-as-a-whole...
Yet surely that is what Jesus taught as the truth? That what you or I think or want, here and now, can make an eternal and universal difference?
It seems to me that we need to drop the assumption of an unalive universe, and to return to that assumption with which we entered the world; the assumption of all reality being alive and conscious (to various degrees).
We need, therefore, to discard the "physics, biology, humanity" sequence of creation - whether that model comes from from the Old Testament, or from "science".
If we can then (and it is difficult indeed! Or, at least, I find it so) develop the original and true habit of regarding reality as alive, conscious, purposive etc - then Theism and Christianity begin to make understandable sense, we can grasp how the assertions may actually "work".
If we can recognize and discard the unlife assumption; can re-learn to think of everything as alive; and thereby relegate physics to the realm of more, or less, expedient models, but never "real-reality"...
Then I think we will find that claims and promises of Christianity can make a kind of obvious, "common sense".
After which clarity and grasp of understanding is attained; salvation becomes a simple matter of whether or not we personally want what Jesus offers.
Note: The above is a different and somewhat novel way of describing the "metaphysics of beings" that I have been propounding on this blog and elsewhere, for the past several years.)
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