Bruce Charlton's Notions

One lethal consequence of the mainstream modern assumption that death is annihilation, is that it renders this mortal life merely palliative. 

Because life is assumed to end in nothingness, mortal existence cannot be more than palliative: i.e. a series of temporary attempts to avoid or alleviate suffering... and maybe attain some temporary pleasures.

This nihilism is what seems like ordinary "common sense" to the modern Western mind, and has done for several generations. 

It is the great benefit of assuming a continuation of life beyond this mortal life, that it makes it possible to have a positive purpose - because there is the prospect of carrying-forward something of whatever we have done in this life. 

This benefit of a potentially purposive life, may derive from a variety of convictions about the nature of life-beyond-life (e.g. resurrection, reincarnation, forms of paradise etc). 

The point is that a continuation of our life after death is what makes purpose possible; whereas the contrary belief that we are extinguished at death, makes any subjective feeling of life-purpose into just a futile delusion. 

Given that so many people in The West (especially among the higher and leadership classes) apparently regard their own death as absolute the end of themselves, and anything else as mere wishful thinking -- many things about the experienced futility and evil of life in Western modernity become understandable - indeed inevitable.  

Because emotions are partly physical, we cannot lead a spiritually satisfactory mortal life. 

This statement sounds startling (or just plain false!) but it derives from the nature and properties of emotions; and their role in this mortal life. 

Emotions derive, significantly, from the state of our physical bodies - our body state (including especially the hormone and neural activity) as sensed and interpreted by our brains. This is not the whole story, but there is a sense in which we cannot get away from the physical when it comes to emotions. 

There have been many attempts through history to train people to become spiritually independent of the emotions - i.e. the tradition of religious asceticism. 

But all valid authorities agree that humans can never be wholly free of the passions: the spirit can never become independent of the body. The tyranny of emotions may be diminished, but this lessening is never more than a quantitative change; a reduction of the causative drive; but never an elimination of our subjection to emotion. 

Furthermore, when asceticism works and there is a successful diminution of the strength of emotions - this has bad effects as well as the desired good ones. There is some degree of demotivation, and of disengagement from life; because it is emotions that link us to the world, other people, other beings. 

For instance, the technical word for a person who lacks sympathy or empathy - which means the capacity to feel the emotions of another - is psychopath. A psychopath is one who lacks the automatic and innate response to resonate emotionally with others. 

It is this unemotionality which (to some degree) underpins cold, selfish cruelty without remorse.  

Thus on the one hand we are (to an extent) slaves to our emotions, hence our bodies - and bodies are subject to the entropic changes of degeneration, disease and death; and also to the temptations of evil. 

Yet if it was possible to reduce or eliminate emotionality; we would also thereby lessen vital aspects of our basic humanity. 

For me, this emphasizes that our mortal life is not the kind of thing that can be perfected; and that even the scope for improvement is limited, since there is a "swings and roundabouts" quality to many basic human changes. 

And, in turn, this brings me back to the fact that when Jesus offered Mankind the chance of resurrected eternal life in Heaven - a life in which we remain our-selves, and retain our emotional nature but perfected by love; He was offering the greatest gift that it was possible for us to receive - and exactly the best response to this fundamental problem of human existence. 

It is striking (when you think about it) how it is easy to recognize - and be confident of the identity of - evil actions; but not good ones. 

There are plenty of well known actions that are evil with such a high degree of certainty as to make it nigh impossible to imagine any situation in which they could deliberately and consciously be done from genuinely good motivations.   

Yet, because good and evil are not symmetrical, the same does not apply to good actions. I can't think of any action that is good in and of itself - what makes it good comes from the motivation, and from that motivation proceeding from a full accordance with God's creative will. 

This is why it is so much easier to talk about "goodness" in double-negatives; in terms of opposing evil rather than genuinely doing good. 

It is the doing of good that is the problem; because nothing "done" is good in and of itself - we just can't get away from why it is done.   

People really want good to be definable in terms of acts; because if it could be, then good could be made into a plan, described in bullet points; and "implemented" on the world and other-people.  

Yet it is the fact that good cannot validly be thus conceptualized that has made all schemes for making-the-world-a-better-place (i.e. the entirety of politics and social engineering) into the realm of such self-deception, lies and horrors.

I suspect that we can only really-do real-good in those sadly-brief moments in which we are ourselves really good - when really-are on God's wavelength, as it were. 

And of course that means that the real-good which is done by us is only seldom in any objectively observable or definable form - but most likely to be in our thinking, a particular choice, a word or phrase, or some very particular (maybe unnoticed) action.  

 A book recommendation for people who like this sort of thing. 

Salvation - resurrected eternal life in heaven - should be the direction of our life, not its goal. 

A direction provides a context and perspective for living. We know where we are going, we know we are going there - and we live in that environment of expectation. 

This direction shapes Christian life. 

But when salvation is instead understood as the goal of our life; then Christianity gets to be something like a politician trying to get elected, or studying for a scholarship examination, or winning a court case. 

We are already in God's family - it's a matter of recognizing that family as good, a matter of affiliating with our family (similar to the choice that most adolescents are confronted with). A matter of affiliating our purposes with those of our divine family; and therefore not affiliating our purposes with others who have chosen to reject (and attack?) that divine family.

Christian life isn't about believing and doing a "million" things derived from scripture, nor about obeying a million instructions from a church. 

It is (or should be) about aligning ourselves with a few, and simple, understandings of reality.

All this is part of weaning our-selves off the expectation that our personal faith ought to satisfy some external this-worldly arbiter; I mean the strange but prevalent notion that "what matters" is justifying ourselves to "other people" - (or to what we infer about other people, since we seldom really know with surety). 

It often seems to me that the greatest but most misguided act of faith is in the superior-to-ourselves honesty, competence and motivations of "other people" - whether those people are current or past, whether written or embodied in a bureaucracy. 

I see this as an attempted denial of ultimate personal responsibility for our own Christian understanding, faith and life; and I regard protestations that this deference to "other people" is due to the virtue of humility, to be nearly always a false evasion (as evidenced by their gross - ahem - "lack of humility" in all other respects!). 

But in the end this issue of humility just kicks the can; since understanding the nature, role and importance of humility is yet another issue about which we must decide whether to take personal responsibility, or to submit to the Superior wisdom) of other-people...

And then: how can we (how actually do we) discern which other-people are of superior wisdom to ourselves? If we answer in terms of a consensus of history; then which consensus? 

And why should consensus be wiser than the individual - who says, and is it right that those who say it must be believed? 

Wherever we squirm, we will find that ultimately everything has been underpinned by our own personal decision and choices. I think we will also find that the reality of our solid faith is much much simpler than the millions upon millions of explanations and rules and practices that are supposedly "Christianity" - and which we have actually derived by subordinating our personal responsibility to a wide range of "other people" - about whose competence, nature and intent we are essentially ignorant. 

That the highest level of the Western Establishment are all-out attempting to engineer an all-out World War III is now becoming generally acknowledged among those who are minimally-informed and can think. 

But their reason for doing so is still nearly-always misunderstood - because the ultimate explanation for why the globalist "elites" want such a war invariably grounds-out in terms of the desire for money and power. 

Whereas the real reason is spiritual, is evil; and is concerned with damnation rather than with this-world. 

In a nutshell: the global-elites want WWIII and they want it now because they are servants of demons (or actually demonically possessed); and the demons believe that the kind of war they desire will lead to mass damnation - in a way that world wars of the past probably did not. 

There are different levels of power in the Establishment, and different reasons why war would lead to damnation. 

The highest level of people of whom we know the names (but who are in fact dupes of the real global elites) are the likes of multi-national and national leaders, senior managers of mega-corps, media barons, tech moguls, and max prestige intellectuals. 

These mostly want WWIII because they believe it will make them richer and/or more powerful (and get more sex/ torture of the kind they desire); and because they regard the Little People as Human Resources at best, and useless eaters in the mass. 

Others among them have embraced transcendental value-inversion, and believe that war will enable them to persuade or impose such values upon the world.   

And such motivations are more than sufficient to ensure that when these lose power, status, wealth as a consequence of war and die, they will do so in despair. And some will actively choose damnation because to them, real-evil is regarded as "good" (and vice versa). 

The mass of Western bureaucrats, functionaries, officials, middle managers, teachers, entertainers and the like; passively approve of WWIII from a mixture of deliberate self-blinding and ignorance, dishonesty in thought/ speech and deed (so that they either refuse to believe what is actually happening - including in war, or interpret it to mean the opposite), and from their obedience to power in pursuit of status, security, fame etc. 

These myrmidons-of-evil are mostly fuelled by fear, resentment, envy, pride, luxury, and other sins that they regard as virtues. 

They disbelieve in the reality of God, divine creation, and Jesus Christ - and will choose damnation because they regard the whole idea of salvation as childish, dumb, insane, or evil.  

Although not so extremely evil as the above, and more likely therefore to repent and choose salvation (post-mortally, if not before) the Western masses are Godless and a-spiritual; and therefore have become thoroughly corrupted by short-termism and selfishness, by cowardice and hedonism.

These too are likely to choose damnation - in substantial numbers, at least. 

This - or something like it - is the economy of damnation that has led those most demonic (who are also among the most powerful) to unrelenting and strategic efforts to engulf the world in war. 

Past wars were often double-edged in their effect on damnation; with Men pushed towards extremes of virtue, as well as vice. 

But now, with the world as it currently-is; global and unrestricted war apparently looks to the demons like a near certain bet for damnation on a truly colossal scale - which explains the escalating rhetoric or and unending stream of ever-more-extreme provocations and atrocities.  

**

Note: The economy of damnation works on probabilities and percentages of men in the mass. Of course, any individual is always free to repent up until the final post-mortal commitment; but the demons can do nothing about that. They work by trying to make it as sure as possible that repentance will not happen - by inducing people to want and choose... something (anything!) else than salvation. 

Heidegger is credited with having given a name - in German Geworfenheit, in English "Thrownness" - for the situation in which we already-find-ourselves in the world; that realization (which often happens during adolescence) that we are in an already-existing world - as if we had been thrown into existence, and must make of it what we can. 

Thrownness is, it seems to me, part of the development of consciousness - an aspect of the awakening of self-consciousness; which on the one hand is a separation from The World; and on the other hand the possibility of freedom. 

Thrownness can therefore be understood (and felt) as fundamentally negative-alienation or as positive-agency. 

Thrownness is, of course, both alienation and agency - the one cannot be without the other. But if there is meaning to thrownness, fundamentally one aspect must be primary, and the other secondary.

People react to the sense of thrownness in many ways, often (it seems) negatively - as when they complain "but I didn't ask to be born!" 

And when people react in that way, they seldom realize that by doing so they have already "begged the question"; in other words, by regarding thrownness as "not my fault" they have already assumed that their own life has no purpose or meaning. 

However, as always, the experience of thrownness is not a raw-fact; but brings with it its own interpretation - it arises in the context of a theory which gives meaning. 

Indeed; feeling that one has been "thrown" into the world willy-nilly, and without consent, to sink-or-swim; is embedded in a set of assumptions - which seem to me to point-at an unloving, or perhaps evil, deity who does the "throwing". 

More often, thrownness is supposed to be evidence for (or consistent with) atheism: an emotional subjective response to the operations of blind and indifferent material-causality and/or random chance.  

Yet, even for a theist who believes that this is a creation we inhabit, and that each living-soul has some purpose and meaning to his existence; there is an underlying existential aspect to this awakening into awareness of "me, here, now" - because it usually seems that creation is already up-and-running, and already has a divine purpose and "rules". 

We therefore find-ourselves confronted by a necessary choice: 

Do we, or shall we) personally approve-of, or do we instead reject, this ongoing creation in which we awake and find-ourselves?   

It seems to me important that we recognize this as a choice, and take personal responsibility for the way that we answer it.

Indeed; I think this is one of those choices that always gets answered in our lives: implicitly if not explicitly, unconsciously when not consciously...

That is: we shall always be taking either an adversarial or affiliative (negative or positive) attitude towards ongoing divine creation. 

Either choosing to join-with and be an ally to God; or else God's enemy. 

I tackle this vital matter over at the Notion Club Papers blog - focusing on the specific example of the author and "Inkling" Charles Williams (1886-1945).

Thinking is much more difficult and rare than doing - it is also of low status; which is why so little thinking gets done. 

I first realized this some forty years ago when I began to work as a laboratory research scientist, and noticed that there was (in the biological and medical sciences anyway) extremely little thinking about the meaning of what we were doing. 

There was, indeed, active hostility (and scorn) directed against anything that challenged, or even seriously analysed, whatever the currently-accepted meanings and purposes of research-doing. 

The ratio of doing to thinking was so high, that it seemed to me that very few bioscientists ever thought consecutively and in a focused way for even ten minutes about their subject, or even their results. 

(I formulated this in a kind of slogan that anyone who did succeed in thinking for ten minutes about the implications and purposes of some research, thereby became a leading theoretician in that field.)

I was much more disposed towards thinking-hard than I was to doing-hard (long hours in the lab were mostly a chore, though this was my daily work environment for more than seven years, in the end); I soon decided that my "edge" as a scientist would come from focusing on solo theory rather than the usual practice of trying to generate vast quantities of data by forming vast teams of collaborators*

I felt, and still feel, that this was a flaw in the biosciences and medicine (attempting to remedy which was why I edited Medical Hypotheses for seven years) - and I think the same applies to other sciences. 

So far as I can gather - even the theoretical scientists don't really think, but just apply externally-learned models in a routine fashion. In other words; theory is not thinking! - or, seldom so.  

Eventually; this insight became a kind of Master Theory about Life! For nearly everybody, it seems that the ratio of doing to thinking is way too high; indeed apparently infinitely high in many people (i.e. they never think consecutively and in a focused way; so the ratio is some-quantity, divided by zero).  

And this is a major reason why our civilization is where it is: self-painted into a corner where it is purposively destroying itself - and simultaneously trying to bring-down the rest of the world from spite.  

No amount of doing will help - only thinking. 

Some serious and sustained thinking... very likely coming at the cost of less doing. 

*Note - on-average modern researchers do Not, contrary to almost universal perception, publish significantly more papers than earlier scientists who worked largely alone. What the moderns actually do, is work in much larger teams, and share in more publications. The bigger the team, the more shared-publications. But when the number of publications is divided by the number of authors (which has increased many-fold) - there seems to have been no significant change in average publication rates. 

We cannot know what to do, so long as we are wrongly-motivated.

This is something everybody seems to find it very difficult to grasp and hold-onto... 

That, while we are in a situation of wrong-motivation, we cannot know what is best for us to do. 

Therefore; any plans we make while wrongly-motivated, will be bad plans - will make things worse. 

As Western society as a whole, and a large majority of its individual persons, are here-and-now so very wrongly-motivated - there is currently no possibility at all of making - or even recognizing - plans for a better future. 

Yet, this is what people constantly clamour for! Indeed, they demand detailed flow-charts of how to manufacture a better future. 

Unsurprisingly; all the strategies that emanate from The West, and are supported by the usual run of corrupt and dishonest Westerners - are dystopian in the extreme! Their methods and aims are nightmarish, claustrophobic, anti-human, anti-life; because that is the only kind of plan we can imagine. 

This ought to be obvious common sense. And it is a measure of the depth of corruption that it is not obvious - and that so many people instead suppose that people and societies who have embraced value-inversion yet deny it, might somehow be able to contrive a "road map" to social regeneration...

Before we can even imagine a better world and how to get it - let alone commence to make such a world; we must first become better people...

Indeed; not just "better" but transformed people: transformed in terms of our motivations; or it could be said transformed in terms of our perspective on reality and our place in it.

This sounds wildly optimistic and ambitious; and yet it it is a thing that any person can do for-himself; and cannot be prevented from doing.

It's all a question of wanting; and so we return to motivation...  

In his Exegesis; Philip K Dick often returns to the theme that God - and The Good - could be found among the "trash" of civilization - and only among the trash:

The right place to look for the Almighty is, e.g., in the trash in the alley. And for Satan in vast cathedrals etc. 

This fitted with PKD's sustained interest in historical Gnosticism; by which this world is made by The Devil, who is an evil demiurge; such that God (and Good) can only penetrate this world (and eventually redeem it - make it good) by stealth and in-disguise. 

Such Gnosticism (which he knew of partly via his friend the Bishop of California Jim Pike, who was involved in translating the Nag Hammadi library) appealed to PKD because he was very aware of the evils of this world, especially its suffering. 

PKD could not make intuitive sense of the traditional-orthodox-canonical Christian view that such a world as we inhabit was created and sustained by a wholly-good and omnipotent God. On the other hand; PKD was not satisfied by the explanations of Gnosticism either - and therefore the Exegesis displays many oscillations and explorations, and never settles on a final or wholly-satisfying explanation. 

Leaving aside what I regard as the mistaken metaphysical assumptions of ancient Gnosticism (and indeed traditional canonical Christianity) - there is certainly a strong case to be made that real Christianity is now to be found only among the detritus and at the edges of modern Western Culture; and not in the cathedrals, temples, churches, seminaries and theological colleges, or their like. Nor indeed in mainstream mass media; nor high status education and academia.  

As Western Culture has become totalitarian and corrupted - then every-thing that is mainstream, official, popular, powerful, wealthy and high status; has been brought within the evil-motivated totalitarian System, and under the ultimate control of literal demons. 

Here-and-now; any-thing that is not on-board-with, and supportive-of, the totality of systemic evil is forced to the margins; and demonized as "trash". 

Christians themselves are already - and increasingly - regarded-as, and treated-as, trash by the world of mainstream officialdom and mass media; and the more truly-Christian a person may be, the more he will be despised. 

So that the end-result is superficially very much as assumed by ancient Gnostics and their sympathizers such as PKD; despite that PKD was essentially a man-of-the-left, and there is a significant element of 60s counter-culture "nostalgie de la boue" -style posturing about the notion of seeking "God" in the trash!

Nonetheless, and despite all reservations and contextualization; it is probably true in essence. 

Although most of the trash of our civilization is indeed rubbish, and some of it is very evil; as of 2024, in The West, we won't find God anywhere else. 

The Western ruling class's preparations to create and escalate global war have been yet another Litmus Test of our time...

Revealing that the vast majority of even those commenters who regard themselves as solidly anti-Left "realists", cannot comprehend how bad things really are. 

There has been for many years, and it is still increasing, a repetitive trope about how dumb, stupid, and all-round incompetent are the Western leadership class. 

Anti-Woke analysts and commenters work themselves into a frenzy of exposition concerning declining IQ, declining competence, and idiotic doubling-down on mistakes. 

All this is perfectly true, in itself - but incompetence is not the underlying and causal problem! 

The big problem is evil, not incompetence. 

The problem is evil motivations.

The problem is what the ruling class want; not their inability to achieve it!

If the ruling class were more able and intelligent (and less corrupt) then they would be using their competence to do more evil. 

The reason this is a Litmus Test is that it reflects the inability of most people, of almost everybody - it seems, to acknowledge and recognize the reality of deliberate, purposive evil.

Most people don't even seem to notice that the "incompetence" always works in the same direction (i.e. towards evil) - whereas genuine incompetence would err on both sides of right action, and would sometimes seek good by accident! 

And if you can't see evil when it is staring you in the face and doing its best to destroy the world... well, then you are absolutely certain to get it badly wrong about the motivations of the Western ruling class.  

My understanding is that we originated in terms of divine creation as spirit-Beings, living in a situation of "obedient love" with respect to God. 

In that sense we began as "angels" - perfectly-Good servants and messengers of God, but without agency (i.e. "free will").

This was our spiritual childhood, because we loved by means of obedience. We found our-selves living "in" God's love, but un-consciously; therefore passively and spontaneously we accepted love as the basis for life (and creation). 

As consciousness developed (some Beings developed faster than others, and probably some did not develop to this point) we became agents capable of choice. Capable of choosing to accept or reject our then-current state. 

We became capable of choosing to reject the state of living "in" love. 

Then some pre-mortal spirits (i.e. the demons - and perhaps the Devil first of all) chose to reject and oppose God and divine creation. The rejecters remain as pre-mortal spirits, but have chosen disobedience to God and opposition to divine creation. 

Thus evil entered creation.   

Others chose the next step in development; which is to incarnate as a mortal Beings - after which temporary phase there is the opportunity actively to choose to live eternally "in" love; as resurrected incarnate Beings in the state of Heaven. 

Thus; we begin as spirits unconsciously living in a child-like state of obedient love; then (due to Jesus Christ's work) those of us who chose the temporary path of mortal incarnation will have the opportunity consciously to opt-into living eternally in a mature-adult state of chosen love.  

The pre-mortal state is one of living wholly in-love, but it is not Heaven; nor is it conscious, nor active. 

Heaven is a wholly-Good state inhabited by those who have-been mortal incarnates, and who then have consciously chosen to live eternally in-love.  

The point of this post is to emphasize that we have not known Heaven. Heaven lies in our future (if we make that choice) but not in our past. 

In this UK and US election year, people are induced to focus on power, and what they think they might do with it if they got it - or what those we most dislike might do it us if the power went to them. 

But in a society in which evil motivations predominate - and where personal motivation is at an all-time historical nadir - such that people are easily induced to be motivated for or against almost anything, and then abandon or reverse this motivation on a sixpence... 

In such a society of endemic, pervasive, near-universal demotivation and false motivations - the distribution of power is of very subordinate relevance.   

Unless the problem of motivation is first solved - that is, unless people are motivated towards Good rather than evils, and their motivations are internal and personal rather than passively responsive to external manipulation - then distribution of power is almost irrelevant. 

In a situation where Good is absent altogether (or motivated so feebly as to be a misleading distraction); we can (and are encouraged to) analyse and quibble about the lesser of evils, which particular fake-puppet-personality we prefer from a cast of obedient-drones and controllable-psychopaths.

But all available options are wrongly-motivated; therefore all options are evil - and, in a complicated and chaotic world - a world consisting of distortion, hype and outright lies; which particular option is the least evil cannot be predicted.  

The imperative is to recognize just how very bad things are - ultimately in a spiritual sense - and that from this spiritual corruption comes the situation of endemic, pervasive, near-universal demotivation and false motivations. 

Hardly anyone I speak-with or read seems remotely to realize the depth and extent of our current civilizational malaise - and this indictment includes all the most famous and influential "dissenting" voices.

From where we actually are, the only positive way forward entails a transformation and reversal of many of those assumptions that we hold most dear, or regard as obvious and unchallengeable. 

That is just how it is. 

Whether it is at all likely to happen is another matter! But that's what must happen - else present trends will continue towards predictably destructive ends. 

When so many people expend so much energy propagating that you've got to believe-in... something; then you eventually realize that nobody really believes in anything. 

For a long time, people could be induced to believe in things by social structuring; then for a while-more belief was created and sustained by inducing people to participate in rituals, study, self-disciplines; and then that phase passed. 

For a short period more; it was widely asserted that this inability to believe meant that anyone could believe anything - simply by choosing. 

Someone could - by wanting - learn to "believe-in yourself", or believe-in any kind of religion, spirituality, or political ideology...

Someone could (it was said) induce belief by replacing external social structures with a personally-chosen framework....

The implicit theory was something-like this: 

First; you chose what to believe...

Then you build your own belief-sustaining system...

Finally you stepped inside and... 

Believed - from then-onwards.  

Yet that interchangeability of belief also implied that if you could believe any-thing, then you ought to be believe... whatever was currently-approved/imposed by the rulers. 

Because if not, if there was no consensus of belief; then "chaos would ensue"; than which anything is better (so most people felt). 

Meanwhile - nobody really believed anything: because belief was (for pretty obvious reasons!) self-subverted by its own arbitrary-ness. 

If we can "believe anything" then, actually, we cannot believe anything.

And that is where things now stand. 

Believe-in doesn't work. 

Now, what we need is to-know. 

And that means we need to know without having first to believe-in. 

And that means we need to know directly, by a single inner act of knowing that does not depend on any intermediaries that must be believed-in...

That is we need to know without believing that words/ concepts/ symbols capture -real-reality, we need to know without having first to believe-in some particular person or institution (or church).  

Direct-knowing in this way can be called intuition - and it not only can but must become the ultimate basis for life, because it is the only potentially solid basis: the only basis that is not merely a floating island adrift in the sea of culture. 

Direct-knowing is when the island of our expressed belief is merely the tip of a root that extends to the bedrock of reality. 

And on that rock...

 1. Mainstream Western Secular Materialism

This world is entropic - Life arises accidentally from unlife and soon reverts to it. All that is personal and distinct is temporary and tends towards disorder. Annihilation of every-"thing" is the ultimate destination.

2. Oneness

This world began and ends as One, anything else is illusion. The tendency is towards dissolution of all that is distinct; all beings, all persons, all "things", our-selves.

3. Christian 

The persons, beings, forms of this entropic and illusory world, are a learning-stage or phase, en route to the potential choice of eternal resurrection.

The distinctively Christian essence of resurrection is that our ultimate goal and destiny can be one in which some individual persons, beings, life, forms... order and structure; may choose to become everlasting.

These three world-views are incompatible. Only one can be real, and we can choose only one. 

I think it is best to consider which we would most desire for ourselves; and if the answer is Christian, then recognize that our destiny is one that we must (therefore shall) choose.