There are plenty of views that Christians hold, but one of the most popular views (I would guess among the laity, professional philosophers, and possibly church leaders) is substance dualism. While memories are clearly stored in the brain to a degree, or at least influenced by the brain, the dualist typically thinks those memories are also located in and available to the non-physical substance (a soul/mind/spirit/etc) that survives the death of the body. Since those memories survive the death of those neurons, they are never lost.
Another view that was perhaps more popular, and is perhaps also gaining popularity again, usually called idealism, is that there is no physical stuff that exists on its own. Instead, God creates other souls/minds/spirits, and God imagines a physical world, and then gives experiences to those souls/minds/spirits as though they were in a physical world, even though no such mind-independent physical world exists. On this kind of view, the memories at the time of death are remembered by God, or exist within the soul/mind/spirit who was experiencing being that human in that imagined world (this second option is much like the dualist view). And so in the resurrection, God merely needs to have that soul/mind/spirit again have an experience as of being in such a physical world with a body that now has those memories restored, or, if those memories are already located in that soul/mind/spirit, then no extra work is required. The memories are either remembered by God, or were and continue to be stored in the soul/mind/spirit.
A third view, perhaps even less common than the preceding two among Christians, is a kind of materialism, where we have no immaterial soul/mind/spirit, and we are just our bodies. On that kind of view, I would assume the story is that God knows how the body was constructed (including the memories encoded in the brain) prior to neurons being destroyed, and is therefore able to rebuild the body in the resurrection as it needs to be to ensure the right kind of psychological continuity. These kinds of miracles would be trivial for God as described by Christians.
There are a few other passages that seem to hint at it as well.
I'd describe it as a model of God that fits well with the Bible but which the Bible itself does not explicitly present.
So, bring it on :)
It's for this reason that absolute avoidance of "sin" is misguided, even assuming we could reliably identify it. We were always meant to eat from the Tree of Knowledge; it was there for a reason, and the alternative would've been a rather stagnant and meaningless existence - certainly devoid of suffering, but also of joy.
This resonates with what I've read about the gnostic understanding of the creation. The demiurge (the God of this world) created this world to have a ratio of 2/3 light and 1/3 darkness. Suffering and conflict is produced to create tension and perpetuate the system.
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference...
It’s easy to explain the suffering that can happen during one’s life as part of a wider experience which ultimately ends up being good, when the examples are adults with a range of experience and agency over their situation.
It’s less easy to explain why a good god has created an existence where a young child who doesn’t yet have agency over their existence contracts and dies of smallpox. Or is brutally raped and murdered. Or…
What’s the point of that exactly?
The LDS church, on the other hand, teaches that "As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be". I'm not familiar enough with LDS teaching, but if their god was once like us, then that means that this god did not create life, given that this god was a living thing before having the power to create life (and is this the same for that god's god? And the god of that god? And so on?). That suggests to me that this god is not the creator of physical reality (contrary to what Christians think), and not the original creator of life, and therefore is not as obviously responsible for a physical reality full of suffering as is God for Christians. The LDS god did not set up the original rules, and so can't be as responsible for them. That being said, the god of the LDS does seem to be very powerful, so that would give rise to some forms of the problem of evil.
These are just some poorly informed thoughts, and there's a lot I don't know about the LDS church.
Looking deeper, suffering is also necessary to allow for the gift of immortality to be a choice, and to be 'fair'-- those who cannot resist the desire to cause misery for others must be given the chance to demonstrate for everyone else why they should not be granted immortality. If God just snuffed them out at the first sign of trouble everyone would start to wonder if God was really being just. [Oh, I also didn't believe in eternal hell, just a final judgment where the 'bad guys' are all destroyed so the rest of us can actually start enjoying life without any more misery.]
You will find thousands of other quite different responses to this question because it is the most common question asked about God.
I don't really believe any of that stuff any more, but the beliefs I described brought me comfort for a long time in a dark place and I still think they make more sense than any other irrational, unprovable belief system I've looked into.
I have my own views on how to explain this, but it would take a fair bit to explain.
Bereavement is unavoidable but many religions promise an afterlife.
Child bone cancer and like are difficult to explain away. Perhaps we would have a cure for cancer if we didn't spend so much effort developing weapons and better advertising algorithms, but that is besides the point. I have heard Muslims believe that Allah will not inflict suffering on someone beyond what they can handle.
God, if they exists, could have created world we everyone were in a state of continually bliss, but what would be a point of that?
I find this a particularly inhumane way of thinking. Try saying that to someone suffering "oh, you can handle it", it's beyond cruel, yikes. Makes it sound like it's some type of blessing, like the little 3-yr old is meant to die of bone cancer because of some greater God's plan. I don't know, it's just sounds so wrong to me to think like that. Even life on earth is some sort of school for the afterlife, I don't think there is a lesson to be learned by dying of cancer as a young child.
> God, if they exists, could have created world we everyone were in a state of continually bliss, but what would be a point of that?
Yes please, isn't that what heaven is supposed to be?
> please, isn't that what heaven is supposed to be?
No, I doubt it would be like that, not like what a junkie experiences when they inject heroin in a vein. There would be some sort of meaning to it.
What would be the point of not doing that?
It's not really about individual suffering -- god could have created a universe in which suffering did not exist as a possibility or a concept. But it does so exist. Therefore God either intended it to be so, and condones or accepts or requires suffering, or God has limits that mean it had no choice but to create the universe this way, or there is no God.
Well, to be sure, you have to nudge a bit and create such circumstances to make sure there will be misery and wars. For starters start several opposing religious factions, all willing to do god's bidding and do horrible things in his name. Don't discourage it, leave your words in ancient manuscripts open to interpretation.
And, in the resurrection, we will be 3D printed back into existence.
I feel like any technologies we come up with could have superior analogues by the person able to come up with the laws of physics in the first place.
But restoration directly from the past is an interesting idea!
> Our reality is a constantly changing bubble. Within that bubble, both our future histories, as well as our past histories (!) are subject to change. This bubble of reality is an environment, set up by soul, to create experiences by which the consciousness can be exposed to.
https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/the-passage-of-time-is-a...
> Consciousness is created in Heaven, and needs to experience reincarnation to evolve.
https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/the-origin-of-consciousn...
> “time” is just our consciousness moving in and out of different world-lines. Each world-line is our momentary reality. During that “in between period”, our consciousness is in “wave form”, and we are in what is commonly referred to as “Heaven”.
https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/journey-of-souls-full-te...
Okay I laughed, and I’m not ashamed to admit it
--
Edit: The browser history still exists, although I cannot disprove that it was created Last Thursday; 'twas the comment near the bottom of this thread that intrigued me with its sole content, that link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755748
I do not want to start a discussion on Christianity, just to point to that there is a more subtle understanding in the church whether or not you believe in it.
At the end of Revelation there is a declaration that ~"there will be no more crying, or tears, or death, or pain, for the former things have passed away," and some interpret that to mean humans will not remember anything from life in the old universe.
It's an interpretation, though, not something the text outright says.
During my life as a Biblical literalist, I saw it as simply saying that a world with hardship and suffering was no more, and that our memories of those times would be recontextualized.
Thanks.
In short, he distinguishes between the brain and the mind (consciousness, memories, etc). While the brain may be required for an embodied creature to use their mind, they are not the same thing.
If a bomb vaporized your brain you would cease to be an embodied creature and you wouldn't have a mind anymore. You can test this theory yourself but only once.
You actually can't test this theory at all, if it's correct.
On destruction of your body, if the mind does not continue, you cannot observe its discontinuance. Thus, you cannot test the theory.
If the theory is false, then you could presumably falsify it by this technique.