>>15996
>What do you mean here
In another way of saying. Although it's, at the least, arrogant of me to presume I'm capable of rewording the passage while still retaining the same meaning. Probably better said as, the most literal example of where I derive this thought from. **Or rather, it follows along with my own reasoning for what I'm even experiencing as a living thing."
>But creation certainly was made "and then" never interacted with again
First of all, there's no possible way you can prove this. As a Christian this is ironic to say, but I suspect you aren't a Christian (I think it's a bit obvious as you give hints throughout), so it bears saying. I had considered the basic premise of your thoughts, since "with" is ambiguous and bears some preliminary probing, and my initial assessment of the idea is that it merely hides away the original foundational problem: what is existence? By replacing the Uncreated with a creation that exists within its own logic, that doesn't change the initial problem of what it's even doing. We can point to a cause and an effect of the external face of our perceptions for an eternity, speculate about the mechanisms, if there are any, that drive them, but it'll never amount to any knowledge of what it, in the most general sense, is. We can never prove that reality is unreal or even real. It's a non-falsifiable statement. No one, given our limited ability to perceive, would ever be able to prove it, even if they "knew" what it really was.
I realize this isn't what you're saying. I'll throw away this idea of proof and just work with the information being given, so I can work with a creation that isn't subject to temporal constraints. To begin with, it is circular to claim that reality contains time when it's only ever a perception that I project into it, assuming that reality is separate from my own conscious perception of it. Let's, assuming what I've assumed, throw away the idea of reason as well, as it's meaningless to think of an intellect capable of assimilating and working with, creating by its own structure, a network capable of relating every facet of its own experience, both reasonable and merely sensual, into itself. There no longer is a need for assimilation, things simply are, and my perception of such a misconception as there being a time in which I've realized something is, for whatever reason, delusion. No, even by the initial point, I can say absolutely nothing, since there's no possible relationship between creation and itself, ever. It's just a jumbled mess and the rest of your thought process follows. If there is no connection between one moment or the other, even the existence of a moment, then there's nothing that could be said about it other than, "it exists". That is, it's created.
From my thinking, all of this doesn't even bother to take into account the idea that regardless of whether it's true or not, your perception, my perception, any human's perception, is limited by its constraints and any speculation that tries to go beyond it is literally epistemologically impossible.
>the fact of the matter is that He shares the same relationship to our minds since they, even if left distinct from the material, are still Created and subordinate to His hand in the same way as everything else
My position is much more that creation essentially acts by itself, using the wisdom that God bestowed to it. I'm not sure if this is entirely biblical. God made us, gave us life, gave us our soul, but within this condition we're able to act by our own will. Even if this weren't "true" in a literal sense of "independent of perception", we still perceive it as such no matter how much we attempt to deny it.
>The position "At the end of all things you'll ascend to the godhead" is just nihilism with bright metaphors
Is Christianity nihilism? If I interpret faith as an acknowledgement of implicit unbelief, then sure. It's nihilistic in the sense that it rejects the world, although what that world actually means is not something I'm going to bother thinking about for now. No, I don't think it can be called nihilistic within itself, it puts emphasis on the existence of God above all else. The only way it can be nihilistic is if it rejects human reasoning and human experience. In the Nietzschean sense, it's nihilistic since it denies the striving for life inherent in all creatures. In a luxuriously loose sense, it's anti-life. I don't think someone can seriously claim this idea of nihilism without it being a tongue-in-cheek comment.
>If we are Created, then either the sense of perception in itself is an illusion (a la "free will is an illusion")
No, I think it's far more likely that every facet of our experience, if perception isn't real, is completely unreal. That it has no relationship with reality as it is independent of our perception of it. Think of a simulation that works solely as a virtual world projected into your mind, absolutely indistinguishable from reality as you currently perceive it, but whose every particle and every inhabitant is not from the "real world". Which leads to this thought, it's irrelevant whether it's real or not.