Sincerity And A Hereafter

Here, Gunnar Heim thinks, "Sincerity is the most overrated virtue in the catalogue..." and I ask whether Manse Everard has ever said this.

Here, I had already quoted Everard as saying, "'Sincerity is the most overrated virtue in the catalogue.'"

Everard says this to Janne Floris because Janne, acting in the role of a goddess, has promised a happy hereafter to the sibyl, Veleda. At least temporarily, Janne is overwhelmed with guilt. I think that it would be wrong to promise a hereafter, not believing in it. And, if there is after all some kind of hereafter, then we know nothing about it. So I do not agree with Everard that it was ok for Janne to console Veleda in this way.

In a hypothetical hereafter, would we be disembodied or differently embodied? I do not think that disembodied consciousness is logically contradictory. However, such a consciousness would be inherently undetectable and unverifiable, except to itself. Surely self-consciousness would require memories, even if spurious, of self-other interactions? (A surviving soul would have such memories but any permanently discarnate subjects would have to acquire them from somewhere else.)

Empirically, consciousness is a property of organisms with central nervous systems. Can it be anything else?

These reflections continue on another blog here.