Leolaia, OMG, finally someone who thinks the same thing I have! I've had this conversation with my wife over and over, but she doesn't get it. If I die and decompose, that is it. Any recreation of that body would be a copy of me. Someone else running around with my memories. Unless something of my current existance survived and passed on to this new shell, I don't see how it would be possible for that new person to be me and that I would know it.
Yeah, exactly. Of course, it also helped that there were movies I saw at the time that played out this scenario. Like the very creepy and scary Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland in which the pod people clearly replace those they copy (and they copy even the same memories). And then there was Blade Runner with Harrison Ford with a similar theme, replicants believing that they are the people they are not. I realized that the JW hope of the resurrection was nothing more than the hope that replicants will one day populate the earth, programmed to believe that they are the people who died many years ago. Of course, if God could "resurrect" you by recreating you, then what's to stop him from making two of you? Or 144,000 of you? Which one is the real you?
Then there are other philosophical issues tied into this. How is it that I know I exist...self awareness? When I die, will I know I am dead? What will happen to my memories if I stay dead? Or is the fact that I have memories and am self aware proof that I have a soul that will never die? Is the current moment in time that I experience right now just memories I'm reliving on my death bed or in heaven or in the afterlife?
Well, those existential issues are quite messy ones indeed...our own memories are always fragmented and they change. I believe they are modified in the act of remembering itself. Our lives are filled with discontinuities and the idea of an internal essence that defines our identity is deeply questioned in much contemporary philosophy.
But true, the watchtower doesn't have a satisfying explanation for resurrection and also for why we don't have an immortal soul for sure. Just because the bible says so is not a good enough reason. The bible needs to fully explain why or why not.
Well, it should be acknowledged that the Society has completely replaced the actual biblical belief of a resurrection with a notion of re-creation. They are however stuck with the label "resurrection" because that is what is in the Bible, so they are left with a doctrine that doesn't make any sense.