John,
You are right and yet religion is really the most important area of life to get a good understanding of because of its long term significance to all of us, as it can make the difference between long term life and death. I am glad that you don't question Jesus' existence and holiness. You are right that Jesus said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. This does not mean that any man can do the works that Jesus did by himself, however, or that Jesus was just another man. The next verse gives the answer as to how it works. There Jesus says, And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. Notice that the man does not do the works himself, but asks Jesus and Jesus is the one that does the works and also notice that Jesus is doing the works in accordance with God the Father's desire so that God the Father is glorified in the works. Those two verses are John 14, 12 and 13. In verse 6 of the same chapter Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the father, but by me. Here Jesus is saying in his own words that he is the mediator between God and man and the only way that a man can come to God is by him. This is very significant because he is saying that if a man tries to come to God in some other way he will not be able to do it because it is not acceptable to God for man to come to him in any other way. God the Father has set Jesus up as the only way to come to him. In addition he is saying that he is the source to go to for truth and life. It is true that some have come into the church and perverted the gospel of God and preached lies and done bad works, such as in the dark ages. It is interesting that the scriptures predicted that time saying that Satan's seat would be in the church implying that Satan would rule the church institution for that period. As far as whether he made it to heaven, Jesus said he was going to God the Father who by all accounts has his throne in heaven. There were many witnesses that saw him ascend up to heaven and since the apostles did preach the gospel as Jesus had done and also asked in Jesus' name and did other works that Jesus had done while he was on earth even bringing men back to life, etc. that would be another witness that he did get to heaven to the Father so he could fulfill his promise to do the works for them.
You are right that consciousness and knowledge are two different things. Consciousness has to do with our awareness inwardly of ourselves and outwardly of our surroundings. It has to do with our ability to observe and input information, from our bodies, our souls, our spirits and the external world that surrounds us. Knowledge is the result of the processing of those observations and that information. Knowledge can be in several forms. I will just give a couple so I don't get carried away too much. If you see a repetitive pattern such as the sun rising and setting every day, you will at some point store that pattern in your mind and then based on that stored knowledge you will make plans and predictions of the future based on that pattern. If you combine that knowledge with knowledge gained from other observations such as how many days each season lasts, you can determine the best time to plant crops, etc. in the future. Another type of knowledge comes from categorizing similar things into groups under one general name. Many large plants that all have the same general traits are grouped together and called trees, as an example. This allows us to work on things in the world in a more orderly and less time consuming manner. Our consciousness is mostly lived in the present. It is usually mostly involved with present observations. We can, of course, also put our attention on and observe our stored records of past events or look at our stored plans for the future. We can also consciously process observations from those sources using stored knowledge to gain more knowledge and wisdom, etc. You are right that knowledge is generally stored in the structure of our minds in the form of records of events and the results of our processing of those events that make up our stored records of the past. They can then be called up in a later present time and be used in processing new observations. When you talk about consciousness pushing the reset button and starting fresh, as a new generation are you talking about reincarnation or just that those of the next generation possess and carry on consciousness as an existence so consciousness continues and does not cease to exist?
Your concept of the universal state of oneness is somewhat like what God is talking about in the body of Christ in that under God the Father is his son Jesus Christ and under him we are all equal members of his body, all joined together into one body in him. On the other hand it is not God's intent that we be in the state of lack of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding as a little child or of stem cells that have not taken on their later useful forms. Instead he says that we will know as we are known. So as God knows us, in the body of Christ, in the world to come, we will also know him and each other and be able and willing to work together in love for one another for the gain of the whole.
With God, good and evil (bad) are considered to be so for two main reasons. First God made the world and knows how it works. The things that God calls good for us to do are those things such as to love him and one another, to have compassion on others, to have patience and long suffering with others, etc. that if followed by us will make for a better world to live in and a better existence for us in the world. The things that are called bad by God are those things such as killing others, stealing from others, committing adultery against your spouse, cheating others, bearing false witness against others, etc. that when done by us will destroy the world and men's lives and make the world a worse place for us to live in and make our lives in the world worse. The second reason is that God's intent is to create a body for himself and just like you would not like it if your body or some part of it decided to not do what you told it to do or to do things that you did not want it to do, in the same way God requires us to do as he desires for us to do because that is what is best for all of us, for the whole body, his son Jesus Christ, and for himself, so that we all enjoy and gain from working together as one. Therefore, not doing the things that God says are good or doing those things that he says are evil, is also rebelling against God, the head of the body and it is God's desire to protect the whole body from such actions that could destroy the whole body if left unchecked. That is why when we do good we are really doing doubly good because we are not only doing things in a way that will make a better more enjoyable life for ourselves and the rest of the body, we are also doing things in a way that pleases the one that made us and the rest of his body and has the right to expect that we do what he desires for us to do. When we do evil we are also doing double evil because we are not only doing things that will negatively affect us and the whole body, we are also doing things that displease the one that made us and, therefore, has the right to expect us to do that which pleases him. To give an example that might make things clearer, suppose that one of your hands decided to stop doing what you told it to do so that when you told it to get some food and put it in your mouth because your body was hungry it instead threw the food on the ground so that it became no longer edible. Also suppose that it would make rude gestures to bullies so that they would come and beat up your body. At some point in order for your body to survive you would likely take some action to cause it to stop doing such things. If you went to a doctor and he told you that it was due to some disease that was at that time only in your hand, but would spread to the rest of your body if you did not have the hand cut off, you would likely have it cut off to save the rest of the body. In the same way when someone disobeys God (sins) it causes a separation between him and God. In the world it is evident that when people do those things that God says are evil to others it tends to encourage the others to do the same thing back to get even and so the evil spreads from one person to the next and increases and works in the world to destroy men's lives and generally make life for all worse. The opposite can be seen when people do good. God has created the world in such a way as to provide for the needs and development of the members of his body. Other lower creatures are parts of the machinery that supply the needs of the body members. In an area that man has not expanded his control into, the foxes control the number of chickens so every thing remains in balance. When man enters into the area he reduces the number of foxes and uses the chickens for his food source. From God's stand point it was good when the foxes ate some of the chickens when man was not there because it maintained the balance that God desired. It was also good for man to reduce the fox population so that he could have food for himself because the rest of the creation is made to support the production of God's body members, which are men. You may be right that if the chicken could think at a high enough level, it might consider that any other creature that would eat it was doing evil from its viewpoint, but from the stand point of the one who made the whole creation to fulfill his purpose, that which helps to fulfill that purpose is good and that which works against its fulfillment is bad. I should note here that in the beginning the scriptures say that all animals ate plants. It was not until after sin entered into the world that animals began to eat each other or people began to eat animals. This is just another area where the negative effects of sin can be seen. It also says that it will be restored back to the way it was in the beginning again in the world to come in that man will eat fruit from trees.
Take your time and think it through thoroughly. Remember that energy possesses mass also, otherwise it would not be able to knock electrons out of atoms to cause the photoelectric effect. This mass is primarily caused by the angular motion effects caused by the fourth dimensional motion.
It is true that energy tends to travel away from its source at high speed due to its motions in the first four dimensions and that the fifth dimensional motion of matter that generates the angular motion components that produce the rest mass effect and causes motion to take a curved path tends to draw matter particles (mass) together. My point is that if that was all there was to it we would live in a world with one large central black hole composed of all the matter in the universe that would have collapsed there, and all of the energy that did not get pulled into the black hole would be speeding away from it in all directions at the speed of light. Our world does not look like that though. That is because the whole world is created in such a way as to generate a stable equilibrium between the outward movement of energy and the inward movement of mass at all levels of structure. This delicate balance between expansion and contraction and other things that show that the universe was designed to make life possible in our universe has recently been seen by many scientists and has been called the anthropic principle. This great evidence that the world was created by someone with great ability for a specific purpose has caused atheists to scramble to come up with some way to explain it away. The results are the various multiverse, megaverse, and landscape theories that invent an extremely large place that contains an extremely large number of universes of which ours is just one, so they can explain away the extreme improbability that our world would have come out the way that it did by chance. This large place has been put outside of any possibility of scientific observation and testing so it cannot be disproven. Of course from a scientific point of view it would have no more scientific validity than the belief that God created the universe since neither can be observed or tested. They are nevertheless hard at work to convince people otherwise. Let's see how gullible people really are. My guess (though I could be wrong and hope that I am) is that they will be proven once again to be very gullible. It probably would be possible to have consciousness in the sense that one could observe himself and the world around him and see that he exists, but not have the processing ability to analyze the incoming information to produce knowledge from it or lack the ability to store that knowledge for future use. In either case the world would just look like a place full of random motions and events. It may be that some lower animals might go through life close to that way. Or it could be that we live in and have our consciousness in the present and old motions pass us and recede away into our past when they no longer interact with us and new motions come to us as part of our next present instant.
I was not talking about the measuring devices (sensors) in particular although that could also enter into the picture. I was talking about matter that existed (say a five pound block of iron) in the container. When that container and the five pound block of iron in it got down to absolute zero, the matter particles would still possess their fourth and fifth dimensional motions and the matter particles in the iron block would still be moving in the iron atoms, etc. so that even though all the electrons in the iron atoms would be in their lowest state so they would not generate any photons that could interact with a sensor in the container, there still would be a lot of motion going on inside of the matter in the iron block at absolute zero. The same would go for the matter in the sensor and the walls of the container even if they were both at absolute zero. These motions that would still exist were never originally intended to be considered in the concept of absolute zero. It was only intended to describe a condition where all free motion had been removed from the system so that no transmission of energy would occur from the place that was at absolute zero. Later some people said that there would still be some transmission away from the area at absolute zero due to matter decay. If you take this viewpoint, you would only truly be able to consider a place to be at absolute zero after all of the matter in it had decayed into energy and that energy had dissipated from that place or to say it in a different way only empty space could be at absolute zero. If you do not take this extreme viewpoint, however, the standard view of absolute zero leaves much motion in the system. It is just trapped local motion that cannot be transmitted externally.