Eschatological restoration

One intriguing question is the nature of eschatological restoration for the developmentally disabled. This is, of course, speculative. On the other hand, Christian theology opens of vistas of possibility that secularism cannot. So it's useful to explore. 

You have the physically disabled. Say, a person who can't walk or can't run or can't use his hands. 

Then you have sensory disabilities, like the deaf and the blind. That has both a physical and psychological dimension. It affects how people perceive and adapt to the world. How they mentally model the world, based on the sensory input available to them. 

It can also create an inbuilt sense of community. There are blind and deaf subcultures. In a sense that makes you special. And it confers automatic social membership in a preexisting community. 

In that respect, the notion of having your sight or hearing restored can be threatening. Will you be excommunicated from your social circle? Suddenly, you're just another ordinary person. You no longer have that kinship group. 

Of course, that refers to the here-and-now, not the hereafter. In the world to come, that shouldn't be a deprivation. There will be additional compensations. 

Then you have psychological abnormalities like Down Syndrome, autism, and savant syndrome. In that event, eschatological restoration raises questions of personal identity. Will you be the same person if your condition is normalized? 

It's hard to generalize. For instance, savants are less intelligent in most respects, but geniuses in another respect. Would restoration mean they retain their distinctive aptitude, but other faculties are leveled up to normal? Or would it mean an equalization of their faculties, where their distinctive aptitude is leveled down while their other faculties are leveled up to make them consistently normal? 

What about autistics or people with Down Syndrome? I think the fear that they won't be the same person is misplaced. It's not like eschatological restoration erases what they were. It's not amnesia. 

If they were reborn, and mature normally, then in some respects they'd turn out differently. But there's no reason to think that's how eschatological restoration works. It's not aging them down to the womb and starting over again without the disabilities. Rather, it begins wherever they are, as adults (let us say), and then removes some intellectual impediments. 

Let's take a comparison: some animals have sensory aptitudes that humans lack. It's natural to be curious about how they perceive the world. Even with our five senses, what are we missing? 

In the future, it might be technologically possible through a neurointerface to experience what they experience. To perceive the world through their sensory aptitudes. If that was available, surely some of us would experiment with that, to find out what it was like. That would expand our mental horizons. 

We wouldn't view that sensory enhancement as a threat to our personal identity. It wouldn't remove something that we already have or already are, but give us an additional window onto the world.