Tentatively Christian; looking for a reasonable discussion

[Pizza]

Besides, in a basic sense- and god knows I can't have anything other than that since you're so vague with what your terminology actually means- the claim that things preserve their identity through change is simply false; coal becomes diamonds, sand becomes glass, all kinds of objects change form into something unrecognizeable. No doubt I'll get some form of assertion-as-clarification shifting the goalposts so I'm not talking about what you are, but if you're going to appeal to the same airy Forms stuff you usually do, then all you've got there is another assertion.

To add my two cents to this, even when we suspend belief in physcialism about the mind, the problem still stands. For example, mental states are anything but unchanging. One minute there is this thought and this experience, then the next minute there is another thought and experience, then two hours later there are different thoughts and experiences that are not identical(not to be confused with analogous) to ones from before.
The appearance of an orange is not identical to the appearance of an apple even if they are made from the same substance(whether mental or physical). If I'm wrong about apples and oranges, I may as well be a radical global skepticism because I don't know nuffin'.
Another problem is that we can't find "I" in our thoughts and experiences. When "I" analysis the experience of sitting down and typing on a keyboard, into smaller parts "I" don't find an "I." Now, I common criticism to this is that the I is external to the thoughts and experiences. Okay, but this comes at a price; that is, the concept of Self would become a very sterile concept.