S6E17 WHAT CHRISTIAN SAID

It was not what Christian said to Jack, but how he said it that continues to cause problems in understanding the whole show construct.

In the church, Christian tells Jack that everything that he went through was real. But he also says that Jack is real, he is real, and the sideways world is real. Everything is real.

But we know that is not logically true because we were told that the sideways world was made up by the castaways as a place to meet in order to move on in the afterlife. The sideways world was not a "what if" Flight 815 never crashed; it was a holding pen for souls until Jack was ready to join them in an "awakening."

Everyone in the church was dead. Everyone in the sideways world was dead. Dead is dead.
But Christian called those sideways experiences "real." If dead is real, and the island was real, then one can argue that the island was also "dead." The island was a Dead Reality just like in the sideways world.

If the island was a level of the afterlife (the cast was dead or died in the plane crash), all of the legal-medical-science inconsistencies in the past story lines become immaterial because the island itself was a purgatory test of each person to redeem themselves. The sideways world was not a purgatory setting as the characters mirrored their bad behavior without any consequences (like in a dream state).