What is a soul?

Skrill · Post by **Skrill** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 9:54 pm

It is fact that the Physical Brain controls memories, personality. Thousands of other actions are all controlled by our nervous system, which is managed by our brains.

Therefore, what consensus is there for any evidence for a soul(s)? As the existence of the soul is very central to any belief or religion.

(my first post

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Checkpoint · Post by **Checkpoint** » Sun Oct 09, 2016 5:04 pm

marco wrote:
Checkpoint wrote: [Replying to post 77 by marco]

Jesus referred to the body becoming a spirit on death.
He did? Where?
I quoted the passage.

In Luke 24:39 we have Christ saying:

King James Bible:
"Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. "

Jesus defines the properties of a spirit in illustrating that his is a real body. This supports the idea that Christ accepted that, after death, the spirit survives as a ghost perhaps. He does not dismiss this idea as nonsense.

I see where you are coming from, but do not draw your conclusion.

His resurrection took place three days after he died, not at his death.

It was not to heaven or hell, but to life from death.

marco · Post by **marco** » Sun Oct 09, 2016 5:22 pm

Checkpoint wrote:
marco wrote:
Checkpoint wrote: [Replying to post 77 by marco]

Jesus referred to the body becoming a spirit on death.
He did? Where?
I quoted the passage.

In Luke 24:39 we have Christ saying:

King James Bible:
"Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. "

Jesus defines the properties of a spirit in illustrating that his is a real body. This supports the idea that Christ accepted that, after death, the spirit survives as a ghost perhaps. He does not dismiss this idea as nonsense.
I see where you are coming from, but do not draw your conclusion.

His resurrection took place three days after he died, not at his death.

It was not to heaven or hell, but to life from death.

I have no idea what you mean. The only extraction I take is that Christ talked about spirits, meaning they could have been taken as a possible explanation for his appearance. I am not claiming he actually was a spirit; apparently he had a glorified body. And Christ explains he wasn't a spirit for a spirit has no flesh.

The time details of exactly when he rose from the dead are unknown except by deduction from Christ's words that he would destroy the temple of God and in three days rebuild it. What happened after the entombment (and Caravaggio depicts this for us rather better than the Evangelists) is for God and the angels to know.

JehovahsWitness · Post by **JehovahsWitness** » Sun Oct 09, 2016 5:23 pm

marco wrote:
Earlier, you wrote:

"There is no evidence bibilcally that people have something invisible part of them inside their bodies that continues to live after they die. That is something many churches adopted from Greek philosophers."

If you are now denying this sentence, that's okay.

So you get to tell me what a spirit is, is that how it works? I said there is no invisible part of a human that escapes at death. I didn't say that spirits don't exist. God himself is a spirit, so why do you suppose that the above sentence means spirits do not exist unless as I said, you get to define what they are for the rest of us.

marco wrote:By referring to this something as "soul" rather than "spirit" we don't change the idea that something spiritual survives the body.

I never confuse the two terms because the bible uses the two words to refer to two different things neither of which is an invisible part of the person that escapes his body at death so that his consciousness continues to exist after "death" in another form YOU are the one that seems to think they are synonyms (indeed you don't even seem to be aware when you interchange the two words).

The idea that something spiritual "survives" the body is completely unbiblical.

JW

JehovahsWitness · Post by **JehovahsWitness** » Sun Oct 09, 2016 5:30 pm

marco wrote: This is an old argument and the picture you offered is not a biblical reference. You know what my point is.

How would I if you don't explain yourself logically. In words.

I pointed out the simple fact that "soul" and "spirit" are different words. To which you responded "so you say". To which I replied "so say every Hebrew scholar you care to refer to" and now you suggest that I understand your point was NOT that the two words are different.

marco wrote:
JehovahsWitness wrote:
The word under discussion is soul. You posted a scripture that doesn't even mention the world "soul". "soul" and "spirit" are not the same words.
So you say, in order to maintain some semblance of correctness.

If you want to dispute interpretation that's fine, feel free to do so with anyone interested enough in your opinion to enter into an exchange with you, but my point was about how how the words are written on the page. Do you want to continue to suggest I am wrong when I say the two words ("soul" and "spirit") are not the same in Hebrew?

JW

dio9 · Post by **dio9** » Sun Oct 09, 2016 5:38 pm

Still no one here has said what a soul is. It may be taboo to do so , but a soul is God itself/him /herself within humanity. Like Isaiah said, Emmanuel , God is with us. The Vedanta philosophers of the Upanishads had it right when they said God is us and everything else too. Only when we are aware of , conscious of this , are we a soul. A soul is not an individual separate God but a unified being of God and body, Like the poles of a magnet.

hoghead1 · Post by **hoghead1** » Sun Oct 09, 2016 5:41 pm

[Replying to post 81 by Checkpoint]

The Bible does not have a mind-body dualism, such as you find in major thinkers such as Plato and Descartes, where mind or soul is some wholly simple, immaterial entity, wholly independent and separate from the body and world of matter. In Scripture, everything has a physical dimension, including God, to whom is attributed about every body part, hands, eyes, feet, etc. Hnece, the risen Christ also has a body. Mind and matter are one in Scripture. Survival beyond the grace is survival in a physical form.

JehovahsWitness · Post by **JehovahsWitness** » Sun Oct 09, 2016 5:44 pm

dio9 wrote: Still no one here has said what a soul is

The soul is a physical breathing person or animal, made up solely of a physical body animated by the power of active force from God. When the body dies there is no part of a person that "survives". His life ends, his body decomposses and the person ceases to exist.

JEHOVAH'S WITNESS

marco · Post by **marco** » Sun Oct 09, 2016 5:56 pm

JehovahsWitness wrote:
The idea that something spiritual "survives" the body is completely unbiblical.

It would have been simpler to say you didn't understand the point I was making. Here it is:

CHRIST saw that the apostles would think he was a ghost. Instead of dismissing "ghost" (which YOU would have thought he'd do) he explained that spirits have no flesh and he is talking about the spirit they would think he was if he came back from the dead. No, he says, I am not THAT KIND OF SPIRIT for I have a real body. So the spirits of the dead don't have real bodies. That's your theory thrown out.

I think you'll have to re-evaluate your theories on soul and spirit. No?

JehovahsWitness · Post by **JehovahsWitness** » Sun Oct 09, 2016 6:00 pm

[Replying to post 88 by marco]

So have you abandoned the line that "soul" and "spirit" in Hebrew are the same word or are you going to suggest again that that is my opinion.

Clarification on this point would be appreciated.

JW

hoghead1 · Post by **hoghead1** » Sun Oct 09, 2016 6:03 pm

[Replying to post 87 by JehovahsWitness]

The Bible is nondualistic, but it does in fact talk very strongly about life beyond the grave. Also, there is no Jeho9vah God in Scripture. Jehovah is a serious mistranslation. I also have issues with your New World Bible, which I find has more than one serious mistranslation to force Scripture to agree with the tenets of your WatchTower Society.