What is a soul?

[Skrill]

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 )

[JehovahsWitness]

[Replying to post 90 by hoghead1]

What a shame that is the tetragrammaton is not the subject of this thread. Feel free to post a thread on the subject, I'm sure someone on the internet that is interested in discussing this topic with you will reply.

JW

[JehovahsWitness]

The Bible is nondualistic, but it does in fact talk very strongly about life beyond the grave.

The bible does indeed speak about the resurrection and a hope for the dead. Indeed Jesus himself after being dead for parts of 3 days, returned from the grave, so I would agree that death is portrayed in scripture as something that can be conquered.


JW

[marco]

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.

This is an opinion. The picture you gave that seems to show Jupiter has an attachment that is NOT biblical. It says "Adam was not given a soul." But the Bible does not say this. It says: "Adam became a living soul."

We must remember that we are dealing figuratively with the act of creation and to extract a literal meaning from a poetic rendering is an elementary mistake.

The clay was given the principle of life, and when Adam possessed a soul, he was alive. When the soul leaves the clay, he will cease to live. The phrase that seems to confuse is just a poetic expression, as much of Genesis is, to indicate the start of a human life. Adam became a living person is not the same. Adam became a living soul does have a spiritual meaning. Another way of regarding the words is to say that the soul of man is what characterises man, not the clay. The soul that was placed in Adam was Adam - he lived because he now possessed a soul.

Easy to understand, I think.

[JehovahsWitness]

The clay was given the principle of life, and when Adam possessed a soul, he was alive.

This is an opinion is it not? Why do you not state it as such?

So have you completely abandoned your suggestion that my saying "soul" and "spirit" where different words in Hebrew was my "opinion"? You seem to have gone all silent on this question.

[marco]

[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.

I haven't abandoned that, since I don't think it makes much difference. As it happens even the Romans differentiated between "spiritus" and "anima" but on close investigation they are pretty much the same thing. The difference is important only when you think that the body dies on death and there is nothing rises from it, neither soul nor spirit.

I think your idea is wrong in this respect and your interpretation of Scripture wrong as well. This is the trouble when you claim to go back to the Bible and take a meaning - there isn't just ONE. But obviously you've had better persuaders than me - not divine, just ordinary mortals with an opinion.

[JehovahsWitness]

I haven't abandoned that, since I don't think it makes much difference.

So the words in the text don't "make much difference"? Evidently because you seem to not see the difference between the verb "to become" and "to possess" (Gen 2:7). Am I to presume you won't be drawing our attention to any more of these pesky words that "don't make much difference" (such as "ghost" or "spirit" or "flesh") in the future then?

JW

[Talishi]

The bible does indeed speak about the resurrection and a hope for the dead. Indeed Jesus himself after being dead for parts of 3 days, returned from the grave, so I would agree that death is portrayed in scripture as something that can be conquered.

The authors of Sacred Scripture, I contend, have an erroneous understanding of the fear of death to hold that death is something that should be conquered.

Without death, wealth and power would continue to accumulate in fewer and fewer immortal hands, and old ideas would never give way to new ones. Without death, people would not feel the vitality of living that the very brevity of our life stimulates, and the Earth would continue to fill up with people until everyone was eating those funny green graham crackers Charlton Heston found out about in Soylent Green.

Pain is a defense mechanism, just as the fear of death is. People who cannot feel pain rarely live to be twenty years old, and those who feel we should wage a war against Demon Pain are as ignorant as those who mistake, as the slings and arrows of an enemy, the natural fear of death which is ingrained in all living things to cause them to avoid risky behaviors.

[Checkpoint]

[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.

The time details are not relevant to what we are discussing.

For Christ it was three days or less, for most it is centuries between death and resurrection.

Our issue is the nature of resurrection, and our view of that will depend on what we think happens, or doesn't happen, during the time between death and resurrection.

[hoghead1]

[Replying to post 91 by JehovahsWitness]

Whether it is or is not the subject of this thread isn't the point. My point is that it is a serious mistranslation and that if you are going to use it, you need to be cognizant of that fact. As well, you need to be cognizant of the fact that the New World Bible is not at all an accurate translation and therefore inappropriate to use in serious discussions.

[hoghead1]

[Replying to post 92 by JehovahsWitness]

Then why did you say earlier there was no life after death? I don't get it.