Welcome to a pinoy atheist's point of view.

Ay naku!  When Christians talk about souls, they really think they are the expert on that subject. Do you know that the idea of a soul is not a Christian original? In fact, the concept was already been introduce by older religious beliefs.

 

Defining the soul is as complex as determining it, because different religion and philosophy portray different things about it. Most people say that the soul is an immortal entity that makes a being alive and departs its body when a person dies. The current English word "soul" may have originated from Old English sawol, documented in 970 CE, which has possible etymological links with a Germanic root from which we also get the word "sea". The old German word is called 'se(u)la', what means: belonging to the sea (ancient Germanic conceptions involved the souls of the unborn and of the dead "living" being part of a medium, similar to water), or perhaps, "living water". Ancient Egyptians believe that the soul will leave the body after birth. The Egyptian Boom of the Dead tells us that the soul will be judge by Osiris in heaven. The ancient Greek connotes soul to the human psyche. Early Hebrew says that soul is the living being itself, but there are times when a soul also stands as "life breath". Most ancient culture believes that the soul is responsible for life.

 

What’s the difference between Soul and Spirit?

According to Christian theology, the soul is the individuality of the person so he can distinguish himself to another. His soul contains his "ideas", "life," "self," "person," "desire," "appetite," "emotion" and "passion". Spirit on the other hand is the moral qualities of man that will return to God. So both are said to be an immaterial object that is inside man and both are "immortal".

 

Plato (428-354 BCE) believes that the soul is the essence of a person. The Platonic soul comprises of three parts:

1. the reason (mind or logos)

2. the appetite (body or passion)

3. spirit (emotion or pathos).

This idea has a very uncanny resemblance to Plato’s idea of his ideal city-state written in the Republic. The reason (elite guardians) equates to the mind. It corresponds to the charioteer, directing the balanced horses of appetite and spirit. It allows for logic to prevail, and for the optimisation of balance.

The appetite (masses) drives humankind to seek out its basic bodily needs. Yet when the passion controls us, master passion drives us to hedonism in all forms. This is the basal and most feral state.

The spirit (courage) (the soldiers) comprises our emotional motive, that which drives us to acts of bravery and glory.

For Plato the soul is immortal and incorruptible. When the soul is punished, it is force to leave the ideal realm and enters the material world.

 

Aristotle, like Plato defines the soul as the essence of a person. But, unlike Plato, Aristotle has a more monistic view of the soul. In Aristotle's view, the soul is an activity of the body, it cannot be immortal. Example, if the eye is a living creature, then sight is its soul. If the being dies, his soul dies with him. If the eye lost is sight, it lost its activity.

 

Augustine, one of the most influential early Christian thinkers, described the soul as "a special substance, endowed with reason, adapted to rule the body". The apostle Paul said that the "body wars against" the soul, and that "I buffet my body", to keep it under control.

 

Maimonides , in his The Guide to the Perplexed, explained classical rabbinic teaching about the soul through the lens of neo-Aristotelian philosophy, and viewed the soul as a person's developed intellect, which has no substance.

 

The Kabbalah (esoteric Jewish mysticism) saw the souls are supposed to have an ideal as well as a real pre-existence. It has three elements. The Zohar, a classic work of Jewish mysticism, posits that the human soul has three elements, the nefesh, ru'ah, and neshamah. A common way of explaining these three parts follows:

 Nefesh - the lower or animal part of the soul. It links to instincts and bodily cravings. It is found in all humans, and enters the physical body at birth. It is the source of one's physical and psychological nature.

 Ruach - the middle soul, or spirit. It contains the moral virtues and the ability to distinguish between good and evil. In modern parlance, it equates to psyche or ego-personality.

 Neshamah - the higher soul, Higher Self or super-soul. This distinguishes man from all other life forms. It relates to the intellect, and allows man to enjoy and benefit from the afterlife. This part of the soul is provided both to Jew and non-Jew alike at birth. It allows one to have some awareness of the existence and presence of God. In the Zohar, after death Nefesh disintegrates, Ruach is sent to a sort of intermediate zone where it is submitted to purification and enters in "temporary paradise", while Neshamah returns to the source, the world of Platonic ideas, where it enjoys "the kiss of the beloved". Supposedly after resurrection, Ruach and Neshamah, soul and spirit re-unite in a permanently transmuted state of being.

The doctrine with some modifications passed into the Christian church, was accepted by Justin Martyr, Theodoretus, Origen and others of the church Fathers, but became obsolete by the latter part of the 4th century. It was formally condemned by a synod held at Constantinople in the 6th century. In later times it was accepted in modified form by Kant, Schelling and others, and was specially defended by Julius Muller, who held that the soul had a timeless preexistence and underwent a fall before the final act, whereby it was united in time to the body as its temporary home.

 

The Hindu believes that the jiva (soul) survives death and will enter a new embryo and bring along with it all the karma of its past lives. The cycle of death and rebirth is often depicted as a wheel. Karma is the universal, immutable law which adjusts effects to cause. The law of karma is the consequences of a person’s deed and action. If a person lives a good life, the soul will be reborn in a higher state but if a person does evil as they believe, you might end up in a very less noble life at rebirth, like being born as a maggot. Since the soul is immortal, some believes that it eternally exist so it just changes it nature but never ceases to exist. The goal of the soul is to achieve moksha (escape the cycle).

 

The Jewish and the Hindu belief are a little familiar with certain New Age mystics. According to them, after death the soul goes to certain state of existence called the astral plane, which has several sub-planes, and we stay on that plane compatible with our degree of soul evolution or consciousness. There is no judgement in the afterlife. Most traditional religions also share these ideas like the Tinguians of Abra province in northern Luzon, Philippines.

 

Philosopher Anthony Quinton said the soul is a "series of mental states connected by continuity of character and memory, [and] is the essential constituent of personality. The soul, therefore, is not only logically distinct from any particular human body with which it is associated; it is also what a person is". Richard Swinburne, a Christian philosopher of religion at Oxford University, wrote that "it is a frequent criticism of substance dualism that dualists cannot say what souls are.... Souls are immaterial subjects of mental properties. They have sensations and thoughts, desires and beliefs, and perform intentional actions. Souls are essential parts of human beings..."

 

But not all religion believes in a soul. The Buddhist believes in the principle of anatta or no-soul. In death, the body and mind disintegrate; if the disintegrating mind contains any remaining traces of karma, it will cause the continuity of the consciousness to bounce back an arising mind to an awaiting being, that is, a fetus developing the ability to harbor consciousness. Thus, in Buddhist teaching, a being that is born is neither entirely different, nor exactly the same, as it was prior to rebirth. When a person achieves Nirvana everything is extinguished, since no karma remained.

 

There are also some scientific and non-theological views of the existence of the soul. Popular presentation of the dominant scientific view of the soul often uses the "computer paradigm", which compares the brain to hardware and the mind (mental processes traditionally subsumed under the concept of "soul"), to software. The departure of a brain/hardware leaves no place for functioning mind/software. This eliminative approach to the soul is exemplified by Paul Churchland and his book The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul. In that book, Churchland argues that there is no need for the idea of a non-material soul, that we can fully account for the soul in terms of material brain activity, and that the link between the brain and consciousness is primarily a matter of information processing that can be understood in terms of computational models.

 

Some, like the famous French neurologist Jean Pierre Changeaux, deny the appropriateness of the computer paradigm and propose an analogy with the anharmonic oscillator from physics. Needless to say, both notions have dismissed the concept of soul as a self-sustaining entity.

 

Some investigators have tried to measure the soul, for example by attempting to measure the weight of a person just before and just after death in hopes of determining the weight of a soul. The results of these experiments remained equivocal, especially due to conflicting reports on the findings, and are not well regarded many scientists. Francis Crick's book The Astonishing Hypothesis has the subtitle, "The scientific search for the soul". Crick holds the position that one can learn everything knowable about the human soul by studying the workings of the human brain.

 

In his book Consilience, E. O. Wilson took note that sociology has identified belief in a soul as one of the universal human cultural elements. Wilson suggested that biologists need to investigate how human genes predispose people to believe in a soul.

 

Martyn Carruthers wrote that systemic coaching can lead to a stable state of integration and connectedness, that some people call Soul. A person experiencing this integration displays 100% verbal congruence and nonverbal symmetry and can simultaneously focus on abstract concepts and life details. During this experience, people said that Soul has an independent existence; that Soul existed before the person was born; and that Soul will continue after the death of that body. Carruthers called this Soul-work.

 

Daniel Dennett has championed the idea that the human survival strategy depends heavily on adoption of the intentional stance, a behavioral strategy that predicts the actions of others based on the expectation that they have a mind like one's own. Mirror neurons in brain regions such as Broca's area may facilitate this behavioral strategy. The intentional stance, Dennett suggests, has proven so successful that people tend to apply it to all aspects of human experience, thus leading to animism and to other conceptualizations of soul.

 

The work of Roger Penrose, based on results by Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, the latter of whom proved that the halting problem is incomputable, is possible evidence for the existence of a soul, and that it is measurable. The halting problem states that it is not possible for a computer, no matter how complex, to algorithmically decide whether an arbitrary computer program will ever halt or not. Some people maintain that humans can, in principle, make such a determination and hence, they say, that the human mind is different than a computer and thus there has to be something about the human mind that contemporary physics does not capture. A rebuttal to this argument is that since there exists simple computer programs for which humans cannot determine their halting behaviors, some people state that the human mind is no different than computers.

 

A frequently documented phenomenon involves very young children (under the age of five) saying seemingly random phrases, spontaneously, with no readily traceable originating source, for example: "I remember when I died before". The parent-controlled flow of information that reaches the child does not account for the phrase, which most hearers ignore. Some people believe that a child can express past-life memories in this way.

Dr. Ian Stevenson, a prominent member of the scientific community, has spent over 40 years devoted to the study of children who have spoken about concepts seemingly unknown to them. Dr Stevenson maintains a thorough scientific method of interview and observation. In each case, Dr. Stevenson methodically documents the child's statements. Then he identifies the deceased person the child allegedly identifies with, and verifies the facts of the deceased person's life that match the child's memory. He even matches birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records. His strict methods systematically rule out all possible "normal" explanations for the child’s memories. However, it should be noted that a significant majority of Dr. Stevenson's reported cases of reincarnation originate in Eastern societies, where dominant religions often permit the concept of reincarnation.

 

With all that idea about the soul, I still have a lot of questions about these "silly souls"?

1. In the Christian concept, does the soul belong to God? When a person is still not born, is his soul with God? Is this soul aware that he will be born in a world "ruled by Satan? If so, can he ask God not to bring him in this world?

2. They say that the soul is already immortal, then why resurrect something that was and always been alive all the time? Why will God give us eternal life as a prize if we already have an immortal soul?

3. The soul is a mental property. If the brain dies, does the soul go with it? Most Christian fundies argued that a being can have a brain but it will still not live since to become a living being a body needs the soul, but do animals and plant lives have a soul? How about the microbes? If a soul is only exclusive for humans to live, then why these other living things don’t have this soul yet are considered alive?

4. Is the soul independent with the human mind or does it have an independent mind of its own? If so, I was just wondering, why will the soul don’t take over the mind of an individual if he suffers in some mental abnormalities?

5. Is the soul independent with the body? If so then when the body sinned why the soul is punished?

6. If a soul is immaterial as they explain, then how will a soul burn in hell? How will it suffer since the soul contains only the essence of a person? Remember that the soul doesn’t contain the material brain which holds all sensations like pain and suffering.

7. The soul contains the essence of a person, if a retarded person died is his soul also retarded?

8. Most Christian believes in sinful souls being punished in hell. Is there a degree of punishment given on the type of sin that a soul have? Is the punishment of my soul as a non-believer the same as to the soul of a guy that raped and killed 10 young women?

9. Ok, now on the issue of Hindu reincarnation. If the soul is just recycled throughout history, let say in the beginning there are only 20 thousand people living in this planet, which mean 20 thousand souls. Now there are nearly 6 billion people living in planet earth, not included are the reptiles and bugs on every forest. Where their souls came from if 20 thousand souls now resides in 20 thousand living things now existing? According to some esoteric schools, God created billions of souls and still building more souls. All stored in this soul factory waiting for a new material body to test drive. This explanation doesn’t go well with the Platonic idea which says that the punishment of sinning soul is to enter a material body. This also doesn’t go well with Christian teaching that said God’s creation was already finished.

 

SEE: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/immortality.html