OUR SOULS

[tomday]

As I get older I find myself getting increasingly fascinated by certain of the mysteries of life and, because I cannot accept any religious claptrap in answer to the questions posed, like to theorise and would love to get both the serious and the light-hearted views of like-minded people.

One of the hardest things to get to understand is the thought of not existing before birth and not existing after death â€" is it like when I settle down in the evening to watch a good documentary of movie on the TV I am suddenly out of it and later wake up to find that I have missed it all? Is ‘not existing’ like that period of nothingness between falling asleep and dreaming?  
Of course, if I were religious I could believe that after death I could go to ‘heaven’/’paradise’ and, hey, if I were a Muslim I could become a suicide bomber and look forward to all of those lovely virgins awaiting my arrival in paradise (some people get all the luck!!).  
The thought of not existing has always led most people to want to believe in their ‘souls’ going to ‘heaven’/’paradise’.  Reincarnation is a popular alternative to spending eternity in some paradise (do the Muslim virgins get replenished after they lose their status? eternity must be one hell of a long time to be stuck with the same sexual partners!)  It is popularly supposed that humans have souls that came from a previously living entity - how come there are now 6.5 billion souls in the world when 100 years ago there were only1.65 billion?  has there always been a huge storage depot somewhere in the universe that redundant souls are stored until required?  What happens when the stockpile runs out?  Your thoughts please my fellow soulless heathens.

 :?

[SteveS]

Hello tomday - good stuff.

Your observation about the number of souls seems solid to me - it must be bull because it couldn't possibly work.  I highly doubt that I have a soul, and even if I did, I can't see how it could have come from some previously living thing.  For that matter - what counts as a living thing?  Do viruses have souls?  Meh - this all just gets ridiculous to me.

Serious note: yes - I suspect being dead is identical to being completely unconscious.  Total nothing.  Which isn't really so bad at all - its the "dying" part I'm worried about!  As long as I don't suffer, what's to fear about death?  I'll just be dead - big deal.  This quote came up in another thread, but I like it so much I'll re-quote it here:

Mr. Clemens [Mark Twain] was once asked whether he feared death. He said that he did not, in view of the fact that he had been dead for billions and billions of years before he was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

(Kudos to MommaSquid for identifying this quote)

On a light-hearted note:

if I were a Muslim I could become a suicide bomber and look forward to all of those lovely virgins awaiting my arrival in paradise

Never sounded too good to me, considering:

eternity must be one hell of a long time to be stuck with the same sexual partners!

Which is why I would favor experienced women!  True professionals.  Absolute wonders of the bodily pleasures and masters of passion.

I'm just saying, if I got to choose.......

Semi-lighthearted-note: what is the fascination among the Islamic faith with deflowering virgins?  Is this some kind of power-trip thing?  Personally, I've never been comfortable with a sex partner being a virgin (luckily for me, none of my sex partners ever were).  I had great respect for the good tastes of any girl who wanted to sleep with me ( :wink: ), but if the charming lady was already "experienced", then when she expressed a desire for intimacy with me I figured she at least knew what she was asking for.

I express this in the past-tense because I'm married now - only one sex partner.  Which, honestly, is just fine with me.

[pjkeeley]

Indeed we will 'cease to exist' when we die, just as we never existed before birth...

... but honestly, in what sense do we exist right now? What are 'WE'? Molecules? No. Cells? No. Tissue? Organs? No and no. Are we the neurons and nerve impulses? Not really. We aren't even our brains. 'We' are just a thing that arises from all this energy and activity, which somehow briefly becomes  aware of itself (in fact it makes no sense to refer to a singular 'it') and suddenly stares out at this whole confusing universe... then reverts back to purely mechanical processes. But even this notion is flawed. Are we even 'aware' of ourselves or anything in the first place? Everything every mind thinks and feels was determined in fractions of seconds after the Big Bang, from birth to death. Nobody's home, we just think we are. Life is an illusion.

I think the one thing to take from the above pointless ramblings is that there isn't really a 'nothingness'. People tend to think of death as some kind of void but in fact life too is a void, just one in which energy does a lot of swirling, and will continue to swirl long after conscious beings have ceased to be aware of it.

I don't know. I set out to make a somewhat comforting rant about a secular 'soul' and I ended up depressing myself. Bah. Point is, enjoy life, don't worry about souls or reincarnation, just live knowing that life is wonderous and death is that necessary ending that makes it so.  :wink:

[jcm]

The thing that baffles me, when it comes to a soul, is Christians says animals have no soul. This is strange to me, because humans have a soul, so why not animals. How is it that an animal is able to live without a soul? According to Christians all humans must have a soul because that is your true self. My dog has a very distinct personality and shows signs of love, fear, joy, interest, shame and intelligence. If my dog or any other animal does not need a soul to live then why would a human require one? Seems rather arrogant that only humans get the souls. Why are we so special? Some times I compare my life to a monkey in the jungle. In the grand scheme of things I don’t really see how my life is any better than a monkey’s life or any other animal’s life. We live, we die and fill our life doing stuff. In a few thousand years who really cares? It is rather depressing, right? Not to me. I don’t need a way to distance myself from the rest of the animal kingdom. I like that humans evolved from monkeys. I don’t see the “yuck factor” like many others do. There is a lot of yucky stuff we humans do. I guess the soul just makes people feel better about being human.

[tomday]

SteveS - thanks for putting me right re virgins and experienced women - could have saved myself a whole lot of fruitless searching if I had known this earlier in life!

Nobody's home, we just think we are. Life is an illusion.

pjkeeley - deep stuff this!  So, if this is all an illusion , how come I (who can't possible then exist) am writing a response to you (who also can't exist) about a response (which could not have been made) to an original posting that I could not have written because I don't exist?  If anyone else reads this, take no notice because you can't possibly exist either!
 :wink:

[tomday]

My dog has a very distinct personality and shows signs of love, fear, joy, interest, shame and intelligence.

Sorry jcm, according to pjkeeley, it seems that your dog don't exist either!
 :cry:

[donkeyhoty]

In re: number of souls.  I've heard it explained that the waiting time for souls to be reincarnated used to be greater(shorter queue now that there's more people), and you also have to take into account the being reincarnated as a "lower" animal.  So, maybe more souls have good enough karma to be people instead of chipmunks or bees now.

Or, it's all bullshit.

[myleviathan]

Thinking about souls also gets me thinking about the concept of the 'heart'. Like 'Jesus lives in my heart.' And I remember imagining in my Christian days that he actually lived in some sort of spiritual realm located in my cardiovascular system. Which obviously is designed (using the word loosely, of course) to pump blood and carry oxygen to the extremities. Just a thought. I laugh thinking about it now.

[MommaSquid]

Didn't Demi Moore solve the problem of running out of souls in "The Seventh Sign"?

She gave her life to fill the Guf:  

According to the movie's version of the Scriptures, when the Guf -- a k a the Hall of Souls -- is empty, and the first soulless child is stillborn, the Day of Judgment is at hand.

Not that I believe in that stuff.....

[myleviathan]

The thing that baffles me, when it comes to a soul, is Christians says animals have no soul. This is strange to me, because humans have a soul, so why not animals. How is it that an animal is able to live without a soul? According to Christians all humans must have a soul because that is your true self. My dog has a very distinct personality and shows signs of love, fear, joy, interest, shame and intelligence. If my dog or any other animal does not need a soul to live then why would a human require one? Seems rather arrogant that only humans get the souls. Why are we so special? Some times I compare my life to a monkey in the jungle. In the grand scheme of things I don’t really see how my life is any better than a monkey’s life or any other animal’s life. We live, we die and fill our life doing stuff. In a few thousand years who really cares? It is rather depressing, right? Not to me. I don’t need a way to distance myself from the rest of the animal kingdom. I like that humans evolved from monkeys. I don’t see the “yuck factor” like many others do. There is a lot of yucky stuff we humans do. I guess the soul just makes people feel better about being human.

My mom, who is an evangelical Christian believes that certain mammals have souls, like dogs. Any kind of animal that is capable of expressing emotion. We had a shitzu that died and she earnestly believes that she will see her in heaven. I've pressed the logical side of the argument, asking if pigs and monkeys have souls then, too. It seems in her estimation that pigs and monkeys, although intelligent, do not have souls. I guess it's just pets that get souls. Forget that chimpanzees have nearly identical DNA to humans. It's amazing how similar we are. I don't know how anyone could separate the obvious fact we are so intimately related to animals, especially to apes.

[pjkeeley]

pjkeeley - deep stuff this! So, if this is all an illusion , how come I (who can't possible then exist) am writing a response to you (who also can't exist) about a response (which could not have been made) to an original posting that I could not have written because I don't exist? If anyone else reads this, take no notice because you can't possibly exist either!

I don't quite understand what you're asking. To clarify, I'm not saying you or I don't exist. But it depends on your definition of 'exist'. I say life is an illusion because it feels to us as if we are singular conscious identities inhabiting a physical body and making certain decisions about how to act. Most people think this way by default. But on another level, none of this is quite what it seems, because 'we' are in fact just bundles of stuff (cells and organs and tissues and nerves and so on) that somehow produce a weird feedback loop that we think of as self-awareness. The 'illusion' refers to the fact that all of this is determined in advance by cause and effect, and really our brain only generates an illusion of choice, or of awareness, after the fact.

So to return to your example, a bundle of stuff (tomday) is carrying out a process (sending a reponse on an online forum) to another bundle of stuff (pjkeeley), an event which was predetermined causally by everything else that had happened in the universe until that moment, at which point this bundle of stuff registers that it has been read, setting in motion a response (writing this reply) which the brain tells me was 'my' choice, but in fact was an automatic process, like everything else in the universe.

So yes, something does exist, but it isn't really self-awareness as we think of it, because there is no self and there is no awareness, only illusions of both. The illusions still exist though, at least while we're awake, and while our bodies are still alive.

I'm no expert on consciousness though so anyone who has any better authority on this can feel free to correct the impression I've given.

[tomday]

I don't quite understand what you're asking.

pjkeeley my friend, I am not asking anything, I am merely attempting to inject a little ironic humor in the hope that more people might be motivated to join the discussion as, IMHO, even the most serious of subjects can be made more interesting and meaningful by the injection of appropriate humor.  Maybe my typical British sense of humour is simply out of place in such an international forum?

[pjkeeley]

Oh, okay. I thought you were objecting to my lovingly thought out reasoning so I went straight into argument mode.  :pirate:

[shoruke]

I think that a 'soul' is just a metaphor for consciousness... just as heat energy is technically matter, a soul is just a few quarks of electricity in your brain, and when you brain stops working, it goes elsewhere. So I guess it's kind of like reincarnation, but you might never ever be inside a living organism again...

[Bella]

Human beings are selfish, self-absorbed animals. No, I don't believe there is a soul, but I can understand the appeal of the belief of going on forever in the form of a soul. I mean, wouldn't it be rad if I could go on and on and on? The fear of death? Gone. Oh yea, I can totally understand the appeal!

The brain is an amazing thing and philosophers/scientists have only recently (compared to the span of human existence) discovered that human thought and personality lies in the brain. The brain is made up of all sorts of chemicals and neurons... and it's even been shown that one's very personality can change when these things are altered.

A good example: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,881 ... 89,00.html

*sigh* Further evidence against the "soul" crap that those people believe. How much longer until they wake up?