Judgment of Souls

[AnimatedDirt]

But I am surprised that AD and Bruce would agree with this. I thought you guys were into eternal life, life beyond death.

Resurrection of the body, not afterlife of the soul, is my understanding of the New Testament teaching. But that's just my understanding.

Agreed.  "The dead know nothing."  When a person dies, the whole person dies and is in the grave.  Not in heaven as a disembodied spirit/soul, but wholly in the grave...dead.

[Stevil]

The fallacy here is equating a mortal man and his actions to that of God that is the Creator and Sustainer of all life...or so is the claim/belief.

So god does it and we call it perfect but if a human does it we call it monstrous.

[Stevil]

But I am surprised that AD and Bruce would agree with this. I thought you guys were into eternal life, life beyond death.

Resurrection of the body, not afterlife of the soul, is my understanding of the New Testament teaching. But that's just my understanding.

Agreed.  "The dead know nothing."  When a person dies, the whole person dies and is in the grave.  Not in heaven as a disembodied spirit/soul, but wholly in the grave...dead.

Where is this eternal life that you have been promised?

Are your bones going to be reanimated at some distant point in the future? How are they to claw themselves out of the coffin? What about those that were cremated? What about people who have defective bodies, hideously deformed, their eternity would be terrible.

What about when the sun runs out of fuel, how can the god keep to the eternal promise?

[Ecurb Noselrub]

Where is this eternal life that you have been promised?

Are your bones going to be reanimated at some distant point in the future? How are they to claw themselves out of the coffin? What about those that were cremated? What about people who have defective bodies, hideously deformed, their eternity would be terrible.

What about when the sun runs out of fuel, how can the god keep to the eternal promise?

Again, I can only refer to the New Testament. There is the concept of "a new heaven and a new earth," which I take to mean that God in some manner rejuvinates the cosmos. I assume that God himself would be the eternal energy source or provide it indirectly in some manner. But this is only speculation on my part. The presentation of resurrection in the New Testament has the resurrected body being "glorious," so there would be no defect.  How God accomplishes this is beyond me.  This gets into the realm of pure faith.  My basis for believing in general is my personal subjective experience with Jesus. Beyond that, since his apostles left us teachings about these matters, I accept those teachings on faith because of the apostles' association with Jesus. He apparently trusted them with this matters, so I do, as well. 

[Sweetdeath]

What's the deal with pets/animals having "no soul" ?

[AnimatedDirt]

What's the deal with pets/animals having "no soul" ?

Both Man and animals ARE souls...the sum of their parts (what God used to form these) = a soul/living being/creature

<sub>Genesis 1:21 - Hebrew chay nephesh - living thing/creature

Genesis 1:30 - Hebrew 'asher nephesh chay be o - "...everything that has the breath of life in it."

Genesis 2:7 - Hebrew 'adham hayah chay nephesh - "...man became a living being."</sub>

[Ecurb Noselrub]

What's the deal with pets/animals having "no soul" ?

Black pets have soul; white pets have rock.

[Sweetdeath]

What's the deal with pets/animals having "no soul" ?

Black pets have soul; white pets have rock.

XD LOL

[En_Route]

Let's say that the soul exists

That it is an immeasurable, unobservable system that accompanies the living body.
It has no mass, nor momentum, it provides no resistance, thus the accelerating/decelerating body behaves exactly the way the laws of physics would dictate based on the sum of the physical/material parts.
But somehow this soul is bound to the body, it is located, presumably in the brain or a part of the brain that is irremovable/irreplaceable, the part which underlies a conscious self awareness.
You can lose an arm, a leg, a kidney, have a heart and lung transplant and yet "your" soul remains with the conscious self awareness still present in your brain. You can even lose specific parts of the brain, some functions may be lost, short term memory, speech, mobility etc but your conscious self awareness may stay unless "that" part of the brain is affected.

Anyway, digressing too much, the soul, attached to a specific part of the brain, co-exists with you, during your life, follows you everywhere and is not affected by sudden changes in momentum, it is metaphysically bonded.

Now the purpose I suppose of the soul is to allow you, as a person to make right and wrong decisions, moral decisions, based on .... the structure/blueprint of the soul. If you have a Good soul then you will act like a good person. If you have a Bad soul you will act like a bad person.

Presumably souls can change, they can decide to give up their own faulty blueprint and instead follow the perfect morals taught by their church.

This all becomes very important once the person dies and the soul is then free to explore the afterlife. The soul then faces judgement day.
The god, inspects the soul as if god were a Spartan inspecting a new born baby, if the soul was defective then it is either cast into eternal torment or destroyed via fire (depending on what you believe).

The Spartans destroyed defective babies presumably in an attempt to build a physically superior race/society, one that had a stronger chance for survival. When our societies encounter dangerous members we can punish them as deterrents to them and others or lock them up in order to protect the rest of society.

So why does the god judge souls? Why are they punished or destroyed? Are they a threat? It can't be a deterrent to others because the living don't ever see what happens to bad souls, they have never had confirmation on what is good or bad behavior, so there are no cautionary lessons to be learned.
Is the afterlife threatened by bad souls? Would they corrupt it? Would this mean the god is not all powerful and seeks to destroy all threats before they can grow in numbers? It seems that disbelief is a greater crime than repentant murder and rape. Does this mean if souls in the afterlife stop believing then the god will lose all its power? If belief is still required this would mean that the souls still won't get any evidence of a god, not even in the afterlife. For if they did, then disbelief would become a moot point.

Anyway, if you read through this long rant, then congratulations, you did well.
I've never been religious, am just trying to make some kind of sense of it. It is bizzare in my opinion.
Maybe I will never understand.

The soul is the ghost in the machine, the mysterious essence of the individual which transcends all the changes  which the human personality undergoes, and which is invested with the magical property of free will which is the get- out clause that allows God to inflict an eternity of agony on his own creations for whose flaws and faults he must be ultimately responsible.

[xSilverPhinx]

What's the deal with pets/animals having "no soul" ?

Black pets have soul; white pets have rock.

That was...awful, in a funny sort of way