What Is The Soul?

trentwray said:
You did say it was infallible though, yes? What is the difference? Do you believe it can be infallible but also in error at the same time? Maybe I don't understand the meanings of the words as I thought ....

Regardless ... still ... do you view the bible as equal to god? Or is the bible god? Or can a person know god without a bible? Why/why not?
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I'm sorry, my mistake. For some reason I don't jive altogether well with the word "inerrant." To me errant means wandering about and inerrant the antithisis of that. Whenever I use the word inerrant and errant I get it backwards. Odd, really. I used to do the same thing with Jonah and Noah. Every time.

The Bible has errors. Spurious scriptures, mistranstlations, copyist errors; the latter having to do primarily with numbers which were a bit tricky in the Masoretic.

Can a person know God without the Bible? Hmmm. Adam didn't have a Bible as such. The law of God is written in all of our hearts.
 
David Henson said:
I'm sorry, my mistake. For some reason I don't jive altogether well with the word "inerrant." To me errant means wandering about and inerrant the antithisis of that. Whenever I use the word inerrant and errant I get it backwards. Odd, really. I used to do the same thing with Jonah and Noah. Every time.

The Bible has errors. Spurious scriptures, mistranstlations, copyist errors; the latter having to do primarily with numbers which were a bit tricky in the Masoretic.

Can a person know God without the Bible? Hmmm. Adam didn't have a Bible as such. The law of God is written in all of our hearts.
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I continued this conversation in a long post in your 7 day thread, to save you from answering it here. Sorry :(
 
David Henson said:
Would anyone buy into one that claimed otherwise?
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Because a lot of people do not see the universe in such black and white terms. For example, I am a moral relativist, so when it comes to ethical questions, I do not believe there is Only One Real TruthTM. Many modern religions are blends from different faiths (please do not go off on paganism again, I get it), so that already implies there is more than one possible truth.

How would you test your truth against, say, Confucianism?
 
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Can a person know God without the Bible? Hmmm. Adam didn't have a Bible as such. The law of God is written in all of our hearts.
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So why did he use invisible ink for the majority of the earth's inhabitants?
 
Bikewer said:
I would speculate that the idea of a "soul" long predates any sort of organized religion. I would think it would originate with primitive animistic beliefs. Animists believe that "animating spirits" are responsible for life, and when the spirit leaves the body, life ceases. The spirit is in some way capable of carrying on and interacting with the world.
A logical enough belief for our primitive ancestors... They would be familiar with death by trauma, of course, but what happened when grandpa Uugh went to sleep one night and simply didn't wake up?
Obviously, his spirit departed.... Indeed, that term for death has lasted to the present day. To tie this spirit in some way to breath (as did the Hindus) or blood (many others) again seems logical....No breath, no life. Loose too much blood..You die.

These ideas would go way back...Possibly even prior to the emergence of Homo Sapiens.

Current ideas of the soul in some way maintaining one's personality in a non-physical form are just extrapolations of the ideas of our ancestors.
It's an appealing idea, and that no doubt speaks for it's survival despite the lack of any evidence.
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That sounds plausable . . . skeptics of the Bible tend to overgeneralize or at least grossly underestimate the Bible. For example, a skeptic will read of the signs in the heavens given in Revelation and assume they are a superstitious fear of astroids or some other seemingly logical excursion, when in fact, a careful study beyond your speculation indicates that Revelation in those specific cases were not talking about astroids they were using metaphors to indicate political and social upheaval. For example, Nebuchadnezzar being called Lucifer or the Daystar and Jesus being called Daystar.
 
Sun Countess said:
I don't really take too much mind of what the bible says, as it's clearly a bunch of misogynistic and ridiculous contradictory hooey written by men, who were only inspired by their own desire for power, and nothing remotely "divine" or "truthful."

It's a horrible book of fiction, and god is the main villain. My criticisms of the bible are a separate but sometimes secondary layer to my criticisms of theistic belief in general.


Who said that blood and life are trivial? They're very real, and I don't particularly care what the bible has to say about either. I'm not going to take moral teachings or any other kind of teaching from a book that will also teach me (a female) that I'm a worthless, filthy piece of property, available for raping by whoever is in the vicinity (maybe I'll be lucky like Mary and get raped by Jehovah himself!! *squee!* :rolleyes:) and commanded to be silent. Sorry if I ignore moral teachings that include: slavery, genocide, rape, torture of innocent children, gang rapes, incest, and blood sacrifices.

And yes, the idea of anything "immortal" is difficult to grasp. An immortal soul is just plain ridiculous. Do you have any evidence of immortal souls (outside of the bible)?
eta: Scratch the last question, as I reread and see David said the soul was not immortal. I guess I'm really wondering why he thinks atheists would have a hard time thinking that soul had to be immortal because the bible says so....? (If I got that thinking right.)
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Wow! Well at least the appearance of intelligence saw fit, in the end, to actually get the basic meaning of my post. Perhaps we should give you a second chance on all of the other preconceptions and ignorance?
 
Ron_Tomkins said:
Newsbreak: Claiming something is true because it's written in some book, is circular reasoning.

So yeah. Both your Bible claim and the Lord Of The Rings example are samples of circular reasoning. If you claimed Gandalf existed in real life you would need far more proof than a fictional book.
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Lament of the atheist, clutching a school textbook on evolution like his religious predecessor, never an obvious thought of history repeating itself, indoctrinating the children and squashing the competition is rather typically myopic, don't you think? There is such a thin line between the quixotic and the mundane.
 
David Henson said:
Wow! Well at least the appearance of intelligence saw fit, in the end, to actually get the basic meaning of my post. Perhaps we should give you a second chance on all of the other preconceptions and ignorance?
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It may be a topic for another thread, but I'm not ignorant of the words in the bible which promote: rape, genocide, misogyny, slavery, subjugation of women, women as property, torture as a way to prove love (see: Abraham, see: Job).

Maybe there's a retranslation somewhere that doesn't make Yahweh out to be a big old bully, but I've yet to see one. If people want to use that book as a source of guidance or a moral code, I usually figure they haven't read it, or they've reinterpreted it to gloss over all the bits they don't like. Except for the part about homosexuals.

But....none of this has to do with souls, and whether they're immortal or just a synonym for blood. It's a word to describe an imaginary concept. If you want to talk about blood, just call it blood. If you want to talk about life, just call it life. When people talk about souls, they're generally speaking about that "spark of life" that exists both before you were born and after you die.
 
I Ratant said:
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As has been and will be pointed out to you and all the other bible thumpers that rely on that for their thinking, the bible is a collection of folk tales and myths and social rules built upon many years of wishful thinking and chest beating and real life experience, all funneled through the imaginations of many people, a goodly number of whom were bonkers, and operating to a standard agenda of social control of the population, through misinformation, fear and threats of both real and after-death punishment for failure to knuckle under and accept that crap.
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Nonsense. All you are really saying is that the only real answer to "God did it" is "God didn't do it." Your "observations" or rather "opinions" on the subject of the Bible, its writers and their culture is far more ignorant than the writers themselves were, and 2,000 years later you know less about it than was known then even though there are mounds of new information since just King James' day.
 
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David Henson said:
Lament of the atheist, clutching a school textbook on evolution like his religious predecessor, never an obvious thought of history repeating itself, indoctrinating the children and squashing the competition is rather typically myopic, don't you think? There is such a thin line between the quixotic and the mundane.
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So, you are a creationist as well?

Hm.
 
This is pretty amusing.
David Henson seems to be the one who knows the true version of Christianity and the soul.

I still frankly am figuring out why I should care about a fantasy?
 
paximperium said:
This is pretty amusing.
David Henson seems to be the one who knows the true version of Christianity and the soul.

I still frankly am figuring out why I should care about a fantasy?
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I tried to cut to the chase and go True Scottsman immediately, but I think he wants to drag it out before revealing his ace in the hole about how he's so sure about what he's so sure of. Either to earn a self created badge of honor for surviving a specific length of time amongst the less enlightened heathen or because he only wants to cherry pick and dance around the heart of his agenda, testing his knowledge to flex his "biblical muscles" in his own mirror.

David Henson said:
Of course, you realize that Jehovah is genderless. Having neither male or female sex organs.
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David ... please get to the core of your arguments. I'm thinking in your mind it's to sharpen your biblical skills. But for me the basis of your argument rests on not the validity of the bible, but the validity of Jehovah. Do you have any (dare I say it) evidence to prove Jehovah is alive and relevant to the here and now by actually existing? Have you met J or can I talk with him for example? It's so easy to answer. It's almost a yes or no question.
 
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David Henson said:
Nonsense. All you are really saying is that the only real answer to "God did it" is "God didn't do it." Your "observations" or rather "opinions" on the subject of the Bible, its writers and their culture is far more ignorant than the writers themselves were, and 2,000 years later you know less about it than was known then even though there are mounds of new information since just King James' day.
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Out walking today, I encountered this serpent.
It spaketh not to me!
( Good thing, my Aramaic is really primitive.)
Anyway, I know tons more than the vast assemblage of compilers of the OT and the NT knew about the universe.
Such as snakes can't speak.
(Neither can bushes.)
Elementary, my dear Watson.
The earth wasn't Flooded.
Stars can't move around and hover over specific dwellings.
Ya know (or most likely don't), science stuff.
Stuff you could hang your hat on, not like the "truths" in the book, which vary all over the place, depending on the mis-education of the editor of the moment.
 

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Hokulele said:
Because a lot of people do not see the universe in such black and white terms. For example, I am a moral relativist, so when it comes to ethical questions, I do not believe there is Only One Real TruthTM. Many modern religions are blends from different faiths (please do not go off on paganism again, I get it), so that already implies there is more than one possible truth.

How would you test your truth against, say, Confucianism?
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I wouldn't. I've published, designed and proofread the Analects of Confucius on a former website of mine which no longer exists. I know of it's history in basic sense, but would see no point in comparing the two. How would you compare them?
 
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