Draconis

Thinking about dead animals and whether they might have souls or not led me to wonder, assuming an evolution-accepting, OEC point of view "at what point did God decide to start putting souls into us so we could start going to heaven or hell?" According to my mother it was "He saw that we were intelligent, and gave us souls" but what level of intelligence? How long ago? And why no word of this in the Bible?

This also suggests another interesting possibility, that any other organism might potentially gain enough intelligence for God to do the same in future.
Perhaps in the future we might be sharing heaven with dolphins(?)

atonal chaotic

Venturing into idle, empty speculation (but is anything involving spirits or souls not so?)
Perhaps souls are an emergent property, not specifically granted but just appearing where conditions enable them. Perhaps humans only have proto souls, the initial hope for immortality, and the true souled beings will arise later in creation.

Mr Carcer

I've always thought that people with retardation are soulless brutes. Now I know I'm right.

stuart shepherd

Ecclesiastes 3:18-21 (King James Version)
18I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.

19For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.

20All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

21Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?

Stuart Shepherd

ForensicAtheist

Exactly what is a soul anyway? And can anyone prove it actually exists?

thegdin

beyond barry white there isnt proof of soul. if we mean soul in the religious sense it is just as impossible to prove as the existence of god or gods.

ForensicAtheist

Exactly.

biitar

The belief that humans have a mind seperated from our bodys seems to me just a load of bollocks. This because changes in our body change our behavior, feelings and etc.

So I think that the biggest problem for religion is defining soul.

Cheerful Charlie

Soul in that sense is a late comer to Judaism. Soul in the OT was the principle of life, when you died, your ruah, breathe disspated.There is no heaven, hell or after life in the earliest parts of the OT. Early Christianity had no soul, the claim was we would all be bodily resurrected. Soul was a pagan idea, Plotinus and others made it a popular idea that was accepted into Christianity. Neo-Platonism made the soul acceptable.

Stoicism taught souls were made of a special kind of fiery matter.

Where do souls come from? Two ideas have been argued for centuries, when we are created, we recieve a soul from God, or we get souls from our parents,whose souls create new souls as well as corporeal bodies. God created the first souls of Adam and Eve.

Soul is really a vague idea that never had a strong set of dogmas exactly explaining it all.

The whole idea of a soul began to be a problem again with with Descartes, who tried to answer a question from Princess Christinia of Sweden, "How does a soul interact with matter?". Dualism, souls and matter are near impossible to harmonize reasonably. Liebnez and Malabranche and others got involved and things got so odd and weird thinking about all of this dropped out of fashion. Oddities like parallelism, god creates a parallel world of matter and souls, or occasionallism, God creates the world of matter to reflect our soul's thoughts. Berkeley and idealism. All is soul stuff.

Oddly enough it did advance science, as all was materialism with a soul on top. Animals and man were machines, man had a soul, animals did not.
This allowed science to ignore god, souls and supernaturalism, post Descartes. Naturalism and theology joined hands.

The natural history of the soul is long and twisted. And really, kind of interesting. Its not something most theologians like to discuss dogmatically speaking.


Cheerful Charlie

Derrick Lang

Soul is an odd thing. I remember during my suicide attempt, I went into a coma, had to be revived at all that good stuff. It was just complete darkness (I didn't have the fortune of having the brain activity that stimulates Near Death Experiences, which have more in common with dreams than reality). Anyway, that made me ask the same question you ask. I would say that humans don't have a soul in a dualist sense, as in the brain dies but something else consciously lives on. If the soul is a separate entity, I would assume it would lack consciousness and would be a part of a single whole (would that be fun?).

Problem is, hell is a bunch of nonsense that is a sign of spiritual insecurity more than anything else. Really what is worse the Holocaust, which allowed an escape, or Holocaust like punishment for eternity? In other words one would worship a Hitler like entity just because he has power? And I wonder how dictatorships survive (yes I Godwin'd this thread, but I'm tired and need a shortcut)

Not to ramble, but I just don't think souls came latter (such as in Scientology). And to think of some sort of God (or I should say god) who would create souls to stroke his ego and punish, can't be divine, that has the mark of humanity all over it (imagine a horny 14 year kid creating souls for robots so he could have a harem of loving female bots but the unbelievers get raped and tortured for all time or something).

I'm not really answering your question, because I don't know the answer. I'm ignorant, and nothing I say will affect reality. We might not have souls. If we do, that means the question of other lifeforms having them needs to be answered, and if, for example, Dinosaurs had souls, am I really going to have to spend eternity on the run from the frickin things? Cause I'm sort of hoping for relief in death.