"Spirit of modern liberal Christianity, nicely defined"

from: www.myconfinedspace.com

Comments

[jim rogers]

What is the modern concept of a soul??

A soul has no size or specific location. After death how does a soul store thoughts? What gives a soul integrity as a self-entity? How does it have self-boundaries in the absence of physical properties in a void, and not simply "dissipate"? How does it keep thoughts within itself?

Is a soul neither male nor female? Yet our sex is a major part of who we are and how we view ourselves. Presumably it is neither heterosexual nor homosexual, yet that also heavily influences our concept of self. So what is a soul? What does it comprise?

What is a life force, as some espouse? Is is an integral part of a body that can't exist alone (Aristotle)? The Hebrews didn't envisage an eternal soul existing outside of a body, and that idea followed Plato. Is the soul the logos or mind alone? Is it a Platonic immortal essence with moral reasoning? How can a bodiless soul "act"? Does it have personality or individuality? Can it have human properties including some or all human emotions? Can it be optimistic or pessimistic? Can it be sad, angry, scared, frustrated, happy, calm, or whatever? How? In relation to what?

A soul can't become demented, brain damaged or psychotic, yet physical changes in our brains change the way we perceive our world, and major brain changes effect us dramatically during life, so do these change our essential self and therefore our soul? How could they not cause a major change, including changes to our moral sense? They change the way we act morally. So does a demented, damaged, or insane person have a permanently compromised soul as a result?

Is it "conscious"? How could a soul think without neurones? Does it have memory? How can it store memory without neurones? If it has memory of thoughts and sensory events, what thoughts and events? Only a fraction of our brain activity or mind is within our conscious awareness during life at any time. Does the independent soul access all this unconscious information too? Science tells us that 98% of our visual field information is not in focus at any one time, and we see an interpreted world. Many sensory perceptions are also unconsciously perceived. Does the soul remember unconsciously stored data? We forget most of our life experiences. Does the soul forget too? Or does it have a record of every thought and every perceived sensation via sight, sound, taste, touch and smell, every inner bodily sensation and function, and our every act and experience throughout life? How could it interpret this infinite data set in any comprehensible way?

How does a soul make sense of emotions without a limbic system and body to experience and give sense to them? Does a soul experience every type of human emotion? All at once? Is every thought in a soul conscious at once if it has no unconscious? How does it make sense of the near infinite input? How does it focus its thoughts?

So if a soul never forgets anything, it has memories of every thought, event, bodily function, experience and emotion a being has felt throughout life, including every pain, hurt and suffering, every sexual experience, every negative experience. Throughout life we are able to forget, and time heals because the emotions attached to bad experiences fade, or memories get lost, filtered or are often re-written in a modified less painful form as we reinvent our past. If a soul remembers everything, then does it still have to live with the painful associations of all traumatic stressful memories? Does this asexual soul live on with countless sexual memories (which must be strange for a supposedly asexual entity)? How does it escape the feelings stored in hateful memories and negative feelings?

If the soul somehow escapes negative emotions, perhaps with these being muted and transformed without a brain to supply the neurotransmitters and brain activations and bodily hormone and neuronal physical activity that are an integral part of human deep experiences, then, can it hate with passion? If emotions are muted in a soul, then, does it then experience only muted not passionate love? Can it be then purely evil? Can a soul be not only either all good or bad, but every step in between? If every step in between, then, given that no-one is all good, do all souls still suffer to varying degrees?

With death a being would in fact realise it is not who it thinks it is, as all thoughts, experiences and emotions throughout life returned. Every delusion, and mistaken thought, including the emotions attached, which was sometimes a conscious process, sometimes merely a long line of poorly based, prejudiced or ignorant belief, and often an unconscious process linked to the limited field of consciousness at any time, would be blown away. We are who we are, now, warts and all. At any moment we have forgotten or learned to ignore many memories, or they are buried in our unconscious.They are heavily filtered within. If we vividly remembered many of them we would likely be changed in a major way. If we remembered every single thought, experience and emotion we would be overwhelmed and changed. So in death, if the soul is the essential self, the soul would be changed dramatically as these memories again become conscious, and as deluded beliefs became explicit. The soul would not recognisably "be" the being it had been, or thought it was.

The above ideas suggest a soul perhaps cannot access much lifetime acquired information. So if a soul can't have these functions of mind that we have during life, how can it have or be anything we can ever conceive of ? A soul is unimaginable, inconceivable, and totally beyond human thought. Contemplating the soul is a pointless thought experiment, for there is no answer to it. No wonder there is no consensus about what a soul is between various religions, nor within a religion including Christianity, nor within denominations.

We are consciously aware of only thinking with imagery, symbols and language. We can't really conceive of most thought without language. Our language centres are crucial to our conscious thought expression. Presumably there is an underlying brain process language, which could be called "mentalese", a hypothetical language of thought or representation of concepts and propositions in the brain in which ideas, including the meaning of words and sentences, are couched. It is the postulated background unconscious "language" of thought. Emotions and feelings are experienced within, but rely on the limbic system and associated pathways and mechanisms being activated to give expression to them. Our thoughts involve sensory interaction with the physical world, and interaction with the emotional and abstract or mental world around and within us.

If we strip theses away, what is left? Is there a language of the soul, "soulese"? How does it represent these other elements? How can it possibly do that when detached from them? If we take away the physical representations and feedback that our brain is constantly dealing with, what can a bodiless, brainless soul be left with? How can the data and representations of a living brain and mind exist without its substrate? How could they possibly have any meaning in a matterless void?

How can the soul in fact think in any way we would recognise? What is left of personality when mannerisms, habits, and all other physical characteristics, and all sensory, biological, neurological, and language components are peeled off? How could a soul be recognisable as coming from the person it supposedly inhabited in life, if personality, mental processes, and maybe even all knowledge and memory of the physical realm as we know it, are stripped away? How could it be recognisable to other souls who had known the person in life amongst the tens of billions of other souls? How is it even recognisably different compared to the others?

A soul can't carry energy as we know it. It can't transfer any energy to a living body nor have energy transferred to it, for that would contradict the first law of thermodynamics (energy within our universe cannot be created or destroyed). A bodiless soul would therefore have to exist outside of our universe, and not interact with it in any known way.

The soul is only a warm fuzzy thought or feeling, and that's about the sum of knowledge about it. It is a nebulous, unprovable, indefinable, conceptual "self".