Is the Mind part of our physical body?

Faith & Science Conversation
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I think demonic affliction (I dont like ‘possession’ as in our mindset it implies a complete taking over of the person which I would suggest is rare if it happens at all) is alive and well in the West. It seems to manifest when particular Christians who use the authority of Christ appropriately are present, such as in a ministry setting, and where the Holy Spirit appears to make His presence particularly obvious. And I think it can probably affect Christians too.

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You did not find that the doctrine of the Trinity teaches that the Holy Spirit is God??? LOL Now I would like to know where YOU got YOUR understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity?

The omnipresence of God is, of course, a different teaching of Christianity. Sounds to me like you didn’t search or study this topic very hard at all. Why don’t you try a google search of “is the Holy Spirit omnipresent?”

Incorrect. I did answer your question. All I can do is attempt once again to explain. It came from the the only way I could see any meaning and value in Christianity. The only source is the Bible. No I did not get my understanding from someone else telling me what to believe. Repudiate my understanding all you want and all I can say is that I have no interest and see no value in the way you explain the Bible nor in the Christianity you are pushing. Magical mythical stories are great for entertainment but have nothing to do with reality. If that is all I could see in the Bible then I am left with atheism as the next best choice as far as I am concerned.

I suppose I could give you more of my background and thus some insight into the way I think. But you will not find what I have said in any of these. I am not following the teaching of anybody or anything other than the Bible. My story begins as a child of the 60s with the most liberal parents you can imagine. Their ideology can best be described as psychology which they both majored in college. It is largely from psychology which I constructed a system of morality when I was about 12 or 13. The scientific worldview was always so much a part of my thinking it is my perceptual filter through which I perceive the world. From that perspective I explored philosophy and then religion, though the focus of my studies was math and physics. I liked existentialism, Aristotle, and pragmatism while I hated Plato, Whitehead, and Nietche. I took a look at Mormonism, Buddhism, Jehovah Witnesses, and moonies before encountering an evangelical group called Calvary Chapel. From there I went to Vineyard and now I am going to a church of the Nazarene. But while I am generally an evangelical, none of these dictated my beliefs and on some doctrinal issues I am closer to Eastern Orthodox.

Here are some links to other explanations:

Why I believe in God and this spiritual stuff?

Why Christianity?

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84

there are some verses that in support of this view

2 Corinthians 5:1
Our Heavenly Dwelling
For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

1 Corinthians 6:19
Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own,

I am curious what do you really mean by that and how it is different from my understanding.

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I apologise for not making myself clear. I never said that the Holy Spirit is not God. I just said that we must learn from what the Bible teach us how the Holy Spirit operates. God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit work in different mode. I did not invent or define how the Holy Spirit work, but I learn from the Bible that the Holy Spirit is a gift to us from the Father God. The Holy Spirit works as a helper, counsellor, etc. The Holy Spirit resides in each believer. (indwelled, filled with the Holy Spirit) Paul use the term “temple” for this body as an analogy where the Holy Spirit is in there. This is all taught in the Bible, and not some man made invention, but a revelation from God on the modus operandi of the Holy Spirit.

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Ah Mitch, isn’t the reason we have this forum is for dialogue? What is the use of dialogue if you have already made up your mind and not open to the opinion or understanding of other people? I also have sets of belief that I hold on to and some interpretations of the Bible that I think is correct or at least valid interpretation of the Bible. However, I also know that I am a human being with a limited understanding of things. There were many interpretations that I hold about the bible that I found later as weak or contradictory with the whole narrative of the Bible and must be discarded or modified for the new one. why is that? Partly because I am definitely not a scholar of the ancient languages - hebrew, greek, latin or aramaic, and I am not a scholar of the ancient history of the east - egypt, canaanites, or even Israel for that matter. That is why I need to learn the bible from these scholars to see the context or hidden meaning of the ancient texts that is not easily unearthed by casual or even deep learning by non scholar as myself.
The second part is probably how I found that my understanding of the bible is growing day by day. The more I grow in understanding, the more I find that there are some beliefs that can’t be true. It is more like science to me. We must let the fact/reality dictate our science. The same thing with the Bible. If we believe that the Bible contains the truth that God wants to reveal to us, then we must follow where the Bible lead us with the help of the Holy Spirit who enlightens and open up the God’s world to us.

In this sense, I am still learning and still excited to find new truths / facts that had been there all along and yet missed it completely. Also, I think forums like this help to see if this new findings have merits or just my own false reading into the text of the Bible.

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  • In fact, if you believe that everytime a brain cell dies, you lose the memory in that cell, it would seem reasonable to assume that, when you die, your soul dies, and, if you have a spirit that survives death, you obviously believe that it leaves its memories behind, in which case you surely must think that your spirit has no memory of the deeds that it or any one/thing else committed before your body died.
  • In which case, I suspect that you’re going to be very mystified if you wake up as a new spirit–having no memories of ever being anything other than what you are.
  • Of course, if you believe in Hell or Purgatory, I would think that you’re not going be very happy, unless and until. you get moved into Paradise…no?
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Hi Terry, I am not sure whether you are following my chat on this forum or not. I argued that our mind (memory included) resides with our spirit. When we are alive, our mind is locked in with our brain and sourced our memory in that memory part of the brain and have access to it if that memory part is still accessible to us (unless the cell dies or the connection got damaged due to diseases or accident).
However, when our body dies, our spirit is freed from this physical realm and have the full memory of our lives even those we could not recall right now (like what happened when we were only 6 months old).
Our spirit will be clothed with a future resurrected body (spiritual body) that is unlike our physical body. It will be immortal, and it will not see decay. In another word, if we have a brain like we have now, that spiritual brain will never lose any capacity to remember any detail.

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The use is that even if we have made up our minds about a great number of things, we don’t know everything and haven’t made up our mind about everything. I have learned and made my decisions about a great deal from reading on this forum and other forums in general.

But the Bible doesn’t answer all questions or teach about all things. And neither do I support an effort to misuse passages to support interpretations for which those passages were never intended. This is precisely the problem with creationism – misusing Genesis to oppose evolution when it was never intended to do any such thing.

The fact remains that the Holy Spirit is God and thus omnipresent, so your argument does not follow.

For me it is largely the other way around. I find that the Bible does contain a great deal of truth when I had no reason to think it had any such thing. I also find that it contains things that are obviously quite wrong and far more that people use to claim things that are wrong. So no, “because the Bible says so” does not overrule the objective evidence or basic morality, let alone overturn the basic reasons I have for thinking that any of this stuff is worth listening to at all (that would make VERY little sense indeed). So… although I have found reason trust what it says about many things, that doesn’t mean someone can use their own interpretations of the text to lead me around by the nose.

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  • Chronology:
    • [quote=“Miekhie, post:67, topic:53516”] to Mitchell:
      What I mean is this. While we will have a spiritual body that totally unlike our physical body, will our resurrected mind retain the memory of our life, what we had done and all the persons that we knew from our life on earth?
      [/quote]
    • [quote=“Terry_Sampson, post:69, topic:53516”] to you:
      Excuse me. My memory isn’t as good as it used to be. Aren’t you Catholic, or weren’t you Catholic?
      [/quote]
    • [quote=“Miekhie, post:72, topic:53516”] to me:
      Isn’t forgetfullness happened because the death of brain cells that contain that memory?
      [/quote]
    • [quote=“Terry_Sampson, post:74, topic:53516”] To you:
      If you think so, you clearly couldn’t be a Catholic.
      [/quote]
    • [quote=“Terry_Sampson, post:87, topic:53516, full:true”] to you:
      In fact, if you believe that every time a brain cell dies, you lose the memory in that cell, it would seem reasonable to assume that, when you die, your soul dies, and, if you have a spirit that survives death, you obviously believe that it leaves its memories behind, in which case you surely must think that your spirit has no memory of the deeds that it or any one/thing else committed before your body died.
      In which case, I suspect that you’re going to be very mystified if you wake up as a new spirit–having no memories of ever being anything other than what you are.
      Of course, if you believe in Hell or Purgatory, I would think that you’re not going be very happy, unless and until. you get moved into Paradise…no?
      [/quote]
    • [quote=“Miekhie, post:88, topic:53516”]
      Hi Terry, I am not sure whether you are following my chat on this forum or not.
      [/quote]
    • Actually, I am, but I don’t think you are. You seem to be unclear on whether memory fades with dying brain cells, or survives death of the whole human.
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Since your source is the bible, can you give me some bible verses concerning the Holy Spirit that support your idea that the Holy Spirit does not dwell in us?

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That will be quite amusing Terry, since I am the one who started this thread. Let me quote you some of what I have said so far

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  • I’m glad you think it would be amusing, because I certainly thought too.
  • Ahhh! there’ “it” is, and you’re right. I was paying as close and steady attention to the meanderings of this thread as I wanted, but not as close and steady attention as you were.
  • The problem, IMO, is that it’s much clearer to me what you’re open to believing, which is, I say, ‘a good thing’ but it’s pretty far off the “track” for the people that I am least interested in communicating with. Therefore, I’ll say no more publicly.
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The 1st quote could be understood as referring to the new home God is building, what Revelation calls the New Jerusalem. It is a future home on earth.

Im not sure the 2nd quote has relevance to the question if we, as humans, have a separate entity called a ‘spirit’ within our physical bodies or brain, as the quote specifically refers to God somehow living in us.

I am just not convinced that, for example, when we die the ‘real’ us, a spirit, goes to live/exist in ‘heaven’ with God, and we stay there until Judgement Day and our physical bodies are finally resurrected, and presumably our spirits are reunited with our bodies. I wouldnt be surprised if in reality when you die, you really die, and the next thing you are conscious of is being alive but your body has been transformed. Ive found the writings of J Richard Middleton interesting on this. There is a youtube video in which he touches on the subject, for example referring to the ‘I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise’ from Jesus. Or should it be ‘Today, I tell you…’!

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Now you are just making stuff up.

The Holy Spirit DOES dwell in us. And the Bible certainly says this.

But the Bible does not stay the Holy Spirit ONLY dwells in our physical bodies and can only communicate with our spirit because our spirit resides in our physical bodies.

So how about we change this to a question which makes sense? We can change this to another belief of mine where the Bible is my only source. How about the belief that the physical body comes first and the spiritual body only comes second growing from the first like a plant from a seed. That is found in 1 Corinthians 15.

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2 Cor 5:1 could be misunderstood as referring to our new dwelling place in heaven. However if you read thru the passage especially
2 Corinthians 5:6
So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord,

It became clear what Paul was referring to as as the tent should be understood as our body.

Why not? If the Holy Spirit can dwell in us, then how about our own spirit. in Romans, Paul even said that the Holy Spirit will bear witness with our spirit
Romans 8:16
The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,

I personally believe that when we die physically, we will experience “soul sleep”. We will be a sleep. It was a term that Paul regularly used for believers who died and it was also used by Jesus Himself.
1 Corinthians 15:18
Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.

1 Corinthians 15:51
Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

Now, I know that many believers do not hold to soul sleep and I personally do not know why since it was a term used by Jesus and Paul himself.

So what will happen after we die? When we die, we will fall asleep like going to bed at night after kissing our wife good night and we lie in the bed and fall asleep. The next thing we know is the morning sunshine washing over our face. This description is close to what I imagine will happen. When Jesus comes again, we (our soul with spirit and mind) will be raised (awaken) and given new spiritual body and we will live with Jesus in His kingdom for eternity.

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97

I really enjoy discussing 1 Cor 15 and since you brought it up, then let’s discuss this more thoroughly and combine with 1 The 4:13-18

In the second coming of Jesus, there are basically 2 kind of believers. The first is the ones who had fallen asleep (dead) before the coming of Jesus. The second is the one who are still alive.

When Jesus comes again, both will receive the spiritual body as was Jesus. Now my question is “what is the role of our earthly physical body for the spiritual body?”
For those who were already dead, the question was easier. The physical body was long gone and turn to dust. Some dust lied in a tomb, and some were spread out over the ocean. Does God need this spread out dust to form a spiritual body? Not really since this spiritual body is unlike the physical body as in 1 Cor 15.

For those who are still alive, our physical body will be transformed / changed.

1 Cor 15:51-52
Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.

The physical body will be gone and will be replaced by the spiritual body. The question is still the same. Does God need this physical body to create a spiritual body? not really. But since those alive are still with their physical bodies, then in a flash, their physical bodies will be no more and replaced with spiritual body.

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98

I suggest that you reread 1 Corinthians 15 again, starting at verse 19, and read a Greek-English Interlinear version, such as can be found in www.biblehub.com…

  • verse 19: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
  • verses 42-54 …
  • You assume, on the basis of no evidence that “a natural body” is “a physical body” and that “spiritual body” is not “a physical body”. Surprise! They are both physical bodies, but just not natural bodies.
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I am not going to argue for something that is revealed so little in the Bible. You could be right by saying it is a physical body. It could very well be. However, what is this “spiritual body” made of? Definitely something that will not see decay nor death. Some stuffs made not in this material universe perhaps. Will this “spiritual body” need to be sustained with food? probably not. This “resurrected body” will last for eternity. It might not be made from carbon or water anymore. As such, it is still a mystery. We don’t have the living Christ right here on earth to explore the science of His resurrected body, but one thing for sure that our resurrected body will be like His resurrected body.

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I already answered this and so did Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. The spiritual is created by the choices of the living organism. Like Paul says, the spiritual body grows from the physical body like a plant from a seed.

The resurrection is not the creation of the spiritual body. The resurrection brings the spiritual body (dead because of sin) to life. And the matter of the physical body is irrelevant. That is constantly changing anyway as we eat, drink, and breathe. The spiritual body doesn’t come from the matter of the physical body but from the choices we make.

But the spiritual body is not a physical/natural thing as part of the space-time mathematical structure of the physical universe. The spiritual body is like God outside the space and time of the physical universe which God created. So even though it grows from choices made by our physical body it is not inside our physical body.