What is the soul?

Faith & Science Conversation
81

@cnalleyjr

This is quite a confusion. During the pre-New Testament period, there were rival schools about the afterlife. There were those who believed in a sleeping soul that would be awakened with a renewed body.

But Josephus tells us that the Zealot school believed in a soul independent of the body. The speech he presents may be fictional; Josephus may have had no information about any final speech at Masada. But he does couch the dramatic speech about the rapid “translation” of the soul to the Isle of Bliss into the mouth of the Zealot general.

Ironically, the idea Western civilization most commonly has about an afterlife derives from the Essenian viewpoint, while the Essenes themselves vanished from the Earth? Maybe we will meet up with all of them at the Isle of Bliss?

82

I would think the best place to start would be to see what did the ancient Jews believe it meant to be a soul.

https://biblehub.com/hebrew/5315.htm

83

I think all the theories of the soul become irrelevant next to the most often over-looked:

Souls are not “human-made”. Bodies are supplied with divine souls by God. God gives you the category of soul he has assigned to humans.

This leads us almost inescapably to a new conclusion: if you believe in Original Sin, you pretty much have to believe that Original Sin is attached to our “person-hood” by God himself! You can hem and haw, and dance around … but just because we have Original Sin (which I happen to reject) … doesn’t mean our soul has original sin because of contact with our parents.

We have original sin because we are humans under God’s human curse. He ships those souls out for general use - - with a cup full of spice and Original Sin !!!

"Until the late modern era, the standard Jewish belief was that after one dies, one’s immortal soul joins God in the world to come while one’s body decomposes, or the soul continues in a cycle of re-incarnation into a chain of other bodies.[1] At the end of days, God will recompose one’s body, place within it one’s immortal soul… 2

Footnote 2: Gillman, Neil. “Eschatology.” Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary . Ed. David L. Lieber. The Jewish Publication Society, 2001. 1434-1439.

84

I also don’t believe in original sin. That was a invention by people to justify infant baptism. The entire concept of OS is built on kids being born already guilty of sin. That’s not biblical.

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85

George, I’m not sure I understand your meaning in this quote. If you accept evolution as God’s method of creating the life forms around us, including our human selves, we can hardly refer to this as a “curse”. I prefer to see the ‘selfish elements’ inherent in Darwinian evolution as challenges that God has left in his creative mechanism so that, as an animal brain develops the ability to become conscious, that animal can choose (not be forced) to become an image of its Creator.

Is this an over-simplification?

blessings,
Al Leo

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86

@aleo

The people who have the most difficult views to adjust are those with the darkest precepts attached to those views.

You and I can differ on matters, and it really doesn’t change much, because we both have rather optimistic world views.

But those who fuss and fume over Original Sin - - they take some real forceful language in the terms that they understand. They are very prone to think everything is human-caused.

But on the assembly line of souls, it is not humanity that picks up the widget of original sin and screws it onto the chassis of the soul … it is God, and only God.

87

From what I have encountered in the bible, to me, the soul seems to be the entirety of your being, or the whole package of what you’re made up of. I am glad I could just punt that off and not make any claims about what we’re made up of.

88

Scripture – translations, at least – seems to make a distinction between body and soul.

89

The Egyptian concept seems to be the MOST complex version anywhere… except maybe L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology!

92

I know what I would like for it to be, but that is just me. I would like to think that God created man from material already created to separate that act, from breathing into him. I think He did more than that, I think He also spoke. The soul would be who we are, the spiritual version of each of us, but those words would be from something that God had never used; He gave protection to the soul that evil could never directly violate. He spoke in free will and self preservation, then sealed the deal with the enmity when they ate of the tree. Basically, we can’t be used like legion used the pigs, so evil has to convince us to alter our minds without setting off the enmity alarm that this change is not from us, but evil. Sin has to look sweet, if it were the true ugly nature that evil wants to directly impose, enmity, free will, or self preservation would prevent it from ever being an issue. He probably made it work for Himself also; God is as powerful as He is old. That endless power with emotion, He could alter free will with a thought. He probably made it so He has to actually speak it, like with Peter and the three denials. That would be my dream anyway, since the soul should work like an external hard drive; I have brain damage, so the people that I lost while being crushed, should still be safely stored in the soul.

93

There are different Jewish beliefs about afterlife.

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94

The teaching of reincarnation is not found in the OT or in the midrash which records the oldest Jewish ideas and teachings. It is found in Jewish mysticism and the Kabalah which originates in the 12th century of the middle ages. As typical of any religious ideas in people of Judaism and Christianity, passages have been found in older scriptures which are interpreted as supporting reincarnation. But the actual teaching of reincarnation is not found in the older texts.

This long association of the idea of a soul in pagan thought with the belief in transmigration and reincarnation is one of the reasons I avoid this word “soul” which I do not think is really in the Bible. The word sometimes translated as “soul” is more often translated as “life” even in those passages where it is sometimes translated as “soul.” So don’t think this concept of soul is really in the Bible and comes totally from pagan influences such as Plato via the the Gnostics.

I go with the teachings of Paul in 1 Cor 15 of a bodily resurrection to a spiritual body not a physical body and thus avoid the extremes ends of a spectrum from the pagan idea of an eternal soul and the anti-pagan idea of a physical resurrection.

95

I would say the opposite… In principle, probably not. I do not think the results can be independent of the means. The best we can do is something which is approximately the same. In general we can always find clues in the result which tells us how it was made – like forensic science which get better all the time.

And in fact we know from quantum mechanics that you cannot always measure things without altering what you measure, and that physical measurement can often create the results which it measures. I think this can even apply to God because when it comes to knowing things which are in a superposition state, such as the future. By knowing the future God creates that future.

96

@ProDeo

This was the point i was making. During the time of Josephus, the Essenes believed in translation of the spirit in the ABSENCE of a body of flesh.

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@mitchellmckain

1] The old testament is almost completely devoid of references to any kind of after life.

2] The New Testament actually provides some robust evidence that New Testamental Judaism had a very popular theme for reincarnation
…long before the 12th Century C.E.

98

I have little doubt there were jews who believed in spirits/gods living in wells or any number of superstitions. But the fact of the matter remains is that reincarnation isn’t in the midrash where Jewish scholars kept a record of their ideas from 200 C.E. to 1000 C.E. so that doesn’t agree with your claim or that reincarnation was in any way representative of Jewish belief before the middle ages.

99

That is not a bad place to begin, but we must understand that our understanding of the word soul is based primarily on the Greek Gentile philosophical understanding of the word soul at the time of the writing of the Bible.

The Jews saw the soul as “life” or the animating principle of humanity. The Greeks saw the soul as the rational, divine aspect of humanity. We are human because God created humanity with the ability to think and to love.

We are sinners because we misuse our abilities to think and to love. Our “soul” or better our spirit is our ability to think and to love.

100

“I were vaporized, could my consciousness be restored by recreating the exact same pattern of atoms in my brain? In principle, probably.”

And there we go to the old argument in Star Trek. Do transporters kill you and just make a duplicate on the other end? Is the Star Trek world full of soulless clones?

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101

@mitchellmckain

You are quibbling:

Mat 11:14
And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.

Mat 16:14
And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.

Mat 17:10-12
And his disciples asked him, saying, Why then say the scribes that Elias must first come?
And Jesus answered and said unto them, Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things.
But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them.

Mar 6:15
Others said, That it is Elias. And others said, That it is a prophet, or as one of the prophets.

Mar 8:28
And they answered, John the Baptist: but some say, Elias; and others, One of the prophets.

Mar 9:4-5
And there appeared unto them Elias with Moses: and they were talking with Jesus.
And Peter answered and said to Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here: and let us make three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias.

Mar 9:11-13
And they asked him, saying, Why say the scribes that Elias must first come?
And he answered and told them, Elias verily cometh first, and restoreth all things; and how it is written of the Son of man, that he must suffer many things, and be set at nought.
But I say unto you, That Elias is indeed come, and they have done unto him whatsoever they listed, as it is written of him.

Luk 9:8
And of some, that Elias had appeared; and of others, that one of the old prophets was risen again.

Luk 9:19
They answering said, John the Baptist; but some say, Elias; and others say, that one of the old prophets is risen again.

Jhn 1:21
And they asked him, What then? Art thou Elias? And he saith, I am not. Art thou that prophet? And he answered, No.

Jhn 1:25
And they asked him, and said unto him, Why baptizest thou then, if thou be not that
Christ, nor Elias, neither that prophet?

Rom 11:2
God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew. Wot ye not what the scripture saith of Elias? how he maketh intercession to God against Israel, saying,

Jas 5:17
Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not
rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months.

102

Do you mind providing a link or source that I can read or look up? Thanks in advance.