(October 6, 2024 at 6:42 am)Belacqua Wrote: According to Aristotle, the soul is the form of the body.

According to Aristotle, the Earth is the center of the universe.

(October 7, 2024 at 1:26 pm)Leonardo17 Wrote:   In some cases this very issue can be a spiritual experience on its own. Like a hunter who is pointing his gun to a deer, suddenly realizing that he and the deer is one and thus being unable to shoot.

Google "buck fever" for the kind of experience your audience may be more familiar with.  Still, I like your idea of the hunters epiphany - and while I suspect that hunters experience more of the former than the latter both are real in any meaningful sense of the word.  As are any number of experiences, some of them deeply antithetical and logically incompatible with each other as truth statements binding upon reality, rather than the limited subset of the reality of experiences.

As it goes - "I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened".

Quote:Before the emergence and spread of Political Islam as an ideology (mostly in the 1960’s) the world was a more civilized place. See civility is a choice. So is other neurotic / narcissistic approaches that include both extreme forms of capitalism (like libertarianism for instance) and/or things like Political Islam and/or the socialist experience / Stalinism that maintained itself between 1917 and 1991.

There you go again.  Before the emergence and spread of political islam in the 6 or 7 hundreds ad the world was "a more peaceful place" too.  They're not doing islam wrong, you are - even if you're doing spirituality right, whatever you and deepak chopra think that is.  The thing that animates these movements...each and every one, explicitly, is the return to whatever passes for an islamic golden age in nutville.  Christianity is going through the same shit over here and has been over the same period.  Both groups are convinced that the trouble with people today ™ is their lack of true spirituality.  We are too materialistic today, and not open enough to a spiritual reality - unlike those people who lived in feudal systems or worse in the past - and that's chemical weapons grade irony, when you let it sink in.  People who uniformly believed that people were property (and often still do....) are supposed to be the exemplars of anti-materialist values in comparison.

Sure, though, islamic states are going through a period of regression at the moment, not because they've left their spiritual roots, but because there's a strong period of retrenchment going on rooted -in- those spiritual beliefs.

There is nothing "spiritual" about humans. We are probably the least "spiritual" species on the planet. And spirituality doesn't have any meaningful answers, all it has is platitudes. People mistakenly believe this platitude horse shit is some kind of profound revelation, well....No? There's nothing profound about any of it. It's literally just stupid privileged people selling things to stupid not-so-privilegd people. Oldest trick in the book, and very tiresome. I don't understand how humans have still not evolved beyond this stage. Fairy stories, that "trick" people into having a world view that is not at all consistent with reality. I'm not sure how people fall for this crap, but it needs to stop.

Probably because there's no "beyond". Evolution isn't an orderly march to correction, and the thing/s that inform our nonsensical sense have/has practical value to us as a species.

This idea that all of the great religions have some sort of kernel of value that we might mine in troubled times is not more complicated, imo, than returning to a known source of water when our exploratory compulsions fail to bare quite literal fruit. The thing that gives us the ability to do the one comes with misfires like the other. We and many other species will return to water so long as it hasn't killed us yet, even if it had poisoned us from the first sip...which...imo...is what happened with theism in general and the spiritualist self help market in particular.

(October 7, 2024 at 9:40 am)Sheldon Wrote:

(October 6, 2024 at 6:42 am)Belacqua Wrote: Perhaps you're thinking that a soul is some kind of material substance? Like a wispy thing that can fly out of the body. 

Perhaps you should learn what a straw man fallacy is?

Now does anything in that post directly address what I actually said? Or have you interjected again, with a straw man, and a long post that doesn't actually address my point?

A straw man fallacy is when you intentionally misrepresent your opponent's position in order to defeat it in argument more easily. 

If I put a question mark at the end of a sentence, that's a question. I'm asking if that's your view of what a soul is. You didn't answer my question. 

I have described how Christians traditionally view what a soul is.

Does having a soul even matter? How does having a soul make humans significantly different than other living things?

Moot point, it seems, since our spirit advocate has told us he thinks that a soul is exactly that. A wispy thing that can fly out of the body....and "more", too.

(October 7, 2024 at 6:16 pm)Sheldon Wrote: So where are we on any objective evidence that a soul or anything spiritual exists, or are even possible?

The soul is the form of the body (in the traditional Christian view) and every material object has a form. The objective evidence for the soul is that every material object has a form. 

I said this before but you ignored it. 

As I said before, the spiritual consists of the thoughts and perceptions of the perceiver. What kind of objective evidence can we have that the thoughts and perceptions of the perceiver have changed? 

I said these things before but you ignored them and haven't responded.