What the hell is a 'soul' anyway?

[Jenny A]

This is a series of questions I always ask when people start talking about souls. I'd like to collect the local soul-believers' answers on this topic, but if you don't believe in souls, feel free to add more questions.

1.  No clue how to define it.  I believe that Soul and Body are separate and that we don't "have" a soul, but "are" a soul and have a body. 

2.  No clue

3.  Well I suppose in some sense yes, in that I believe people are souls that have physical bodies that interact with the material world

4.  Don't know.  

5.  Again, don't know.


Hope that was clear enough for you Luc.  

This has the advantage of honesty.  When someone says soul to me, I have three rather different ideas.  The first is some spiritual essence that the speaker thinks might continue in essence even if the person where to be reincarnated as a cockroach.  That is just woo.  There's no evidence of it.

The next is a metaphor akin to feeling things in one's heart.  It's the deepest emotionally real part of you.  For poets and lovers, that's a useful term.  "I love you/bean soup/impressionism/Mozart/jazz/Jesus to the bottom of my little soul."

The last is just another name for our consciousness.  This is the part of you that attempts to define soul.  I prefer to call that part me.

Which of these, or a combination thereof is the soul?