Question about "faith"

[possibletarian]

I'm aware that John does not believe in souls, but his claim seems to be that if they did exist they would not be unfalsifiable.

Hence my clarification on what he believes that other people believe a soul is, that his denomination refutes exists. Frankly I've never had such a strange conversation where two people agree on something, but the waters are still muddied somehow !

So far as i can tell there are two mainstream thoughts on what a soul is, as i understand it the Greeks defined it as essentially 'all that makes a person up' it does not really delve into the spiritual.  This is i understand how many people still use it.

In religion however the soul is often referred to as a spiritual, none material form that either informs us, or in fact is us, this is i suspect what John means when he says we don't have a soul. To me you cannot falsify the soul, simply infer that we have much better idea's about what consciousness could be etc, in other words make an unprovable soul unnecessary.

My position being that should a soul exist, there is no way to prove/disprove (unfalsifiable)  

I find myself in this back to front conversation where people it seems can make any claim, that the scale of what's extraordinary is subjective, and John seems to think the responsibility is on those who doubt it to refute it rather than the person who makes the claim to prove it.

I'm trying to understand why John under these circumstances would reject a alien abduction claim out of hand.  In other words where does  does healthy scepticism kick in in the mind of John given that all claims must be disproven rather than proved ?

Things aren't unfalsifiable simply because you want them to be or you feel they are too vague. They are unfalsifiable because they predict every outcome of an experiment. Vagueness is measured by this fact alone. If you want to claim souls are unfalsifiable, you have to show how they predict every outcome (which they don't).

If souls are claimed to be responsible for giving life to things, for example, and they're supposed to go to heaven or hell after death, that is sufficient to falsify souls. An experiment which can medically resurrect someone after a day or two, shows that either souls can be pulled out of heaven and hell against God's will (which religion doesn't teach) or else a body can be alive without a soul, falsifying this definition of souls.

Souls would be unfalsifiable if, despite our experiment, they predicted that a person can be alive with and without a soul (which they don't)

This is rich.  Your denomination teaches soul sleep.  That people who die and are resurrected - by medicine or by god come the day, were just sleeping.  Seems like it's got both bases covered to me.

I think they teach that the soul (all that we are) is kept in the mind of god, then we are re-created.