RE: What does the soul take with it?
April 7, 2015 at 12:56 pm
(This post was last modified: April 7, 2015 at 1:42 pm by Brian37.)
(April 7, 2015 at 12:51 pm)emjay Wrote: No-one disputes the fact that the physical body is left behind when a person dies and the soul goes into the afterlife, but what I would like to ask Christians is what of the person goes with the soul? Memories, learned behaviours, and I would say all aspects of personality are 'stored' in the neural networks of the brain. If I were to believe in a soul, all it could be for me was the focal point of all this stored information - in life. But there are many degenerative diseases of the brain, and other neural abnormalities, that directly influence personality in life: dementia for instance progressively destroys personality for many years prior to death, and some lucky or unlucky people, depending on how you look at it, are physically unable to feel pain or fear from birth. Therefore if the soul takes someone's existing personality to the afterlife what does it take in the case of dementia? If it takes their personality when they were younger and before the disease, at what arbitrary point? In any case the brain is always in flux and a person is not the same from day to day so how can you find that arbitrary point if it's not the point of death? And as for the people unable to experience pain, if they went as they were, then Hell would be meaningless. It seems to me that the idea of the soul doesn't take into account individual differences in the brain and the only way it could work for everyone was if a brand new mind/body accompanied the soul into the afterlife, but if that was the case, how would it be you?
Um what do you mean no one disputes this? I most certainly dispute the stupid idea of a soul at all. You are nothing more than your brain in motion, destroy the structure, no structure or to make the motion you call you. No different than if you destroy a car engine, the shell of the car may still be there but it won't be in tact to carry out the function to allow for speed to happen.
You could argue that those who do believe in a soul think they survive their bodies, but there are plenty of atheists that don't buy the idea of a soul, including me.
