(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?
Actually, there was a time in which many Christians believed that their physical bodies would come with them to heaven. That is the reason the Christian church had such a problem with cremation. The resurection of Jesus, and the bodies rising out of their graves when Jesus was cruxified are sited by those Christians for that belief. In Corinthians Paul suggests otherwise. These links lays out the arguments fairly well. Refiner's Fire What the Bible Says
Quote: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?
Nevertheless these are all good questions. It's even harder to define it you think about it in terms of reincarnation rather than heaven. Just what is this soul that's moving into new bodies?
If there is a god, I want to believe that there is a god. If there is not a god, I want to believe that there is no god.
