If I lose my soul, do I die?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Let's say my soul somehow gets destroyed or removed. What happens to my body?

Does it die, or carry on living? If it's the latter, what changes would/could be observed?

For fellow sceptics, how do you think most believers would respond?

You won't die, but you will lose your appreciation for Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett.

Boru

[robvalue]

Let's say my soul somehow gets destroyed or removed. What happens to my body?

Does it die, or carry on living? If it's the latter, what changes would/could be observed?

For fellow sceptics, how do you think most believers would respond?

I would guess most theists would say that the soul is actually the living part of you, and that its loss would be physical death.

Lets see though, interesting question.

I've been thinking about it, and people tend to think animals don't have souls but can still live. So I wonder if they'd say we'd survive. But that means the soul isn't required in the first place, so it presumably does some extra functions which would be lost.

I came up with some ideas about what people might say, if they think you still live, and then my concerns about them.

1) Loss of conscience - Some people already don't have one, do they not have souls?
2) Loss of free will - How would this manifest? How would we tell the difference?
3) Become just an animal - We already are animals, what would change?

Yes, I'm interested to see if we'll get any answers.

[purplepurpose]

You become a muggle.

[robvalue]

Another possibility:

You stay the same, but death is final. This would be weird, reducing the soul to some kind of memory card. But living forever does seem to be the soul's main purpose.

[Fake Messiah]

And what if my guardian angel knocks up some girl - what is that child to me?

But seriously, Rob, if someone destroys your soul is like if someone destroys one of your chakra points in amputation; or if you broke your Chi; or if your aura turns off - nothing will happen because those are all imaginary concepts made by primitive people who didn't understand nature and more closely human body.

Also out of all sciences it seems medicine was the hardest to crack, so it is pretty new and therefore there are still lots of myths about human body going around that people take for granted.

[robvalue]

Sure, I know it's not real, but I find other people's beliefs fascinating. I like to try and come up with questions that might cause people to think. If I get no responses at all from believers, I see that as a success of sorts.

[Haipule]

Let's say my soul somehow gets destroyed or removed. What happens to my body?

Does it die, or carry on living? If it's the latter, what changes would/could be observed?

For fellow sceptics, how do you think most believers would respond?

According to the bible, written in the first century by men empowered, by God, to do so: there is no such thing as a "soul".

A "soul" is the clergies mess. psuchE, in the Greek NT, translated as "soul", mean: natural and instinctive breathing intellect. You were born with it. All of us were born with it. psuchE, according to the bible, is shaped by pneuma, translated "spirit", which means: intellect breathed in, or gleaned, from an exterior source, such as reading a book; IOW's, learned intellect as opposed to psuchE: natural instinctive intellect.

The bible actually says: you are merely a body and a breath with a heart(figuratively: innermost being).


Now, how the clergy, and others, gave us a "soul and a "spirit", is beyond me! Actually, I could show the history of such nonsense but: what would the point be? You already know that they're stupid right?

You don't have to worry about souls and spirits! Just be real so that we all have an excuse for loving you and your heart!

[Fake Messiah]

Sure, in times when no one yet understood that air was made of particulate matter but everyone knew you would die if you couldn’t breathe, then it was believed that the movement of the air was somehow spiritual. YHWH was granted this aspect as well, so when Genesis 1:2 says that only “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” it’s talking about the wind. We supposedly say his name whenever we breathe through our mouths. Since the earliest creation myths, the gods would “breathe the breath of life” into their clay golems to animate them.
Also when the Bible was being composed, its authors commonly believed that the first breath of a child was the moment when its body became “infused with the spirit” as a living being. And of course, the flood in Genesis 6 was meant to drown everything that had “the breath of life.”

Also you must understand that concept of soul is older than Bible so Greeks were using that notion and, of course, Bible took that concept from the other religions like the part when Jesus' naked male friend appears when Jesus was arrested in Mark 14:51-2:
“A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth.
They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.”
This is directly from Greeks like Empedocles who said primordial souls became clothed “in the unfamiliar tunic of flesh”; and Plato who said that at death, souls leave their bodies and ascend to judgment naked.
So the naked guy is like Jesus' soul.

But when it comes to origins of word "soul" it comes from old religions and is actually feminine - such as psyche, pneuma, anima, alma; but as males took over in the battle of sexes, that is religion, you had the third canon of the Council of Nantes in 660 CE ruling that women have no souls, immortal or otherwise. At the end of the 16th century, clergymen declared that the Indian women of the newly discovered American continents were soulless creatures, halfway between animal and human.

[Losty]

Another possibility:

You stay the same, but death is final. This would be weird, reducing the soul to some kind of memory card. But living forever does seem to be the soul's main purpose.

This one makes the most sense to me when I try to think about it like I would have when I was Christian.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

*singing softly* …guess you better slow that Mustang down...

Boru