Matthew 16:26, Do We Have a Soul?
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
//Help! Science has stolen my soul, and I can't get it back!
For at least a couple hundred years before Christ, many Jews believed in an afterlife. They understood there would be a physical resurrection, and they would live again in the flesh, on the earth. It may have been around the time of Christ that the Greek concept of a soul made inroads into branches of Judaism, and lodged firmly in the branch we know today as Christianity.
But if I have a soul, can it really be me? My feelings, my mental skills, my memories reside within a piece of meat housed in my skull. Likewise, so is everything I've learned to say and do and enjoy, everything that makes me "me." My love for music, my competitive spirit, my unappreciated wry sense of humor, my weakness for cute noses. That’s what’s me.
So maybe I do have a soul, a living parasite housed somewhere within my body. Maybe this soul has some sort of otherworldly link to God, perhaps God pulls the strings on this parasite, and perhaps it can even somehow stir the electrical impulses that fire between the neurons of my brain to make me think and act differently. Maybe it lives on after I die, and maybe it then goes to heaven or hell. The question I struggle with is, Why do I care about it? Or, more to the point, why would I care any differently about my parasite than yours? I hope they all go to heaven, and I hope they dance happily there while the personalities they leave behind fade into oblivion.
Comments welcome.
//Help! Science has stolen my soul, and I can't get it back!
For at least a couple hundred years before Christ, many Jews believed in an afterlife. They understood there would be a physical resurrection, and they would live again in the flesh, on the earth. It may have been around the time of Christ that the Greek concept of a soul made inroads into branches of Judaism, and lodged firmly in the branch we know today as Christianity.
But if I have a soul, can it really be me? My feelings, my mental skills, my memories reside within a piece of meat housed in my skull. Likewise, so is everything I've learned to say and do and enjoy, everything that makes me "me." My love for music, my competitive spirit, my unappreciated wry sense of humor, my weakness for cute noses. That’s what’s me.
So maybe I do have a soul, a living parasite housed somewhere within my body. Maybe this soul has some sort of otherworldly link to God, perhaps God pulls the strings on this parasite, and perhaps it can even somehow stir the electrical impulses that fire between the neurons of my brain to make me think and act differently. Maybe it lives on after I die, and maybe it then goes to heaven or hell. The question I struggle with is, Why do I care about it? Or, more to the point, why would I care any differently about my parasite than yours? I hope they all go to heaven, and I hope they dance happily there while the personalities they leave behind fade into oblivion.
Comments welcome.
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