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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Souls
Message-ID: <1310@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 19-Aug-85 23:02:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1310
Posted: Mon Aug 19 23:02:12 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Aug-85 15:39:14 EDT
References: <573@utastro.UUCP> <1291@umcp-cs.UUCP> <577@utastro.UUCP>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 31

In article <577@utastro.UUCP> padraig@utastro.UUCP (Padraig Houlahan) writes:

>>> If "we" get resurrected, then that implies
>>> continuity of something that characterizes the "we" through the death-
>>> resurrection phase.

>> This argument relies entirely on an intuition about the nature of Life: 
>> that it enjoins a certain continuity of existence.  I would like to see
>> the nature of this continuity explicitly stated (in a way that holds
>> up in an atheistic world too), and then maybe we can start discussing
>> how we can apply this to something we of necessity know no details of.

>You are the one making the claim that something continues through the
>life-death transition. The onus is on you to explicitly state the
>nature of the "continuity". 

Apparently you still do not understand what I am saying here.  In the
absolute bare minimum statement of Christian belief in an afterlife, we
believe that we do die, and will be resurrected and live again.  This says
nothing about what happens in the meantime.

This whole business got started because someone was apparently bothered that
without a soul, there is no place to 'put' the person while he's dead.  This
is only a problem if you believe that life must be continuous somehow.  My
point is that, since we have no way of getting solid evidence on the subject,
there's no reason to take our intuitions about the *nature* of the afterlife
or about the *processes* which get us there very seriously.  The concept which
we label as life may in fact be seriously defective (since we're applying it
to something we know almost nothing about, even through scripture).

Charley Wingate