Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site umcp-cs.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!petrus!bellcore!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!umcp-cs!mangoe From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate) Newsgroups: net.philosophy Subject: Re: Souls Message-ID: <1322@umcp-cs.UUCP> Date: Wed, 21-Aug-85 22:37:59 EDT Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1322 Posted: Wed Aug 21 22:37:59 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 24-Aug-85 18:43:41 EDT References: <581@utastro.UUCP> Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD Lines: 58 In article <581@utastro.UUCP> padraig@utastro.UUCP (Padraig Houlahan) writes: >{Just a reminder of how this topic evolved: >Charley claimed that one can be christian and not believe in the existence >of a soul, while at the same time believes that we will be resurrected >after we die. I claim that this is a contradictory position to maintain} >> 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. >This just about sums it up. I feel I am wasting my time repeating the >criticism that statements such as "we do die, and will be resurrected >and live again" imply continuity, since I have already done this. >You are denying that this implication exists. There is nothing else >that can be said until you learn how to read english. The last sentence >is worded strongly because the problem here is not even one of semantics, >or of which axioms should be accepted, but of correctly interpretting >the above quote. If you would quit repeating it, and set out exactly how you get from "resurrection==live again" to "resurrection=>souls", I might be happy. For one thing, the continuity argument fails to deal with the possibility of all sorts of transformations at death. What prevents a person from being tranformed from a material being to something supernatural at death? THis doesn't require souls, but gives you continuity. And besides, what's the justification for this intuition of continuity? >This statement blows my mind; that you can say this, and at the same time >talk about resurrection, all the while knowing that "the concept which >we label as life may be seriously defective...", amazes me. >Resurrection implies continuity of something. The continuity >is contained in the "we" that is resurected, since the "we" was there >before, and after, resurrection. There's no way out of this. All >this talk about our lack of understanding of life, and whether or not >to take our intuition seriously is a bunch of horsefeathers that is >going off on a tangent from this issue. I see. At A I have X, and at B I have X, so there must be a continuity of X between the two. There are so many assumptions implicit in this that it's hard to know where to start. There's quite obviously no point in continuing this discussion. Padraig seems to have absolutely unshakable confidence in his own conceptualizations. My whole problem here is that souls seem to have been introduced because people couldn't imagine how to get from this life to the next (among other dubious reasons). I for one am not so arrogant as to believe that I can fully understand something I have essentially no information about, and which promises to be radically different from human experience. It is apparent to me that others have no such doubts. Charley Wingate The wind blows where it pleases