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!bonnie!akgua!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!umcp-cs!mangoe From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate) Newsgroups: net.philosophy Subject: Re: Re: Souls Message-ID: <1290@umcp-cs.UUCP> Date: Sun, 18-Aug-85 10:54:20 EDT Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1290 Posted: Sun Aug 18 10:54:20 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 24-Aug-85 01:35:08 EDT References: <542@utastro.UUCP> <27500099@ISM780B.UUCP> Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD Lines: 84 In article <27500099@ISM780B.UUCP> jim@ISM780B.UUCP writes: >>> I was >>>under the impression that the whole thrust of christianity was >>>salvation. What's to be saved if there is no soul? >>How about the person? >Saved from what? Salvation in Christian theology has a specific meaning: >saved from eternal damnation, which is presumably an unpleasant state >(so it gets down to Christians being afraid of long-term pain). >If there is no soul, there is no point to salvation. (How did we get back >to religious themes?) I suggest that your knowledge of Christian theology and doctrine is rather limited. >Metaphysical basis? What about simple semantic coherence? What in the >world does it mean to have "life after death" without "survival of death"? >Life of *what*? If not life of that which died, then you are being >incredibly silly; of course after my death there will be some other life, >not necessarily mine. But if we are to identify something following >a death with that which died, then certainly the something that died >survived in order to be identified; if you deny that then you are >using some bizarre and unacceptable notion of "survive". You define a soul >as the immortal portion, and then say a soul isn't necessary, and say >continuity isn't necessary, but this is just semantic confusion. If I >die completely, there is no continuity, but I am later reconstructed >(resurrected somehow), then I have *survived*; continuity is irrelevant. >But this whole discussion is silly from the point of view of >net.philosophy; there is no philosophical basis for presuming life after >death. BIG fallacy here. Jim as much as admits that there need be nothing connecting an after-life to the current one, yet he still insists you need a soul to give you the connection between the two. That's just the point; it's all well and good to talk about souls as being the essential and unique identity of a person. It's a useful construct, as long as you do not confuse it with truth. What people are doing that is incorrect, however, is going from there to the assertion that this implies the existence of souls as real supernatural entities. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about what the function of philosophy is here, something that is echoed in the next passage: >Some New Age types talk about dying and then becoming >part of the ALL. But just what does this *mean*? If my *ego* does not >survive my death, then just what is it after my death that we are identifying >with *me*? Those who claim remembrance of past lives at least have some >means of identifying the continuity; others are just playing word games. It's exactly as relevant to ask what Jim means by "ego". How is different from his concept of a soul? How is it different from MY concept? On what basis could any of these be said to exist? These ARE word games, and they are of fundamental importance to philosophy. At the moment, the free will discussion has collapsed because of a fight over what "free will" means. The morality discussion has finally gotten around to the really important question: what characterizes morality and distinguishes it from other things? As someone else has pointed out, there's too much discussion in this group which revolves around people denying a particular meaning to a word, and then (incorrectly) asserting that the denied meaning is therefore false. The proper response would be to differentiate the two by assigning the rehjected meaning to a different term. This whole line of argument about souls is a clear example of this. I'm quite willing to allow the word "soul" to carry the meaning of something supernatural. But as soon as you do that, you can no longer use it to mean "the identity of a person". In the same way, people are using the word life to mean something analogous to human life in this world; but the precise analogy changes from place to place. Jim intuits that life implies a certain continuity, and defines a soul to be "the immortal portion of a person". This can only be an intuition from our life, and is certainly something which could be argued about. If you use no analogy at all, but take life to be literally like our current life, then his whole argument collapses immediately. It is quite absurd to talk about "the immortal portion" of a person, if we all die. The point of all this meandering is that most of us (myself included) tend to be rather uncritical of our formulations and definitions. On of the purposes of this newsgroup should be to broaden our field of vision. As it is, people are showing entirely too much faith in the power of words. Charley Wingate umcp-cs!mangoe "We are followers of Peter, dressmaker to the Lord."