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From: padraig@utastro.UUCP (Padraig Houlahan)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Souls
Message-ID: <581@utastro.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 20-Aug-85 20:12:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: utastro.581
Posted: Tue Aug 20 20:12:30 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Aug-85 18:31:02 EDT
References: <573@utastro.UUCP> <1291@umcp-cs.UUCP> <577@utastro.UUCP> <1310@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Organization: U. Texas, Astronomy, Austin, TX
Lines: 69

{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}

> 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.

That remains to be seen. Maybe I do, and see a blatent contradiction in
your position that you turn a blind eye to so that you can hold
on to your christianity.

>...  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.

No one said that it did. The issue is whether one can believe in resurrection
and not in the soul simultaneously.

> 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.

>...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

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.

Padraig Houlahan.