Quote:
Originally posted by chavos
I'll take a look at the other thread, but i'd say for openers that when the God of Abraham was first worshiped, there was no conception of a conscious afterlife, mearly descent in to the depths of Sheol.
Moreover, there is no proof that since we can understand the organic nature of the brain, that there is no soul. That was my analogy. There seemed be the instant jump between saying that since there is a physical brain, there can be no metaphysical soul. I don't see the logic there.
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Ok i see what you are going after. Well the simple fact is that we have all these medecines and other substances that alter our counciousness, awarness even our personality (lsd, ecstacy, prozac just to mention a few) and they all alter the verry foundation of what is said to be the soul. lsd can make a true beliving christian minister into a serial killer, while the prozac can make him into a "vegetable".
Aswell as brainsurgeons by shortcircuting parts of the brain can alter things as basic as our ability to count (1,2,3,4,5,6... so forth..) as well as our ability to speak and feel (love, hate, pain and so forth). So they can alter both the practical and abstract aspects of the brain simply by positioning a pice of conducting metal on one part of the brain and then placing the other end on another part of the brain.
All of theses aspects of our mind are considered having it's origin in our "soul".
Then we have the epeleptic woman they mannaged to call fort an OBE simply by letting weak currents of electricity cource through a specific part of the brain. (OBE: Out of body experience, concidered to be one of the main proofs that we have a soul). This is showing what OBE's really are. A little shortcicuit of neurons in our brain nothing more and most certanly nothing less).
As far as i have experienced no proof of the souls existence have ever been able to hold in a critical viewpoint.
As far as the "Abrahams time" argument you presented it was certainly clever but the fact is that it was, what maybe 6000 years ago??, and that they knew nothing compared to what we know today. They were trying to make sense in a world verry hostile twoards humankind but lacked the critical viewpoint of theories that we have developed during the post medieval, beginning of renissance period of our history.
Before this period they simply looked at a dead body and saw that there was something missing (life) and claimed it to be the soul.
it is CSfilms cavemen theory that again comes into play and shows us the basic idea behind the development of our religions. Since noone could prove that there were no afterlife it was assumed that an afterlife existed since a simple wordplay had made it the caveman who said it wasn't so's responsibility to prove that it didn't exist. The reason the theory was so well accepted was because it was comforting to think that this is not the end, i get another chance.
Another example is as far back as the neanderthals (maybe even further back in time, i haven't delved that deep into our prehistoric development) they placed gifts in the graves of their fellow clanmates to journy with them in the afterlife. So even though Abrahams faith did not contain an afterlife our human tradition has passed on that missconception throughout the ages.
Aswell as the sun revloves around the earth, the earth is flat and so forth..
And for the understanding of the organic nature of the brain, we have come much further in our reasearch than to simply understand it, we have come so far that we can manipulate and even alter it. How else do you explain the successes with antidepressants and similar medecines.
How come an ordinary person, with a normal emotional and empatic level, who gets a hard blow to the head at the wrong place becomes a psychopath? How come a simple physical action can shut of such an important part of our emotinal and social sense as empathy? And without him even reflecting over it.
In my eyes that is true proof of the souls nonexistence. (and so on with no soul = no afterlife = god unimportant, uninteresting and most likley nonexistent).
(To be quiet honest with you i find this discussion verry amusing and stimulating. If the tone and wording of my messages seem harsh and offensive to you, please don't take it too seriously as i don't mean any disrespect to you as a person but simpy writes what is on my mind concerning the matter).