I don't believe in a "soul."  I haven't found any good evidence that points to a life force that goes on after death, and untill there is such evidence I can't believe it exists.  Besides that it doesn't seem to make any sense to me.  I've always thought that if we have "souls," then so would chimps, or dogs and cats, where does is stop?  Do ants have souls?  Does bacteria have souls?  I can't see any reason to believe you go on after death.  You require energy to fuel your body to have the thoughts you are having now, you have to intake this energy.  Eventually when you die the energy will disipate out of your body, life is gone.  From what I can see, it's as simple as that.  No body and no fuel = no life.    

  Hey, I'd lke to.  I'd love to live on, "float around in the spirit world" with all my friends and family forever.  As long as it was a free place.  But I can't see any reason to believe you go on in any way shape or form.  Can you show me how we are more than the sum of our parts?  Are you saying we do go on somehow? 

Well, if you've read anything on the eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism they believe EVERY living thing has a soul even bacteria and insects.  Of course that's no less crazy that the insane pie in the sky crap Christianity has been trolling for millenia!!

But you stated it well buddy. There is nothing to indicate that a soul exists and we live on after death in any form. As a matter of fact every bit of evidence indicates we totally cease to exist forever upon death!

No, we have exactly zero evidence for disembodied minds, let alone a 'metaphysical' realm separate from the physical. There is such a thing as the mind which is not strictly the body, but as far as we can tell, all minds are embodied in bodies -- in much the same way that all software is encoded in a physical hardware medium.

The only rational position regarding the evidence we have about minds is the position of physicalism.

What?? The Christnut way is just as crazy if not more! It's right out of a comic book! You disappear in a poof of smoke and you magically appear in an imaginary place called the pearly gates and then you play the approximate equivalent of game show to see how you did in life to see if you'll be let into heaven!

It's no surprise that the percentage of people believing in that fairy tale has drastically decreased in the west over the last 100 years.

Did you know many Buddhists and Hare Krishnas were actually ex-Christians?  It's because the eastern religions actually give a reason as to why bad things happens in this life while Christianity gives no such explaination and just says "it's god's mystery". 

Wow

Many things could fit this definition of a "soul" in that regard. Suppose I was download the contents of my mind into a computer such that the computer looked, walked, and talked like me. This could mean that the sequence of bytes in the computer are a soul. So...I dunno.

Nope.

One question though. Does your soul have a huge penis? Because mine would be HUGE.

Why does the soul need experience on Earth? For many reasons. For example, the soul has some idea of high ideals that are perfection for us, but it wants to bring it to material manifestation, and that takes a lot of work. Just remember the parable of God's kingdom on Earth. This is what will happen when humanity will work under the purpose, impression and guidance of the kingdom of souls. Kingdom of souls is a natural kingdom, just like human, animal, plant and mineral. It is all right for us to domestify animals, cultivate plants and work with minerals. But we have to remember, that in similar fashion our souls are here to perfect us. For some aeons ahead, we are here to convey higher principles from higher kingdom to ours and lower. 
 

But as for the soul which I mean, IT IS Love. Love and wisdom are it's dominant qualities and the soul can flood the person with selfless, absolute and universal love, towards self, everything, everyone and nothing at the same time. I have experienced that a lot. This love is a natural property of the soul. It has however problems expressing it in physical reality. In reality you can express it by doing things like building schools and hospitals, fighting poverty, making an inspirative and uplifting music and films, and so on. Once you estabilish some contact with soul, (with meditation let's say) then meditation is not as important, as using in reality this energy that you receive from the soul. People who don't use the energy they receive, become neurotic.

A technical remark... The esoteric phrase that "we were made in God's image" refers to the triplicity of Father, Son and Holy spirit found in Christianity and Hinduism. The image of us is a similar structre of a Monad (spirit) manifesting the divine Will, the soul manifesting the Love-wisdom and personality, manifesting the intelligent active principle, or dying trying. These three things together are one human being. They don't yet work together well, but when they will, the human being will be perfected as much as it can get on Earth, and this is basically what all these teachers including Jesus wanted us to do all along.

1.  No Soul.  In its metaphysical essence, things have no materialistic sense.  I am a materialist, so the idealistic metaphysical concept of soul is foreign to me.  If you agree to call soul an informational image of a host during and after his/her physical live, than I would say yes soul.  But this my definition just means all the information that people leave after their physical live.   You, most likely, think of a metaphysical soul as an intellectual entity continuing its intellectual live after the death of the physical body.  So far, you can only believe this, no evidence is possible in this case.  No one came back.

Well, Luminon, I will not argue with you, because you may be right. Everything you've said doesn't go against that which I already know.

But I'm in a position where I'm not yet sure of the truth beyond what I know. I don't take for granted what other people tell me... I investigate, I read, I compare to what I know and I check with scientific knowledge.

Being prudent, skeptical, humble and inquisitive is generally my position. However I live perfectly ok with the unknown, I don't mind not knowing because I know the essential - Love is the way.

Who are emotional creatures? Us? The Soul? The Astral Body? Was Jesus an emotional creature? Is Jesus now an emotional creature? Are emotions good or bad? Are we going to lose emotions when we develop into the more perfect vehicles of consciousness"?? I like many emotions I fell... I don't want to lose them!  Loosing emotions seems like a setback! From all people in existence you say that most of them are in the Astral body state, is this correct?

I like your description of consciousness, it's elegant. But to me it's says that there's not a clear separation between consciousness, soul and spirit. They are all the same thing but in different states and conditions. The definitions I've read of Astral body points to a spiritual body that "carries" our consciousness much like our physical body does in this plane. Consciousness itself is a much more subtle thing.

It seems that there are imperfections in the workings of Creation, or at least the mechanics are hard working and the path is long. Is the Creation perfect but it's perfection can't be compared to our normal ideas of perfection... or is Creation seeking the concept of perfection all the time because there is no such thing as perfection but development which turns the path to "perfection" worth enduring and fulfilling?

Let's say I want to improve myself and be more aware of my purpose on Earth. I want to put more and more Love, and peace in my life, what would be your advice?

WOW! how insightful!! You can always make deep insightful comments Luminon!

You believe you can advise me better to my purpose in life by my astrological chart?! I should warn you... I'm very skeptical towards astrology... though some projections I've seen are annoyingly accurate. 
 

I may shoot questions like: Why astrology doesn't update the maps which are thousands of years old and don't account for the receding of the skies? or... How can a specific region in the sky or the planet Uranus which is at a mindbogling distance influence my life?... what if I blew up Pluto?

Are you going to charge me for this?!

ok... here it goes:

I was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 31st of December 1977 at 15:45...

But as for that specific region of the sky... Planets don't affect us by gravity so much. Yeah, proximity of a planet and it's gravity counts a little, but that's not the main astrologic influence. You know, there is a space medium around us, called aether or dark matter, or vacuum with all it's energy in it. You can imagine it like a cauldron of water. If you put a spoon in there and stir the water, circularly for a time, the water starts to rotate and creates a vortex. The longer and stronger you stir, the stronger the vortex is. It works like an impetus-wheel. The planet by countless years accumulates force around it's orbit. These vortexes of force of each planet create an energetic background of solar system, in subtle-material or spiritual dimensions if you want.
And this is what gets imprinted into a newborn child with it's first breath, from the air and space around us. Until the birth, the child is a part of the mother. We are all subjected to the same energy of constellations, but we are different in our starting conditions.

Among many other things, we are also all different by our past incarnations. We're also affected by cultural egregore of planets, because their energetic vortexes aren't that specific in influence. And we're also affected by the position of Earth, because it sorts of shields the cosmic rays. And even if these rays are not shielded, their incoming angle determines a lot. You can call it numerology if you want, but it depends if you divide a circle by a particular number, the resulting angles have different properties. If you observe two circular waves on water and how they bounce from each other, you should get the idea. Astrology observes particular angles of how the cosmic waves bounce from the planets and significant angles are displayed by the software. Certain angles of cosmic waves work well together, they stir the cosmic cauldron well in the same direction, some slow it down, some make it go faster, and some create interference. There's many more details, but I'd rather prefer if you buy the first book of my dad, it was recently published in english.

And finally, we have all these influences and the soul chooses a time and place of birth. It chooses the parents, genetics and exact astrologic influences at the time, just as easily as we can get on the bus to get us to work on time. By studying your constellations we therefore can deduce what the soul wants from you, by giving you such a lovely horoscope.
One of specialties of my astrologic school is, that the horoscope doesn't say what you are, but what you should become.
And please, don't blow up Pluto. It's already too bad they wiped it out of the list of planets! 
 

But your horoscope is beautiful, really outstanding. It's the first time I see something as you have. You've got a true kite formation, then bisextile formation and some more aspects on top of that. These formations are considered very harmonic, very good for you, plus you've got there some non-harmonic squares, that should protect you from laziness and squandering your life. I'm afraid it won't help you to conquer the world, you've got all this rather in emotional and relationship areas of your life. Anyway, this is gonna require additional study. And probably advice from my dad, he's got to see that. I wonder what it is like to live with such a horoscope.

Luminon, is that your pic in your avatar? Are you in your early to mid 20s if you don't mind me asking?

I know of no part of my ability to think that cannot be described or changed with the electrochemical reactions occurring in my brain.

My Emotions can be changed with anti-depression medication.

My memories can be erased with brain damage.

All 5 senses are related to the body.

My decision making ability can be hindered or helped by a number of physical inputs.

What is there left to be the soul?  If there is a things called a soul it is not me.

I was writing a story a while back about a future civilization after the discovery of time travel and the ability to copy or move the process of the human brain into a computer simulation.  This civilization was to the point where population had stopped since there was no longer a need since the people who exist were not going to stop existing.  One of them decided to use time travel to find people who he helpful in getting their society to where they were and thought that they deserved the opportunity to have the chance to continue their existence or to fade away into nothing.  At the time of their death he would download them to a temporary place where he would tell them of this opportunity and then move them into the computer simulation.

The story is however just a story not to mention even if put into a computer simulation the universe as we understand will some distance in the future die of heat death thus stopping the simulation along with everything else.

You're form the Czech Republic? Nice. A fellow european.

Guess your participation in this forum reflect that down to Earth side of yours.

I'll give you a very general idea of me by email, but fell free to ask further questions.

BTW, what I meant with the outdated astrological maps is this: on traditional astrology we have a sign calender. This calender was made thousands of years ago. So today a person who may think he is Libra may indeed be Scorpion... because the skies are not exactly in the same position they were.

Luminon, I was just wondering why you would put your pic on a public forum that's all. Of course there's nothing wrong with that.

Can you please give me your opinion here?

http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/21203

Hi,

1) No

Three points:

1) In "The God Dellusion" Dawkins touches on duality (the concept of having more to us than our bodies, mind soul or whatever) as an evolutionary property of man and references further research/theory on it. Sadly I leat out my copy so cannot reference.

2) I'm quite content with this being it. I don't fear death. Again stealing a Dawkins Quote (roughly):  didn't exist for 13.7 billion years before I was born and I was fine, so why fear it after life?

EDIT: Sorry, this isn't a Dawkins quote, it's quoted in his book from someone else...

3) The first mention of soul in the bible (not that I assume you are Christian) in fact implies that it is not seperate from the body and in fact contradicts your chosen definition!

Genesis Chapter 2 Verse 7 "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." (Source: Bible wiki)

Note BECAME a living soul, implying that man and the breath of God became a soul, body of dust included!

Incidentally, the New International Version changes "soul" to "being". A cynic might argue this was to mop up the contradiction between Old Testament literature and popular Christian belief!

There must be some principle of self-identity through change in each person.  Otherwise, we cannot explain these facts of our experience. 

First, I remember my past events, scenes, things, etc., not just as past, but as mine, as my past experiences of tehse events, etc., which I recall as having happened to the same me that is remembering them and talking about them now.  The no-self theory cannot do justice to this common experience of myself-as-remembering-something-in-the-past. 

Second, I have moral responsibility for my past actions.  I take responsibility for a past act as my act.  Otherwise, guilt, sorrow, contrition, even forgiveness of others all become meaningless illusions to be gotten rid of.  The whole moral life, which is inseparable from my sense of personal dignity and self-possession, goes down the drain. 

Third, I have promise and pledging of fidelity for the future.  It makes no sense to promise what some other self will have to do.  But fidelity to promises is an essential part of human dignity and moral responsibility.

Fourth, I have experience of carrying through a project towards a goal, through time and a series of steps.  I am conscious that I am exerting effort over time to carry out this project.

In sum, any philosophical theory which denies or renders unintelligible any or all of the above human experiences is not an explanation of our experience but a denial or suppression of an integral part of it.

Note that any theory which denies a perduring observer throughout a series of changes is self-contradictory: if there is no single observer enduring throughout the process, it would be impossible to know that there is such a series at all, since the observer would be passing away himself every moment and there is nothing to recognize the series as a series.

Does this enduring self continue after our bodies stop functioning?  Yes.  Since our material universe is a dynamic evolutionary one, still in process of unfolding-- still an unfinished story-- we humans who inhabit this earth and are an essential part of its story are now also the cutting edge of its development, through the self-conscious intelligence, freedom, and creativity that render us able to influence significantly the whole story itself, both for good and for evil.  Thus we now find ourselves as stewards under God for this whole subrational world, most urgently for our own little planet earth.  So the created universe has become for us both a gift and a task to be responsibly fulfilled: i.e., to care for our world as created co-creators with God of a not-yet-finished universe, as well as mediating its return to God with ourselves by acknowledgement, gratitude, and love. 

Sorry, take your time. I wasn't sure if you recieved my email.

Thanks.