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That priceless galazy of misinformation called the mind, harnessed to that stupendous and threadbare glomerate compulsion called the soul, ambling down the almost obliterated bridle-path of Well and Ill. —Djuna Barnes
Are you soulful, soulless, high-souled, low-souled, mid-souled, whatever? Is 'soul' eternal, internal, external, diurnal, fantastic, metaphorical? Do souls have a definite independent existence, or is 'soul' just a label for mind, consciousness, the operation of a brain? Do you give a good rat's ass about any of this? If so, read on.
User's Guide: CARE & FEEDING Of The
SOUL, If Any
or
RATTLESNAKE SOUP For The SOUL - Tastes Like Chicken
- Honesty - You can maybe lie to others and make it work. But lying to yourself? You can't make that work. Deceiving yourself puts you on the slippery slope to fantasy. It doesn't do a lot of good to lie to yourself.
- Integrity - Don't be an asshole! Screwing others only justifies their screwing of you. It doesn't do a lot of good to tell yourself that you're not an asshole, when you are. Refer back to Point 1.
§ Corollary to "Don't be an asshole": Take responsibility for what you've done. Take credit for what you've done. Be realistic about your responsibility and credit.
- Reality - Fantasy isn't fulfilling. It doesn't do a lot of good to worry about whether or not you HAVE a soul. It depends on what you think 'soul' is. 'Soul' either means 'breath' which, if you're reading this, you probably ARE breathing, and therefore you have a soul. Or, soul is consciousness, and if you are aware of what I'm saying, then you ARE conscious, and so you have a soul. But if you think 'soul' is some immortal, immaterial entity, sent to you from On High, well, that may be something fun to believe, but there's no evidence that it is true at all; refer back to Point #1.
- Mortality Take care of the soul that you KNOW you have, in THIS life - your breath, and/or your consciousness. It doesn't do a lot of good to fret over fantasies. Don't worry about your immortal soul, if any; that just interferes with your work on your other soul(s) - refer back to Point #1, and to the following items.
- Maintenance - You feed and nurture your physical soul, your breath, by staying healthy, by eating healthily, exercising, not abusing your bodily, your body so much that you *stop* breathing. It doesn't do a lot of good to die ahead of time.
- Mentality - You feed and nurture your mental soul, your consciousness, with input, with experience. See things. Do things. Feel things. READ things. LOOK at things. And THINK about things. Think questioningly, think skeptically. If someone tells you that something is so, don't just say, "Yeah, sure." Ask, "Oh, have you tested that?" An untested idea isn't really worth very much. An untestable idea is worth even less. It doesn't do a lot of good to think fuzzily.
- Sanity - You feed and nurture you spiritual soul, that immortal one that you may or may not have, well, you nurture that... um... however you want, just don't tell yourself that you're actually gonna get any good out of it - refer back to Point #1.
- Positivity - Deal with your souls, whichever, physical, mental, spiritual, POSITIVELY, not NEGATIVELY. Not by obsessing, not by comparing yourself to others, not by denigrating your own value and worth; but by looking at where you are, and looking at where you want to be, and taking steps in that direction. You really CAN do anything, y'know. You just have to WANT TO enough.
- Complexity - Distinguish between reality and fantasy, between physical [observable] reality and abstraction. Human consciousness is complex, in the mathematical sense - it has both real components, and abstract, fantastic, fictional components. All those together, the mix of them, makes up the reality of your consciousness. But there IS a difference between a road that you're on physically, and a road that you're on metaphorically. Don't confuse those.
§ On distinguishing reality and fantasy: Reality is whatever bites your ass, whatever affects you. Fantasy is whatever you LET affect you.
- Curiosity - Finally, ALWAYS be curious. Always be questing. Always be looking for more.
Follow these 10 points, and your soul, whatever configuration you imagine it to be, will stay healthy and nourished and will flourish. How do I know? Why, I'm not just a client of the universe, I'm also a member!
None of those points is necessarily easy, especially if you're used to living and thinking quite differently; but none are impossible either. Although if you lie to yourself enough, you can make them impossible.
The goal of life is to find a goal. The purpose of life is to find a purpose. Purposes, goals, usually, well, they CAN come pre-packaged, but they might not be worth too much. It's much better to make your own.
Who Needs A Soul, Anyway?
When a person is accustomed to one hundred and thirty-eight in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable. —Mark Twain - Following The Equator
Souls can be problematic. Do you have a soul? Do you need one? Where did you get it? Would you like a new one, an extra, a smaller or bigger or brighter or cooler one? Would you like to swap souls with some other person, animal, alien, deity, robot? And what place do souls have in evolution? So many souls, so many questions...
Ah, souls have arisen in SkeptiChat discussions lately - here are some excerpts:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Wally Anglesea" <wanglese@ozemail.com.au>
To: "SkeptiChatlist" <skeptichat@lists.sonic.net>
Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2001 3:02 PM
> > Identical twins are natural clones. Indeed, we're ALL natural
> > clones.
>
> Zygotic twins yes. singles, no. Which, (and thank you for pointing
> out twins),
The earliest cell-splittings in the zygote can be considered self-
cloning, eh? And note that MANY plant species [and some insects]
reproduce primarily by cloning. Natural cloning. Organic cloning.
Just as {YHWH}/Ishtar/Coyote intended.
> brings us to the question, and indeed answers the question as well,
> of the soul. If anyone believes we have souls, then so must a clone.
> So who puts the soul in? The reason I look forward to cloning a full
> human, is that the debate on this will have to go to a new level.
We should be at that level already, re: twins. Do twins share a
soul? Is the soul cloned, divided, halved, enhanced, confused, bored?
But that also leads to the question of the origin of souls: Where /
when / why did souls evolve? What's the survival / reproductive
advantage of having a soul? Did souls first appear in H.sapiens,
H.habilis, earlier primates, mammals, notochords? Which species and
individuals have souls, and how can we tell? Of course, the Hebrew
word that's rendered as 'soul' in Genesis actually means 'breath' -
if you can breathe, you got soul, eh? Therefore ALL oxygen-breathers
have souls, and carnivorous humans spend their lives ingesting souls.
________________________________________________________________________
----- Original Message -----
From: "A Fellow Chimp" <crypprag@wolffmad.com>
To: "SkeptiChatList" <skeptichat@lists.sonic.net>
Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2001 9:04 AM
> Ric Carter wrote:
> > We should be at that level already, re: twins. Do twins share
> > a soul? Is the soul cloned, divided, halved, enhanced, confused,
> > bored?
>
> Just a minor note on this point of the thread. There have been
> societies who were strongly committed to the "deviance" of twins
> because of just these questions. If every birth results in the
> ensoulment of AN individual, then something must be going wrong
> when twins are born. (We could of course simply deny the antecedent,
> but anyway...) A residue of this, I suppose, is the notion of "evil"
> twins in Western cultures. Others have taken this more seriously.
> Some Sub-Saharan African cultures saw twins as a case of a soul
> being split and thus corrupted, which led them to see infanticide
> of both twins as the only proper recourse. ...
I'd hate to think how they'd treat a mother prone to multiple
childbirths -- if she keeps throwing twins and triplets, all
those fractional souls, is she demonic or what? ... I wonder if
there are any good references on multi-cultural attitudes and
conceptions of souls? Guy E. Swanson's THE BIRTH OF THE GODS
counts numerous [50] cultures' beliefs as to whether immortal
souls exist, but doesn't go into details for each one. He DOES
show that sociological factors correlate with soul-belief:
"1. Cumulative scores which combine the number of sovereign groups
in a society with the presence of unlegitimated contacts, the size
of the units of settlement, and the presence of sovereign kinship
groups are related positively and significantly to indicators of
a belief in the immanence of the soul.
"2: The only other social condition found to be related to a belief
in the immanence of the soul is the presence of debts. The relation-
ship is positive."
In other words, a populous, fragmented culture lacking functioning
mechanisms to resolve inter-group disputes, tends to need 'souls'.
I suspect that other social factors may influence whether a culture
subscribes to single or multiple ensoulments, and other details.
*** SkeptiChat 1.00.06.2 7 *** http://www.sonic.net/~ric/vsub.htm
And of course the other social aspects of 'soul' have to do with concepts of 'sin' and 'karma', all in terms of social control. If a social power structure defines certain behaviours as prescribed or proscribed, desired or mandatory or undesired or verboten, 'good' or 'evil', then it's much easier to enforce patterns of behaviour by promising / threatening rewards and punishments, not just on this earthly plane, but forever and ever and ever... In this scenario, 'soul' is a mind-control artifact, eh?
THE NATURE OF SOUL: There is an obvious need to investigate the existence and nature of 'soul'. I raised some questions in the discourse above:
- What's the origin of 'soul'? Where / when / why did souls evolve?
- What's the survival / reproductive advantage of having a soul?
- Did souls first appear in H.sapiens, H.habilis, earlier primates, mammals, notochords?
- Which species and individuals have souls, and how can we tell?
- Do twins share a soul? Is the soul cloned, divided, halved, enhanced, confused, bored?
Besides those questions, we must consider:
- What are the distinguishing signs for the existence of souls in individual, groups?
- Can souls be synthetically generated / assembled, vat-grown, hybridized, bred?
- What are the possible soul-contents of individuals: integer, fractional, multiple?
- Do souls exist within observable 4-dimensional space-time reality, or elsewhere?
- Is the duration of a soul's existence finite, infinite, extra-temporal, irrelevant?
- If souls last forever, do they accumulate? Is there enough room for them all? Where?
- Are answers to questions about souls fixed, dynamic, unknowable, meaningless, other?
- Would you object to strange souls moving into your neighborhood? On what basis?
And also some basic queries:
- Just what is meant by a 'soul' anyway?
- Does 'soul' contain or consist of:
- intelligence?
- consciousness?
- memory?
- judgment?
- emotion?
- autonomy?
- all or some or none of these?
- Are rewards and punishments for souls real, imaginary, unknowable, irrelevant?
- HOW CAN ANY OF THE ABOVE BE VERIFIED??
And some practical inquiries:
- Are 'soul' and 'sin' and 'karma' (and the eternal punishment / reward paradigms associated with such concepts) merely tools for behavioural / social control?
- Does possession of a 'soul' drive humans to kill each other, depriving others of their souls, stealing and devouring souls with wanton bloodthirstiness?
- Are souls beneficial, symbiotic, parasitic? Do souls feed on their owners, on each other, on other spirits, on universal energy-flows? What feeds souls?
- Are souls more trouble than they're worth? Are we better off with them?
- Can souls be treated as commodities, to be bought and sold? (Certain Devilish tales seem to indicate that this is so.) Would you enter a soul marketplace, either as buyer or seller or broker? How is the price of a soul to be established? Are some souls worth more than others? Why? (Supply and demand, of course.)
Further research is obviously needed. Can we get a grant?
Other Voices And Questions
In July 2005 came news that the Vatican (the Roman Cahtolic Church's controlling hierarchy) may be distancing itself from evolutionary biology and aligning itself with Cretinists and Intelligent Design advocates. And more questions arise.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Fingerman" [fingerman@aya.yale.edu]
To: "Skeptix" [skeptix@lists.opn.org]
Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2005 1:13 PM
Subject: Catholicism's dance with evolution
The New York Times ran an interesting pair of articles this week: an
op-ed by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn and an analysis on the op-ed by
Cornelia Dean and Laurie Goodstein. Cardinal Schönborn, a theologan
close to Pope Benedict XVI, tried to "clarify" the church's position
on evolution articulated by Pope John Paul II in 1996.
Cardinal Schönborn's op-ed:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/07/opinion/07schonborn.html
Analysis:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/science/09cardinal.html
----- Original Message -----
From: "J. J. Foncannon" [bolu.bolu@verizon.net]
Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2005 9:15 AM
Subject: Re: Catholicism's dance with evolution
... If mankind evolved, at what precise point in its evolution was man
endowed with a soul? It seems to me that the Church is placed in the
position of stating that at some point in the past, an individual human
or proto-human had a soul, but his/her parents were merely animals, and
did not. One can make all sorts of outrageous, but compelling, moral
assertions about the implications of a soulessness-to-soul transition
point. For instance, the first human with a soul could kill his/her
parents without being guilty of committing a mortal sin. What if this
first human-with-a soul mated with another human-without-a-soul? Being
bestiality, such a coupling surely consititute a sin, even if the
partners devoutly loved each other. And were their offspring endowed
nor not endowed with souls? Perhaps skeptical contributors can furnish
similar extrapolations...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ric Carter"
Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2005 11:53 AM
Subject: Re: Catholicism's dance with evolution
>>But souls don't seem to leave fossil remains, so we may never know...
>
> Drat. Not even transitional fossils.
That leads to further questions: Do transitional forms possess equally
transitional souls? Does the transitional nature of primate souls (eg
lemur-rhesus-chimp-etc) prove that souls evolve? Are such transitional
souls examples of living fossils? Curious minds want to know.
Even later, we learn that the Vatican is abandoning the concept of Purgatory. Also, with the legal defeat of Intelligent Design, cretinism will need to be repackaged in the US for public-school consumption. Thus mainstream AND creationist thought continue to evolve.
A posting on Crooked Timber notes the book THERE IS ETERNAL LIFE FOR ANIMALS which argues that Biblical texts say that our animals will go to heaven with us. This of course leads to such questions as, All animals or just our pets? Animals that actually lived, or miscarried fetuses too? How can we tell which animals have souls? (Remember, without soul, there is no eternity. And vice-versa, probably. But I digress.)
Then consider that a human is not a distinct individual, but a community of organisms. From the mites that eat our dead skin to the bacteria that digest our food to the mitichordrial inclusions in our very cells to whatever parasites we support, we carry a vast burdern of non-human DNA. If only a human soul goes to Heaven-Hell-Wherever, what happens to our biota? Do we stop eating and shedding and metabolizing? How can we tell?
But let's assume that all living entities have souls, and that they are distributed among 1) the living, 2) in Heaven, 3) in Hell, or 4) in Purgatory (despite revised Vatican theology). By ALL living entities, I mean all those EVERYWHERE in the universe, not just on Earth. We can quibble over whether a virus or prion is alive, whether bacteria and other micro-organisms and indeed plants can/do have souls, if AI/AL (artificial intelligence / artificial life) constructs have souls, etc. Whatever. In any case, that's a lot of souls, the number increasing at an alarming rate. Where do they all go, after life? Where can they all be fit in? Do Heaven-Hell-Purgatory ever get overcrowded? Is the Afterlife squeezed into alternate dimensions? Is this the secret justification of Superstring theory?
OK, let's get personal. Here's another assumption: modern humans have souls, and their associated animals also have souls, and all these can aspire to eternal life in some form or another. But only humans who have given themselves to Jesus will go to Heaven -- and maybe not even all of them, maybe just the 144,000 CHOSEN. Do they get to pick which animal companions go to Heaven with them? Is it true that All Good Dogs Go To Heaven, or just the ones we want along with us? Can we also take along our pet cats, ferrets, gerbils, anacondas, parrots, cows, miniature pigs, lambs, trained crickets, etc? Is Hell filled with bad dogs-cats-horses-raccoons-wolverines? Would you want to go to a Heaven that's filled with good wolverines?
And remember that all these animals have their own biota and parasites. Is the afterlife necessarily suffused with fleas, ticks, mites, lice, tapeworms, all living in eternal bliss or torment? How can we tell?
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