I don't believe in souls, but for those that do; is the soul in charge

[heidler1]

or is the brain in charge or our animal instinctive desires in charge. IMO if there is a soul why would it be fair for it to get stuck in Hell if that soul is not in charge of the body. If the soul is all that goes to Hell or Heaven and it's impervious to pain and death how could it suffer or sense pleasure?

[JuniperLea]

1. We are spiritual beings having a human experience

That dichotomy is all part of the test as far as I can tell.

[bryant69]

2. There's a negotiation between our higher selves and our lower nature

Some let their animal natures run them; others put their higher natures in charge. But at the back of that is the choice between surrending to your animal instincts or your higher nature.

The soul is not impervious to pain, although it is immortal.

Bryant

[thinks4herself]

3. For what it's worth...

I have wondered the same thing. When I was younger and attended a church (30+ years ago), my minister said that he did not believe in hell either. He believed that when a person dies they go through a kind of "life review" where they see and feel emotionally everything they did and every interaction they encountered. They feel the suffering they may have caused others, or hopefully, the joy they gave others, etc. For some, such as Hitler, he would be in sort of a long-term hell because he would feel the horror, pain, and suffering for every single person he had in some way affected. Anyway, I don't know--just passing on what I was told, as much as I can remember anyway. I was just a kid at the time.

[zeemike]

4. In charge of what?

The body?
The Soul can only act in the spiritual world and the body in the physical. In fact that is why we have a body so that we can inhabit the physical world.
You may have heard the quote where Jesus said when he was agonizing over his death that was about to come that "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" (explaining why he was sweating blood and asking that if it were possible for the cup to be taken from him)
The body holds onto life and does not want to die, so in life the body is in charge.

[Meshuga]

5. I believe in soul

But a soul to me is that part of you that stays when you die. Your works, your memories, your existence even if you anonymously died and nobody remembers you. Everyone who ever lived on this earth made an impact of some sort on how the world is shaped (even if a small impact) and that is part of your soul that never dies. I don't believe in a rational soul that suffers and have feelings after death. There is no proof of that and nobody ever came back from the dead to tell the story. :-)

[struggle4progress]

6. Do you know this lovely ancient Jewish fable? There were two friends, one

of whom was lame and the other blind. And the lame one said he knew of an unguarded orchard where there was fruit that could be stolen. And the blind one said, Why don't you go and steal some for us? And the lame one said, I cannot walk so perhaps you could go steal it. And the blind one said, I am blind and I would not find my way there. And they spoke further and hit upon an idea. The blind one put the lame one on his shoulders and the lame one gave directions until they reached the orchard, where they stole the fruit. And they left.

The owner of the orchard heard about this and was unhappy and had them taken before a judge. And the blind one said, How can you judge me for this, since I could not see my way to the orchard to steal the fruit? And the lame one said, How can you judge me for this, since I could not walk to the orchard to steal the fruit? So the judge sat the lame on on the shoulders of the blind one and he judged them together.

[zeemike]

8. I love that story

There is one in eastern mysticism that goes like this;

A man lived a terrible life on this earth and did many terrible things, and when he died he went before the lord of the underworld to be judged, and the lord was very displeased.
When the lord presented him with the tea that was to erase his memory of his former life the man pored it our when the lord was not looking.

And so the Lord decreed that the man was not worthy of moving on or having another life as a man, and decreed Thar man be borne as a dog.
And so he was and he remembered his life as a man and was miserable as a dog and so when he bit his master and was killed for it, he was back before the lord of the underworld who was very angry.
This time he decreed that he be borne as a horse
And as a horse remembering the life as a man was resentful of being rode and when he through his rider he was put to death.
The Lord of the underworld was furious with him and decreed him borne as a snake.
But now as a snake he had wisdom and ate only berries and grass and harmed no living thing, and when one day crossing the road a cart ran over him and once more was before the lord of the underworld to be judged.
The lord was pleased and decided to give him one more chance at being a man, and that man spent his entire life traveling throughout the land teaching people to be kind to there horses.

[skyblue]

7. A Soul is limited to those who are not mentally f'd up and can afford one.

Most times it's just man vs. man struggling for existence beating on each other to survive. Just like how the animals live: Condemned to kill other animals so they can eat. Some people don't have the mental capacity to distinguish right from wrong, either because they have mental illness or something made them flip out, or they're just screwed. The soul will survive, but when God(s) decide they are bored with us, as they were with the dinosaurs and mammoths who lived on this planet for thousands or millions of years by "benign" neglect allowing them to become extinct, it isn't going to make a difference whether you may make a contribution tha is large or small.

[YellingTuna]

9. Catholic

Being a catholic, I was taught that Christ forgives us of all our sins. We pray the rosary to ask for forgiveness and insure us of it. I always felt that the soul was a component of the mind. That the brain worked as an organ to tell the body what to do. However the thoughts originated from the (soul)/mind working as one to present thought in the physical world. Did I just confuse you? I bet I did. I have to try to think logically (liberal part of me)

[TRYPHO]

10. A Slightly Biased Offering...

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-dialoguetrypho.html

CHAPTER IV -- THE SOUL OF ITSELF CANNOT SEE GOD.

(A bit too big to Copy/Paste it all here so please follow the link above).

TRYPHO

(this conversation probably took place around the year 135 C.E.)

[varkam]

11. That is, IMO, a very big problem for dualists.

Dualists being individuals who believe that human consciousness springs from immaterial substance yet have to maintain that the immaterial substance (i.e. the soul) and the material substance (i.e. the brain) can interact with and influence one another.

How can we explain pain? Pain is a phenomenon that can be explained fairly well in terms of neurotransmitter impulses and neuropeptides. But pain is a mental experience - in other words, we experience pain and it's clear we experience it as a result of certain physical phenomenon and that it can be mitigated by certain drugs.

So here's the problem: say you have a headache and you take a tylenol. Mental state of pain -> ingesting tylenol -> mental state of relief: now, where is it that the drug is able to interact with the soul to provide that relief? In other words, where is that bridge between the physical and the metaphysical? IMO, there is no such bridge.

We also know that damage to certain areas of the brain significantly effect personality. Take so called "split-brain" patients. A while back, an experimental treatment for severe epilepsy was to sever the corpus callosum in the brain (the bundle of nerves that connect both hemispheres of the brain) in a bid to reduce the severity of seizures. Something very interesting happened, however. In these patients, it appeared that there were two separate bases of consciousness. For example, one part of the body (and one hemisphere of the brain) would try to read a newspaper while the other (and the other hemisphere) would be trying to watch the television. Does such a procedure effect the soul as well?

Lastly, how do mental states -- if they are purely metaphysical -- control physical activity? So far as I understand physical properties, immaterial substances cannot interact with material substances. If that's the case, then I can only see one of two possible explanations: 1) there is no such thing as a soul or 2) the "soul" is actually a physical property that can be measured and examined...which I guess would really mean that there is no such thing as a soul.

Just some food for thought.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

12. St. Francis called

his body "Brother Ass." I think for most of us it is an eternal struggle and at different points of our lives, one or the other side wins. I am finding that the older I get, the more Brother Ass is losing out.