An interesting question, the exact opposite of the baby question, is what happens to the soul of a person who lives for several years brain damaged and deranged.
Surely, when they die, it would be a little odd for them to be that way for all eternity, just because that was were they left off at death. But then, if their eternal soul is going to be a reboot of who they were before the period of dementia, then doesn’t that imply that are, at least in terms of the souls’ development, dead already?
Barbara Ehrenreich raises this point in her book “Nickle and Dimed”
Good question. What happens to people’s souls when they die? Will they keep their personalities and everything? If an embryo dies and the soul goes to heaven (although I’m not sure how the soul would get there considering there is no faith/sins/good deeds to judge by), what’s the soul going to be like? If someone mentally ill dies and his/her soul goes to heaven, will the soul be mentally ill? If someone who truly has faith and everything goes to heaven, but sins like everyone else (cursing every so now and then), will he/she do so in heaven with God right there?
Or are all souls going to be brainwashed and conformed into the stereotype of people in white robes, a halo over their heads, sitting on a cloud strumming harps for eternity?
I assume that this is a theology question and not an abortion question.
FWIW, from my Catholic background, the exact “mechanism” through which one aquires a soul is not really addressed…I assume it ain’t that important in the grand scheme of Catholic teaching. YMMV. I suppose one could look at Psalms or other scriptures that make reference to God knowing of us “even in our mother’s womb”…beyond that I don’t see specfic scriptural reference about the exact moment one acquires a soul. Perhaps other religious traditions (Judaism, Hindu, Islam, Wicca et al) have other teachings.
If this is a thinly veiled abortion question, FWIW, questions about the nature of the soul…when it enters the human, or by what means…do not really enter into my thinking about abortion or a right to life.YMMV.
Theology question which bothers me because of the fact of abortion/miscarriage, not because of the debate over abortion.
If God knows the future, he knows what will happen to the fetus. If he knows the fetus will die or be killed before birth, he’s “wasting” a soul. Um, sort of.
The problem I run into is why such a vessel would have a soul in the first place. What is the soul for if it doesn’t matter if it gets to experience anything.
(I have similar questions about souls and free will which I’ve brought up before. If you kill me through your own free will, what does that reveal about me? If life is a test, what grade do you get for getting murdered? What if you’re only two? Does it make sense for your free will to muck up my “test”?)
I think God knows all the possibilities, but leaves the individual to choose their own path. He gives us free will, it only seems logical that He intended us to use it.
I believe God creates us as spiritual entities. We can then decide whether to be born into a physical body and live in a physical environment or not. The earth is like a school of learning, where we can learn about ourselves through the interaction with others.
Our souls (spirit) are us. We can not lose them or get them. When we die, we go back into to the spiritual realm.
We decide our own sex, who our mother will be, etc. and usually enter the physical body being prepared for us by our mother at or near the time of birth. If something happens to the physical body that makes it unuseable, we return to the spiritual. No one dies, at least not forever. Once created by God we are eternal beings as He is. We are created in His image.
There is no sex in the spiritual world and God is not a “He”, but it sounds better than calling Him It.
This information comes from near death experiences.
I will react to your post from my knowledge of Catholic theology and Catholic philosophy of which I had a sound training in college.
My reaction is given in good faith, I am not lying here. So if anyone should see any lying here, please be assured that I am not lying here. It’s more probably that for his own personal reasons he is inclined to see lying where lying is not at all present in the speaker.
From what I know, as I said, with my courses in Catholic theology and Catholic philosophy during college:
(Again, please correct me for any mistakes I might be representing in regard to the doctrines and disciplines of the Catholic Church, which I mean the Vatican Roman Catholic Church of the Latin Rite.)
At the very moment when the sperm and the egg fuse together the soul is created by God; so that a human person is already present.
That is why the Catholic Church prohibits abortion. And every reasonable attempt must be made to baptize at least conditionally any fetus that is aborted naturally or artificially.
How that is done by God, I am not instructed in my theology and philosophy class.
What I know is that at the moment of meeting between sperm and egg when the union is perfected, that is they become one entity, there God creates the soul of that new entity which is a human person.
That is the big difference between a human person and an animal. In an animal God does not create a human soul, but with a human God does create a soul that is what we call a human soul and the ensuing entity is a human person.
Dear Goddess, I like your reservation at the start of your thread, ‘if souls exist’. You know I guess that in human exchange of thoughts a lot is based on an assumed scenario. So we keep on talking but in our mind or at the back of our head we continually maintain a set of conditions. People who don’t know that assumed scenario will not understand the discourse, and get all kinds of wrong conclusions to the effect of calling other people liars.
Dear Goddess, again, I like the way you put your question.
Can you do me a favor?
Do you find my English difficult to understand? Tell me in what and where I am difficult to understand in my present post.
Back to your query, if the soul exists we can discuss so many questions. Actually I think even the most committed believers in theistic religions like Christianity and Islam and Judaism, however strong their insistence on the existence of the soul, will admit that its existence is a matter of belief.
If you ask my personal opinion, aside from belief in the existence of the soul, insofar as my intellignece, reason, and free will or free inquiry is concerned, the soul is all in the mind, and nothing outside the mind.
Now, the Catholic Churches teaches that the soul exists independently of the body upon the death of the body, but only for a time. Upon the resurrection of the dead, the soul will be reunited with the body.
That is why I would like to first go to Paradise and then decide whether to go to Heaven afterwards, namely upon the resurrection and I am a saved soul and body, or a human person.
Which sounds like saying there is inherent dignity in the new human life created…but sure doesn’t sound like a philosophical decree that the soul enters the zygote at conception. Of course the process of fertilization is not "instantenous:, but takes place over a few hours. (IOW, the exchange of genetic material does not take place as soon as the sperm penetrates the ocyte). I think this kind of speculation (about the mechanics of a soul) is similar to speculation about the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin…a rather pointless exercise not really necessary to the churches teaching about the sancity of life from beginning to end.
And just to re-iterate, none of the above teachings is a pre-requisite to having a pro life perspective.
I hope you understand perfectly that I am not setting forth the official teachings of the Catholic Church on the production of the soul. I set forth what I still remember from my studies in Catholic theology and in Catholic philosophy. I have to be careful lest someone again keep on harping on my telling lies, by concentrating on a portion of my words and twisting them to his own imagined meaning.
For Catholic readers here, if there are mistakes I commit here, just let me know. I will check the ‘mistakes’ against my college notes and also my books on Catholic theology and philosophy; and if indeed they are mistakes, then I will take them back. But I don’t lie in the sense of saying something in opposition to what I know in my mind and heart (whether correctly or wrongly) to be true or a fact.
Beagle, if you want ‘cites’, of which someone here is always insisting on, but when produced he would dismiss them as of no relevancy, I think you can come to the text of the new Catholic Catechism with any decent search engine.
When I was in college, our studies in theology and philosophy were more of a rationalistic and logical orientation, same also when I was in catechetical classes. My impression is that the present catechism tends to be nebulous in language and in conceptual precision.
About when exactly the soul is produced by God, I really don’t know. But please keep in mind that we are talking here about a belief in the existence of the soul. From that belief once entertained in the mind, then speculations could proceed on the circumstances of its production: the how, the when, by whom, and of what ingredients…
You have a very good point there, all talks about the production of the soul is like the discussion how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. You see, religious people maintain ideas and principles on the basis of belief; when they have to live the real life of everyday existence, some ideas and principles can clash with the vicissitudes of mundane life. Then they have to delve more deeply and widely to find some way out of the clash with life’s vicissitudes.
The traditional teaching is that the soul is produced as soon as the sperm and the egg fuse and become a distinctly separate entity, the beginning of an individual human being, and beginning means ‘already’. Now if scientists could tell us and convince us when in fertilization and the subsequent processes is a distinct beginning of an individual human, then the practical application is present as to up to what stage of the fetus growth can an abortion be done without infringing into the right to life of a newly created human person.
I for one am not in favor of abortion. And for me the problem of abortion would be done away with, if the state should perform ligature on every baby girl and vasectomy on every baby boy right after birth. For I think that the procedures can now be reversed; so that in the future when a couple want to have a baby, they would have to apply to the state, showing their capacity to raise a baby on the one hand, and the demographic space being available for another baby.
Actually I did look there…and again found nothing that stipulates the mechanics of when the soul enters a human. If you can’t back up a claim of fact that you make…perhaps withdrawing the claim might be an option.
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Wow. Urging automatic vasectomies and tubal ligations. Practices generally condemned by Catholic social teaching. :dubious:
You are wrong about the procedure being reversible; sometimes it is reversible, but anyone udergoing the procedure is advised to treat it as permanent because there is no guarantee of succesful reversal.
Furthermore, there might be more complications (such as formation of scar tissue) arising from carrying out the procedure at such an early stage that might result in an even lower reversal success rate, not to mention the moral and ethical issues of performing an unnecessary and invasive procedure (that is not without risks) on an individual whose consent cannot be ascertained.
Okay, if we assume that the soul is placed when sperm meets egg, that about cloning? Does the clone get no soul, a new soul, or have to share their soul with the original gentic supplier? Also, is cloning mentioned any where in the bible?
If we assume lekatt has the right theory, why could murder be wrong? On the grand scheme of things why would God care at all? THere is a soul, the soul can become human, after death the soul goes back to the spirtual world. Is that the end? Does the soul get another chance? In terms of an eternal spirit a few years on Earth or insignificant.
And one more question. Does God put souls into the babies of non-Catholics? Do ALL zygotes get a soul? Especially if the parents have to intention to baptize them. What exactly happens to a soul WITHOUT baptism?
You are distorting my post. God does care about His children, and there are laws in place to correct those who harm others. Everyone will be accountable for their words and deeds when they enter the spirit world again. The subject here is vast, suggest you do some serious reading if you honestly want to know.
So what exactly do you mean by “His children.” The souls or the human bodies? You’ve said that the soul is eternal, hence, my human body cannot kill your soul, only your human body.
Do souls interact within the spiritual realm? What’s going on before and after their trip into the human world? What difference does 80 years on Earth matter in terms of eternity?
Again, I need your help. Who does God care for, the soul or the human? I can understand that God would love and care for the soul within the spiritual realm, but why would the time here matter? Do souls only get one shot at Earth?
That doesn’t change the fact that murder isn’t so bad after all in your system. Now you have a God that arbitrarily holds people to account for deeds for no particular reason.
You are created in the spiritual realm and live there until you decide to “have a go at the physical”. Many do not try the physical, but stay in the spiritual. The physical is like an accelerated growth platform, the body is something like a space suit you don in order to live here. Now the rules have not changed, you are learning to grow. That means to control your thoughts, emotion, and feelings directing them into avenues of learning about yourself and your Creator. Basically you are learning to be like your Creator in all ways.
Since your spiritual memory is clouded when entering the physical what you do here seems very real to you, and it should, otherwise learning would not take place. To harm someone’s body is a serious harmful act, and sets you back in your growth.
It would be very hard for me to explain all the spiritual here.
The presupposition here is that we are not our souls. how else could we be seperated from them, be without them, have them given to us?
Many would suppose that we are our souls.
emacknight,
don’t worry. Lekatt has quite hostory of being misunderstood and having his posts “distorted”.
i don’t think it’s your fault. Lekatt’s a character.
Gotta watch him though or he’ll start telling you about things and events that are only real in his personal experience, (like his naval career and the 4th of July snowstorm in New Orleans)
We have been talking so far about the soul. It is time I think to remind us that we are dealing here with a matter that is strictly one of belief, not fact.
As I said in my earlier post here on 05-12-2003:
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When a clash occurs with a fact established in the mundane world where we are bound by all kinds of vicissitudes, then we have to make a decision to correct, or to expand, or to revise, or to drop our particular belief, in the present case, the soul.
I for one maintain that the soul is all in the mind and nothing outside, insofar as the world of fact is concerned. But I also believe in the existence of the soul, which belief is a very foundational block in my whole religious world. Now this religious world makes up a huge part of actual life, which is composed of two systems, that of the fact world and that of the belief world.
The belief in the existence of the soul is like the belief in the existence of Santa Claus for children, who do not know anything about facts and beliefs, but proceed in life with both, not questioning either. Adults also take Santa Claus into their actual life and act as though he does really exist. And a lot of commercial and holiday activities are carried on to the satisfaction of everyone, specially the children, on the basis of Santa Claus.
Some very reflective mind tells us that all life is a stage, and living men and women are mere players (something like that). On that stage the men and women behave according to a script. The script is founded upon facts and beliefs. When more facts are known to the men and women on the stage, they will have to make corrections in their script to accommodate the facts, even at the expense of beliefs; otherwise their play will become more and more difficult to perform, so that eventually they can’t play any further and the life on the stage ends. And what kind of life will they carry on then?
The world of facts and the world of beliefs: are you telling us, Susma, that as we get to know more and more of facts we will have to give up more and more of our beliefs? Yes, so that we will have a more and more really genuinely pure world of religion that is centered around a God, Who is sad to say so far been locked up in the belief world of primitive men.
I personally think the soul shows up when conception happens … as in sperm meeting egg, not zygote attaching to wall.
So what if there are a lot of miscarried babies running around in heaven? Is this a BAD thing? Is God not able to make heaven big enough for lots and lots of people?