The matter at hand, as stated in the OP, is changes in behavior or belief resulting from changes in the brain. In addition to the information offered in the OP, there is a good deal of evidence showing that damage or other physical changes in the brain can cause changes to moral reasoning. If nothing in the brain is involved, how do you account for this?
Labeling posters aside, I would suppose that if you think this, then you can never make any actual assumptions about the state of someone’s spirit through the actions of thier brain/body–who knows what phyisical malady is twisting someone’s brain and blocking trhe spirit. But if hte spirit can’t affect the flesh, nor hte flesh the spirit, what binds the two together? If my spirit is screaming all sorts of things at me and I can’t hear them because my brain is in the way, then my spirit has no closer connection to my brain/body than it does to your brain/body. It is not mine at all.
To bring this back to the OP, it seems that you are suggesting that we are ALL Phineas Gage post-railroad spike., so whether or not we get an additional spike thru the brain down the road is really moot. That would be an interesting interpretation of original sin.
Manda JO:
I’m really enjoying this interchange with you. I find it edifying toward understanding your views much better. I hope you feel the same way.
Though we tend to judge others by their behavior, we tend to judge ourselves by our intentions. What you describe is the very reason that moral judgement is best left up to God. What you describe is the very reason that a Christian ought not to reject homosexuality on moral grounds. And what you describe explains why Jesus spent most of His time on earth with tax collectors, prostitutes, crazy people, and sick people, and why He saved His loaded guns for the religious leaders.
Why must they be bound together? The actions that are carried out by the brain are amoral. The brain is just atoms. Science has discovered no morality in them.
That depends on which you believe to be the real you, your brain or your spirit. I believe it is the latter, the one that doesn’t rot.
Manda JO said:
Yes, I do believe that we have free will, and that we can reject God’s love. That’s the very short answer; I could write several pages on it, if I were a good and coherent writer, and if anyone were interested.
I don’t know; I imagine it depends on the individual case. Luckily, I don’t have to know, because God does, and He is the one who makes that judgement. We have neither the knowledge, the wisdom, or the love to make these kinds of calls; we are simply commanded to love and serve as best we can.
I am enjoying this as well, and I hope you understand that I am mostly playing devil’s advocate here.
But that assumes that our intentions come from the spirit, not the brain. This almost has to be untrue, as damage to the brain seems to be able to effect one’s whole personality. I am confused–do you think that the counciousness is the result of the pure spirit or the spirit filtered through the brain? If it is filtered through the brain, then I am no more capable of judging my own actions/intentions than anyone else’s. If you believe that the conciousness is the same as the spirit, and that New Phineas Gage had a little Old Phineas Gage inside, aware of itself and trying to regain control over the body it once had, well, that is not anything we can debate. However, if New Phineas Gage was the result of the spirit having LESS control ,it suggests tha the spirit does have some degree of influence over healthy people and we ought to be able to infer something from apostacy.
Because if they aren’t, then everything that matters is between God and Spirits and has absolutly zero to do with the little conciousnesses running around down here. If no spirit is effecting my thoughts, intentions, or actions, then I have no spirit. It just turns into a bunch of spirits floating around, not changing anything down here, and a number of brains down here, running about, not effecting anything up there.
How can it be the “real me” if I haven’t the power to influence it or it me?
Yes, I believe that we can refuse that love.
I think it happens a lot. I don’t think it seems to be choosing hell, but rather despising God. Without love, you will perish.
I am sure that varies a lot, on a case by case basis. So does it vary in the case of other traumas that we suffer in the world. For you and I, any analysis is based on public behavior. God knows us entirely. If we have lost the ability to be who we were, he will know that. If we choose not to love, and will not be loved, then who we have become is not because we lost some ability, but because we chose it. You and I can never know that. God does know it.
The brain injury is the red herring. Where our love, or our hate come from and what we do with them are just the sins of our lives, and our good works. Nature, nurture, experience, and trauma are part of the world we live in. Beyond it all is our spirit, and the God who loves us.
I have said before that I believe that every soul that will be saved shall be saved. I am not willing to place any soul beyond my Lord’s reach. It seems to me that Satan himself can still return to the love he rejected, if he chooses to. Small time assholes such as we can certainly come along as well. But we can turn away and pass away into nothingness as we curse the One who would have saved us. That is free will. Our excuses will perish with us.
I choose to be loved. I am saved, and I do not merit it. I will try to love while I live. That is service to my Lord, not payment for Salvation.
Manda JO:
I think I see now what you meant by a bonding, and I think if I could clear up one of your points, the others might clear up along with it…
Wow. Antecedent overload here. 
There’s a lot of jumping back and forth between the spirit and the animal. There are not two yous of any moral significance; there is only one. If the brain is functioning properly, it will carry out actions comensurate with the real you. Otherwise, it won’t. It isn’t the real you influencing the spirit (or not). It is the real you influencing the brain (or not). There is a one to one correspondence between your spirit and your body, but the latter is amoral.
Think of it this way. What is objective about you, that is, what others can discern from their own frame of reference is your brain. What is subjective about you, that is, what others cannot discern from their own frame of reference, is your spirit. No one can experience your consciousness but you. It is a closed reference frame, and is the essential you that matters.
Does that help?
This is an answer to the OP, and a perfectly unassilable one. My objection to your earlier post was that all the talk about works vs. grace regarding Salvation was irrelevant: that the OP wasn’t just asking about evil acts the victem of physical trauma might commit, but how their very self can transform. Your answer seems to be that that new self cannot negate the acceptance of Christ made by the old self, provided the changed self really is the unavoidable result of trama.
It just occurred to me, while looking over some threads in General Questions, can it be that some people think of the spirit as some sort of ghost? Perhaps making some sort of association between the 16th century “ghost” and the modern “haint”? Thinking maybe that the spirit is made of some sort of mist? That might explain a lot that had left me incredulous before.
**Revtim wrote:
Joe Shmoe is a good Christian, but then through no fault of his own is afflicted with frontotemporal dementia, and becomes a Wiccan. Do Christians believe Joe is damned, even though his change of belief was clearly not via free will?**
I would wonder if any Wiccan group would allow him to join, since his condition is caused not by free will but an act of fate. I believe many would question his motives. Sure, he’d be given material about what Wicca is and its history and beliefs, but before he was initiated, he’d have some serious questions thrown at him.
There, that ought to make xenophon41 unhappy. 
xenophon41 predicted:
[QUOTE]
[li]various aggressive atheists will pile on other scenarioes where behavior modification techniques could coerce conversion away from Christianity[/li][/QUOTE]
Ask and ye shall receive.
Triskadecamus seems to be of the opinion that God, in His infinite love and understanding, would know that the behaviorally-modified person’s new behavior wasn’t her fault – so if this person had accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior [TM] before her personality was altered, she would be admitted into heaven. It would not matter whether this behavior modification was accidental (as in the case of the railroad worker who got a spike jammed through his brain) or deliberately inflicted.
Okay, let’s up the ante a bit:
Suppose a person is born with brain damage that causes her to be crude, irresponsible, and belligerent – and, more importantly, to never even consider the possibility of being Christian no matter how many times or in how many ways the Gospel is presented to her. God would know that her behavior isn’t her fault, either. Yet since she was born with this trait, there had never been a time when she had an “undamaged” personality which might (or might not) have accepted Jesus. Would she be admitted to heaven?
Libertarian wrote:
You seem to be taking for granted a notion of the spirit that is distinctly modern, arising as it does in response to questions raised by neuroscience. The austere notion of a spirit which does not encompass anything not entirely subjective is a much more robust notion than the kinds of ghosts and wights that were sufficient for the pre-neuroscience age.
Even though this definition of the soul is unassailable (in the bad sense of that philosophers of science call unfalsifiable), problems arise from it. After all, you’re sharing territory with that area of the philosophy of mind that concerns itself with the nature of the ontological status of subjective phenomena. There is reason to believe that even acknowledging the physical nature of mental phenomena, which in prinple ought to make experience analyzable, yet there must be some quality to experience that cannot be described in the language of physical analysis. I assume you’re not altogether unfamiliar with this line of thought, the case of Mary, the Cartesian Theater and all that. That leaves you to either deny that there is some subjective experience that derives from the brain itself, or to explain what can be said about the difference between the spirit and that portion of the subjective mind that can be poked with a railroad spike.
But I don’t think you can establish that anyone’s brain is functioning properly. Everyone’s “self” is subject to change by tweaking neurochemicals. So while the spirit may be attempting to control the brain, there is ample evidence that that control is tenous, at best, in any of us. So the question still remains: is there any way to determine that a person’s body/brain has so overwhelmed their spirit that said spirit has nothing to do with thier actions or inclinations? The only answer seems t obe “let God sort it out.”
The corrolary that has been ignored, but which I think it is interesting, is hte person who only acepts Christ after they have suffered serious brain damage. We are willing ot accept that a spike through the brain took person A further from thier real self–mustn’t that also be true for the person who found thier faith after tramatic injury?
That is what I as getting at when i suggested that by Libertarian’s definitions, we are ALL Phineas Gages–all of us have some worm in our brain that makes it impossible for our true intent to be expressed by our brain, and it is impossible to tell whose worm is worse. I suspect that you could turn this into a pretty neat intrepretaion of original sin–that the ‘fall’ was the imposition of the brain as a filter between the spirit and action.
Lib, if spirits exist, they have to be connected to the body in some way, or else they would not separate from the body when it dies. The clear implication is that they CANNOT separate from the body while it is alive, except under extraordinary circumstances.
If the brain is not where the putative spirit (or soul) resides, then where does it reside? If not the brain, then why would a person change his/her faith so radically after a serious brain trauma and only to the brain’s right frontal lobe?
From the article:
I think that’s why Libertarian and Triskadecamus are trying so hard to explain away this research. They don’t want it to be true. They don’t like being told their beliefs are the result of the interactions of a collection of neurons.
Knowing the real reason why I believe what I believe doesn’t bother me at all.
And don’t forget that the word “spirit” comes from the Latin spiritus, which means, literally, breath.
It was a crude but eminently useful notion: Somebody who was breathing was alive, and somebody who wasn’t breathing wasn’t alive. Therefore, the breath had something to do with the life present in the body. Notions like God “breathing life into” His creations carry this connotation that breath=life.
tracer wrote:
Indeed, I find the reduction of the spirit' to something like qualia’ to be a serious retreat for Christians. They are giving up on the many aspects of the soul recognized by the ancients, because those can now be talked about in the language of science: animus, logos, mens, spiritus, sensus. What do Christians stand to gain from giving all this up? A new Manichean heresy. Dualism. That’s a raw deal, if you ask me.
Jab,
I don’t recall trying to explain away any research. I don’t know where the spirit is. I am not all that sure even what it is. I don’t know where God is either. The mapping of behavior to brain activity is a fascinating study, one I follow rather avidly. Scientific explanations of matters of the spirit do not lessen my faith. They don’t even challenge it. I believe the world that exists is real, and the physical forces that cause it to act as I perceive, are fundamentally knowable, within the limits of our intelligence.
None of that is really important to my faith.
Those injured by trauma, both physical and emotional and made unable to learn and know of the doctrine of Christianity are not separated from God. Nothing can place them outside of His reach except their own willful choice. I do not need to despise them because of that. I will feel the loss of the end of their lives. But the soul tormented by the acts of others; left unloved; and given no strength in the world to be loved will not be abandoned by the Lord I love. Those souls too are precious to Him. And they shall know His love, before the end of all things, and be given that same choice.
Tris
Didn’t read all of the posts so I apologize if I am repeating what has been said.
If you pose the question as “he was a Christian before the trauma” then I would have to say that he is still saved. Actually, I was raised to reject the idea that someone cannot revoke their salvation(can’t remeber the proper name for this). Anyone one does was probably not actually saved in the first place. This is Baptist teaching and is probably the minority viewpoint however.
My roomate, who is a devout Calvanist, firmly believes in predestination. I have problems with this interpretation, but it does make the general question of salvation much much easier. You are simply predestined or not. I find this rather unfair, but my roomate states (and quite correctly) that whatever God does is fair by definition. There are some verses in Romans that seem to support his position, but I don’t exactly agree.
On another note:
Some earlier posted that quote:" It is a general Christian doctrine (some small sects disagree) that you do not have to be Christian to be saved; the doctrine of the “virtuous Pagan” should be well known by now."
I have to certainly disagree with this as far as the Protestant churches go(I know little of Catholic dogma). I’ve looked at Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian beliefs and all seem to disagree with this assumption. I know for a fact that Baptist Churches disagree and they certaintly aren’t a small sect( Southern Baptist Convention alone is the largest protestant denomination in the US, this obviously doesn’t even include the large American Baptist Convention and many many independant churches) Although, I have known various people within my own church who believe the “virtuous pagan” doctrine. An aunt of mine actually refuses to pay any money to missionaries because she beleivesthey are corrupting the religion that God placed there. Was this long enough? 
Win a few, lose a few!
Nice succinct statement of the quandary posed by the OP. It comes down to the question of consciousness, doesn’t it? I believe this question to be unanswerable, but I sure hope we (humanity) never stop trying to answer it.
Here is a link to a study on"Impairment of social and moral behavior related to early damage in human prefrontal cortex". Perhaps this offers some evidence that it is in fact that piece of meat the brain which is responsible for moral reasoning.