Some horrors are eternal.
Same problem: where is the information stored? How does it interface with the material world? Does it follow conventional physical rules, or is it so very, very supernatural – spiritual, miraculous – that no rules can be said to apply?
I never dreamed of saying “If you forget a sin you won’t be judged for it.” I only said that the memories of the individual are a major basis for judgement, according to most Christian interpretations. Sure, God can fill in the gaps, perhaps showing some events from different perspectives.
To judge me for things I don’t remember? Seems entirely capricious to me. This was the basis for an IMHO thread not too long ago: if a guy actually forgets an event entirely, should he be held responsible for it, among humans and by society?
But to create a new, blank mind and then tell it, “You are damned because of your sins,” and it has no experience of those events – that’s worse than caprice: that’s malice.
This is one interpretation, but far from the only one.
Tricky. You get into “fuzzy sets” quickly. What is a formal “property” of a religion? There will never be absolute 100% unanimity. Is 98% consensus enough? 95%? 90%? 55%? What happens when things change over time, and a view that was anathema in A.D. 1500 becomes highly widespread today?
The killer here is that it’s based on faith; there are no tests, no experiments, no procedures by which error can be told apart from correctness. (The Catholics, at least, have the doctrine of Papal revelation. If the Pope says it, it’s so. This isn’t very satisfying to non-Catholics. Heck, it isn’t very satisfying to a very great many Catholics, too!)
A great many bodies do decompose, and, moreover, I mentioned cremation for a reason. A lot of bodies do not exist any longer in any meaningful physical form. Ramses II’s mummy is, in fact, in remarkably good shape.
Well, that may be so, but it’s your duty to make sure I can tell which walls are flying your flag, and which walls are not. If I have just captured someone else’s flag, that is not necessarily my fault. At this point, I honestly don’t know what you do believe (or what you are espousing for the sake of argument. I need to be clear here myself, as I do not believe in God or souls at all, and am, in part, engaging in debate at a level of subjunctive supposition.)
Another amusing problem with the idea of a general bodily resurrection of humanity is the consequences of cannibalism. Does the cannibal suddenly vanish as his flesh is yanked away to remake the people he ate; or are those who were eaten by cannibals raised with pieces missing? IIRC this sort of question is why a lot of theologians just decided that God would make brand new bodies for people instead of resurrecting the old; it sidesteps problems like that.
Please tell me which example, in your own opinion, is the best.
Just making assumptions here, but lets say the info is stored in the brain, so conventional physical rules can be followed, the supernatural part would be Gods ability to restore our brains and bodies exactly as they are. When we decompose the information also decomposes when we are restored so is the information.
Ok, my apologies for the misunderstanding. But the claim that “memories of the individual are a major basis for judgement, according to most Christian interpretations.” is still something I have been unable to find any support for.
I don’t see why not remembering something should get you off the hook from receiving justice, more importantly, I don’t see how it can be a reason to deprive your victim of justice. Whether you remember it or not you are still the same person. There was a movie I saw years ago that was similar, guy is on death row for murder, he gets the chair but he survives. After he comes to he can’t remember anything but what makes it interesting is that he also has a personality change where he genuinely changes for the better. In that situation it could be argued that the man shouldn’t be punished. Otherwise what we can or cannot remember should not be connected to what we have or have not done.
For you to be restored you would have to have all your memories and everything else that makes you, you. A new blank mind doesn’t cut it and since it is not suggested that this is what happens anywhere in the Bible, it should not be considered the most likely way such events would play out. To assume that God would judge a “restored to factory settings” version of you makes no sense.
Regardless of how many interpretations there are it is likely that only one interpretation is correct, from what I can see the interpretation that we are judged based on our memories seems like it will be far down the list of possibilities.
History has shown us that unanimity and consensus are no indication of correctness. What is right now was right a thousand years ago and will be right a thousand years from now.
Logic, research and rational thinking are the procedures by which error can be told apart from correctness. For example apply those things to the example you gave of the pope and you will come to the conclusion that that particular belief of Catholicism is incorrect.
I did say it was just a side note. 
I understand that the fact a few bodies seem resistant to decomposition does not solve the problem of everyone else who does decompose.
It’s fine that you expect me to make sure you know what my position is(which I did do). But presumably what you are after is knowledge, to either disillusion yourself of your beliefs on a particular matter or to bolster them. How can you feel comfortable with anything you believe if instead of tackling the most rational, plausible arguments you are looking for “a backdoor” and in the absence of that are happy to just attack a similar “citadel”.
I have already stated what I believe:
“As for NDE’s my personal belief is that some people get to see what they were expecting to see, basically I agree that they are probably mostly a type of dream. There are definitely some that raise questions on how easily we can dismiss them.”
I guess my point is that I believe your take on what Abrahamic beliefs state about the soul and the conclusions you draw from that are demonstrably incorrect and through debating with you I am attempting to either disillusion myself of this belief or bolster it.
I was thinking the same thing.. except I didn’t think of cannibals. Surely from the beginning of humanity til now the cells etc that have decomposed of human bodies would of been reused many times over. Considering all our cells are replaced every decade or so there is probably a way around this problem.
The one were the guy on the operating table could “see” the doctor pointing at things with his elbows was interesting.
And now I have mastered the multi-quote feature.. excellent.
The major problem with this is…we don’t have any indication this is possible, or that this happens, (or will happen,) or what the rules are. Once one says “It’s miraculous,” reasonable analysis stops cold. Okay, God can do that… What does that tell us about the soul?
I get tracts left in my laundry room all the time…
It’s the basis for a whole separate thread; just to be brief, if the guy cannot remember it, then “who did it?” His body, sure, but his mind? Would you punish someone for something they did while sleepwalking? Conventional jurisprudence waives punishment for people who were insane, even if they are cured later.
Agreed; I tossed that out as a possibility, but since we both reject it, pfft, into the trash-can with it. Kind of a waste of time. Sorry!
Why? Re-living our memories is, in the real world, one of the major components of morality. We remember what we did wrong, and try to learn from it. If God plays the big motion picture for me, and I say, “Whoa! I don’t remember that!” then how can judgement be meaningful?
Even so, I think we’re barfing down the wrong bucket. None of this is really meaningful. You’re pushing too hard on something I brought up peripherally.
Does the soul contain memories? That’s the question…and the answer I gave is: there is no evidence for it. Indeed, there is some evidence against it, as no other known memory medium is independent of its physical matrix. When we learn how to record music without using tapes, disks, wax cylinders, or sheet music, this objection might change.
What is the soul? To mis-cite Ambrose Bierce, this is the subject of an appalling quantity of barren speculation. (Bierce was referring to “evil.”)
True. And in some cases, we can see the change happening. The great reversal on homosexuality, for instance, is wonderful to watch. I feel very privileged to be alive in this time and see this immense sea-change in human sexual morality.
In other cases, we can’t see it, and have no idea what the future consensus will be.
True…but that only works because you and I would agree on certain premises and assumptions which lead, logically, to that conclusion. A good Catholic would say, “Hold on a second…” and enter into a gentlemanly disagreement on those premises.
Someone (Robert Heinlein?) said that logic can only tell you what you already know. It doesn’t have any way to introduce knowledge; it can only “process” the knowledge you provide in the form of premises.
No worries! We’re both free-associating, a little. It’s a vast subject, and always fun to speculate upon.
Well, I’m here for a lot of reasons… To learn, yes. To un-learn, certainly. (There are a lot of things I think I know, but about which I am dead wrong!) But also to debate, and in a debate, it is wholly valid to pounce on an outlying weakness. If I say, “Pizza is defined as crust, olive oil, meats and vegetables, and filbert nuts,” I’m not wrong for leaping immediately upon the obvious weakest part of the definition. That is all that’s needed to demonstrate that the definition is incorrect.
Good enough. I don’t know enough to agree or disagree. I came in, my little atheist radar dishes twitching, when someone used the words “soul” and “evidence.” Definitely a side-track to the main thrust of the thread. If a highjack per se, oops, my bad.
Good enough. And, see? The debate technique of pouncing on an exposed weakness is entirely valid! I’m far from immune to it! I don’t agree that what I’ve said is “demonstrably incorrect,” but I have no objection to your presentation of such a demonstration. That’s why it’s in Great Debates.
Isn’t information never being lost and indication that it is possible?
A person who is sleepwalking is not in control of their actions, neither is someone who is insane. Even if they are cured later what is important is that they were insane at the time of committing the crime. If you commit a crime, then go insane a week later would it be waived?
After the movie is over you can consider yourself reminded. :D.
If that’s the question then I agree with you, probably(based on what we can know) not. GE is working on holographic storage devices, does that count?
But at the end of the debate, if all parties were being honest and open minded, either his position would be indefensible or ours would.
Never thought of it that way before but I like it.
So the idea goes, through a logical thought process we can only ever have a better understanding of the information we already have, not gain any new information?
In abstract quantum physics, it appears that information cannot be destroyed. In classic information theory, it most certainly can be. If you’ve ever lost a novel in a hard-disk crash, you’ll know that, in practical terms, information (alas!) can be lost. Ditto for the physical information (DNA, etc.) in a decomposed human body.
Heck of a question; really deserves its own thread. A lawyer could speak to what the law says. I believe that, morally, yes, punishment would be waived. Otherwise, you’d be punishing someone who cannot comprehend what is happening to him, which our society generally holds to be cruel, and without benefit.
And I have the feeling popcorn is not gonna be served…
I don’t know enough about the tech. Sounds nifty! Isn’t RAID a kind of (blocky) holographic storage? The data is duplicated among several disks, so that if one disk fails, the information can be recovered.
True. It just forces us to dig down deeper into the underlying assumptions. Which can actually be kind of fun…
Yep! Or, to put it another way, logic can reveal to us stuff that we knew, but which we didn’t know that we knew. In much the same way, you “know” that 12,398,776 + 1 = 12,398,777. But I’ll bet a pickle you never actually did that addition before, so you “didn’t know that you knew it.” In math, I never memorized the definitions of the secondary trigonometric functions – cotangent, etc. – because I knew how to derive them. I don’t “know what a cotangent is,” but I know it’s 1/tan, and that works.
Oh, another side note of some amusement: regarding “seeing what you expect to see,” one of the principles of DC Comics “Hell” (Sandman, John Constantine, Stanley and his Monster, etc.) is that Hell is what you expect it to be. If you expect sulfur pits and pitchforks, you get that; if you expect a “No Exit” style sitting-room melodrama, you get that instead.
(I’m working very hard on persuading myself to expect dancing, singing, drinking, and orgies, but it isn’t working too well…)