I’m sure clairobscur is well aware, but for the casual reader 50k French Francs would be somewhere in the neighborhood of ~$8,500 with modern exchange rates. May have been more like ~$10k depending on when the experiment was conducted. And this is pretty much what I was thinking. As a general rule people don’t part with enormous sums of money without being certain they’re getting something of value. Unless they’re a fool, and since fools and their money are soon parted, the odds of someone being a fool and being able to amass a huge sum of money to offer for my soul are low.
So the higher the price being offered the more I have to doubt the information I have on the value of a soul is accurate. Or the more I have to doubt the good faith of the buyer. They could be trying to launder dirty money, or intending to have me take the money home and mix it with my money and then have someone rob me. My “it’s too good to be true” radar goes off and rather than peel back the layers of the onion to find out why there is this massive mismatch between our value systems I’m just going to walk away. The buyer is either crazy or crazy like a fox, and I’m not interested in doing business with someone who fits in either of those categories.
If it is the Christian god, then hell, no-his track record on keeping promises is crap as far as I’m concerned.
If it is Satan, then I’ll take the trillion dollars. I figure I could outsmart anyone that would be dumb enough to blow a trillion dollars on my soul, when he could have used the money to influence high ranking church officials into discrediting their religion in irrrepairable way.
Yup, I’d sell out for a million or more. Then, with the knowledge that whatever supernatural force that bought my soul is real, (I’m assuming the Christian devil here) I’d use that money to corrupt as many souls as I could to earn brownie points for the afterlife. I’m a “it’s a better to rule in hell than serve in heaven” sorta guy.
I know this is off-topic, but that’s just wrong. I’ve known enough drug users to say that no drug is 100% addictive to 100% of the people on the first hit. I’ve personally seen someone try heroin, decide it wasn’t for her, and walk away. For the record, it’s still a dumb idea to dabble with heroin, just in case anyone things I’m endorsing it.
How does any sum of money that lasts you only a short life on Earth, i.e., 85 years, make, say, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years of suffering worth it, which isn’t even eternity?
What are your chances of picking the right god among thousands(if you get a chance to even hear about her/him/it at all), picking the rules interpreted by the right denomination, being able to follow said rules to that particular deity’s satisfaction and avoiding eternal damnation in the first place?
What soul? Oh, I’ll play along. Yes, I would sell it!
For only 3 payments of $19.99 YOU will receive a fresh and unique soul! But WAIT! If you order NOW, I will throw in my soulmates’ soul too! All major credit cards accepted! Except in: AK, IA & MD Don’t delay. You must order now!!
Talmudic stories and real life stories have an opposite plot – a person sells his/her soul hoping to get a lot of benefits and get his/her soul back. But they get very little benefit and lose their soul.
That happens almost every time someone decides to try heroin just once.
Wait - I thought Jewish people didn’t believe in eternal punishment? Looking into it now, I see that someone wrote that “two Jews, three opinions,” but the few articles I have just now read refer to a temporary place of…spiritual cleansing, I guess (one article called Gehinnom “the Supernal Washing Machine.”) [I realize that this is an area in which i am ignorant, so please - fight my ignorance!]
So do YOU only act in good faith out of fear of eternal punishment?
I think, personally, there’s a big fucking problem with any God who makes his own children, in his image, and then decides that he is never going to give us any solid proof of his existence, and then decides he is going to subject some of those people to eternal torment! The worst part of this is we don’t even really have a concept of eternity but he does. We apparently signed a contract that we don’t even remember signing, to terms we don’t understand and can’t comprehend, with only a “maybe” as far as benefits go.
Anyway, I am, if any religion, Hindu. I don’t believe in the Christian God and I don’t believe that any loving God would subject any of his or her subjects to eternal torment. And if your God is the one that would, then I’m not trusting him anyway - such a capricious whimsical entity is probably going to find some other reason to whisk me off to Hell.
So. The only other thing I will add to my post is I’d try to hold out for 10 million dollars or more. But $10K is a good start.
My take: Souls are as fictional as Bugs Bunny. I’ll sell mine anytime to anyone for any small payment. Even a free beer. And do it again a few minutes later with no qualms whatsoever. Obviously I’d like most for a bidding war between a couple billionaires to break out. Auction it off to the highest bidder I will.
It is embarrassing to me that we still have adherents to this silliness in the 21st Century.
In one’s existence before and after our sojourn in this physical world, we exist entirely as soul. Soul, of course, is but an independently conscious parcel of God’s own mind–or more simply, a bit of God. As a function of free will, allegiance of a part generally defaults to the whole whence it originated. However, this is not always a given and on occasion parcels have been known to fall away from God and either drift unfettered though the universe and even coalesce with other fragments, forming another entity entirely. The new entity is fully aware of God, and vice versa, but feels no allegiance to Him.
For reasons unimportant to this post, parcels of soul become attached to entities in this physical world. In doing so, they become hyper focused on the stimuli available to them here. The physical world being limited, only a small number of senses remain active while the others atrophy or fall asleep. The result is commonly referred to as a ‘veil’ and manifests itself in the soul forgetting, almost completely, life outside of this realm. So inhibited, these parcels are vulnerable to suggestion and alteration of allegiance which would normally not affect them. Amalgamations of detached parcels can ‘call through the walls’ of the physical realm and communicate with the souls preoccupied with this world, and can even exert some physical influence over matter, and make suggestions to other souls as necessary to effect a change in the disposition of a target. In this manner, a soul is persuaded to voluntarily change allegiance to the predatory entity. Only when the soul disengages from the physical world does it fully realize what has happened. The process can be reversed, of course, but that mechanism isn’t really germane to the thread.
