What is the Function of the Soul?
October 31, 2007
I remember asking my Pastor this question as a youth, “Where is the soul located? And where can you find the supporting scripture in the Bible?” The answer that I got? “That’s a great question! You know, I don’t think that I have been asked that before, but I know that I have come across the answer before in the Bible. Can I find it for you and get back to you?” He never got back to me…
Looking back, I think that I should have worded the question a little differently. I would like to know what the function of the soul is. After all, if God creates everything to serve a function, ie everything has a purpose, than what is the purpose of the soul? I would contend that if there is a god and it is the Judeo-Christian god, then souls are merely chess pieces to be won or lost.
I realize that what I am going to say next is completely void of romance (my apologies to my wife). Just about everything that we can think of is controlled in some way by the brain, either conscientiously or sub conscientiously, chemically, electrically and combinations thereof. Thought, memory, heart rate, breathing and everything else related to your physiology. The brain is also in charge emotionally as well. Love, hate, jealousy, anger, excitement… All just electro-chemical responses to stimuli. In fact, all of these emotions can be manipulated in some form or another with the introduction of certain pharmaceuticals into the body. Certainly a soul could not be subject to the effects of drugs, could it? If so, wouldn’t that make it a physical, not metaphysical, part of you? If so, why wouldn’t your soul be subject to the same laws of physics as your body?
I don’t think that your personality can be called your “soul” for the same reasons. A personality can be molded, changed and permanently altered. In fact, people’s personalities evolve throughout their lives due to life experience. Certain chemicals can change one’s personality momentarily and, in some instances, permanently.
With these options exhausted, where does this leave us as far as the soul’s function? Is it nothing more than a celestial two-way radio? (Although, I have never had an incoming signal, I have tried outbound calls before, with no success.) Or, is it simply nothing more than an imaginary friend that we keep around to deal with our fear of death? I, for one, find that it is an unnecessary concept.
Comments
5 Responses to “What is the Function of the Soul?”
Got something to say?
-
Atheist Blogroll
Hello TJMAdmin:
** Your pure soul is lodged in a stinking tomb: want out? **
The single best place I know to find the whole “soul” story is in The Greeks and the Irrational. UC Berkeley Press. 1950. [ER Dodds's classic in the history and psychology of Greek religion.]
Basically, xianity is a confluence of judaic and hellenistic greek cultural patterns (I almost said ‘thoughts’ but that’s not right). The pythagoreans held that the body is the tomb of the soul (psyche): soma sema = body (is a) tomb. Plato then takes up this strand of propaganda giving voice to it in the Phaedo. Dodds claims that the ’soma sema’ dogma originates from shamanistic cultures in what is today Russia/Georgia.
Only after the Black Sea became open to Greek traders (600 BCE?) did the “separable” soul notion spread.
Shaman to this day go into self-induced (or drug induced) trances, “leaving” their bodies behind as their souls travel great distances to retrieve a soul of someone who has “died.” Sometimes a shaman’s soul can be seen flying as a great water bird, like a crane. This is one of the oldest spiritual images in continuous use going back into the early neolithic, perhaps even back 35,000 years to cave paintings in France.
It took xianity 200 years to get to the point where its leading “apologists” realized that the upper strata of roman society would never “convert” unless xian beliefs were philosophically defensible — there’s little question that as late as 180 CE xianity was still a mish-mash of contending sects, altering their god-given texts, and getting recruits mainly from the great unwashed of major cities in the eastern part of the empire. And the “pagans” said so.
For this — see Celsus’ critique of xianity circa 180 CE, sometimes titled On The True Doctrine. (See RJ Hoffmann. Oxford Pr. 1987 for translation and thorough preface.) Celsus finds the doctrine of the resurrection “disgusting.” As for the incarnation, no god could or would alter his imperturbable states of perfection to become a lesser being. And, Jesus was just another charlatan who’d learned his dark arts among the magicians of Egypt.
Orwell has a word for xianity in practice, he calls it “double-think” — the ability to hold two mutually contradictory ideas at the same time believing in both, in this context, one jewish and one greek: Jesus=Christ=God.
What harm does this cause today outside of religion — large tracts of psychology (and ordinary language) still holds that there are “bodies” and “minds” and that somehow these two different orders of thing, the physical and the mental (ye olde soule) “interact.” This too is madness. But, that’s another issue.
bipolar
copyright asserted 2007
You ask above, “Certainly a soul could not be subject to the effects of drugs, could it? If so, wouldn’t that make it a physical, not metaphysical, part of you?”
A bit of language study might clarify things a bit. The Greek word “psyche” (often translated as “soul”) can sometimes more appropriately be translated as “mind” or “life.” In reading both Plato and the New Testament, it’s important to keep that in mind. When Plato talks of harming others as putting a blot on one’s soul, what he means (to some extent) is that hurting others harms our minds, our ability to think straight. And this is obviously true. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is a *logical* as well as a moral principle.
If one works from Platonic assumptions, it’s clear that drugs do affect our minds/souls quite easily.
For Plato, the soul was tripartite, composed of reason, will, and appetite. The goal of life was to get the three elements into the right relationship, with reason controlling the appetite rather than the other way around. Our materialistic assumptions would usually locate these elements in the brain. But for Plato, the material world was only a shadow of the real world, the world of ideas. We tend to view Plato as wrongly positing an unnecessary entity (the soul) as an explanation of brain functions. But that’s a misunderstanding. You ask where the soul is. Plato would ask, “Where’s the body?’ And his answer would be that the body (like the entire physical world) is simply the temporary manifestation of unchanging ideas. The ultimate source of those ideas is God. So, I suppose, if you had asked Plato where your soul is, he would have said that it exists in the mind of God.
The original question was not where the soul is, but what the function is, Ancientart.
According to the Bible it’s purpose is to praise the lord. In Luke 1: 46-47, Mary exclaims:
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has exulted in God my Savior”.
Second Corinthians 3:18 provides a detailed description of the soul’s function of reflecting God: “But we all with unveiled face, beholding and reflecting like a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord Spirit.”
Well, in all my years as a believer my soul never exulted In any god, however hard I tried.
Clearly it’s emotional and without substance.
I would love to comment on this, but nothing more needs to be said.
So really, I shouldn’t even say this, but I shall.
The pre-homeric greeks didn’t even believe in personal agency, everything you did was the result of some god or other, either directly moving your limbs or putting ideas into your head, and regardless of whether you believed in this or not, souls came much later, and perhaps are thus a function of liberty, which itself is a function of the economic atomisation of more groupthink societies. In this later Greek throught the god you believe is informing your muscles or putting thoughts into your head is in fact, your good self talking to yourself, which is pretty much what always happens when one prays.
All I know is that my prayers are always answered and I need never work for a living, so I must be a believer. And I am God too, for as Peter O’Toole said, I realised that inprayer I must be talking to myself.
See Bruno Snell’s Discovery of the Greek Mind