Message #2924

[Martin]

Martin,
Your attempts to diminish God in the affairs of man seem almost desperate.
Here is a link which should give you food for thought.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09580c.htm

Saudthorp, I rather think it is you who diminishes God, since you clearly feel the need to cling to beliefs that have long ago been proved to be false in order to protect you god.

Perhaps, rather than spewing links to Roman Catholic websites which do no more to provide evidence for a soul than you have given yourself, you could indulge yourself with a bit of thinking of your own. You are so evidently locked in dogma that your mind refuses to ask questions that think outside the box defined for you by the Catholic church.

I fail to see how you can describe my posts as 'desperate attempts', it's patently clear to anyone who reads this that you haven't got any evidence to support your case, and that your posts are the desperate ones.

Incidentally, I don't think you have understood the point JJ is making (either that or you understood it, ignored it, and chose to address one that she isn't making).   JJ is saying that the sort of evidence that was being asked of you, to show that such a thing as the soul actually existed as something other than the brain, could only really be supplied by the results of an experiment or observation of some sort.  An ancient religious text provides conjecture, and theories which are necessarily based upon ancient understandings.  If we are to treat the Bible with any respect as a writing we must read it in that context and must not use it to attempt to prove the existence of things like a soul!

The Bible writers may provide us with wonderful ideas that we can interpret in our modern context, but whatever we do with them, our interpretation will be just that, an interpretation, and something we can only really use if it doesn't conflict with what we can know with absolute certainty about the world, because evidence exists to make it certain.

Now I have asked you, and you have been unable or unwilling to to answer, so I ask it again, what about the other human species that existed before our own?  If souls exist then, would these other human species have had souls?   Specifically, what about Neanderthals, who were a separate branch of humanity with a brain size similar to our own, who buried their dead with ceremonial objects.  Do you think they had souls?  And I'm not asking for someone else's ideas, I'm not asking for a link to another Catholic Encyclopedia page, I'm asking you for your own opinion, derived from your own thoughts.