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Nov. 21, 2010 It was widely believed by Christians in the Dark Ages that the human soul is an eternal, indestructible substance contained temporarily within a frail, perishable body that, at death, it will slough off as it flies off into a land of perpetual bliss or sinks damnably into a cavern of flames. I guess this daydream comes from the New Testament, though similar notions occur in other religions. I personally consider this idea palpable nonsense. To my way of thinking, the so-called soul does not outlive the body. It is the product of the body and dies with it. It is so obvious that this is the case that it hardly takes a philosopher or theologian of the highest rank to understand it. We see that plants, which we believe to be entirely without sensation and consciousness, perform involuntarily some of the very same activities that we perform, sometimes involuntarily and sometimes voluntarily. For example, plants, like human beings and other animals, are born, take nourishment, grow, reproduce, age and die. Plants take nourishment involuntarily by being in the presence of the sun when water and carbon dioxide are in the air. But we take nourishment by consciously seeking and finding food. We consider a regimen of good nutrition one of the cornerstones of health and happiness for us, but when it comes to plants, we use the word health, but hesitate to use the word happiness. However, if you look at a healthy rosebush or canna lily resplending in the sun, you might be tempted to say that they are joyous. If we experienced the same level of health and beauty, we would not hesitate to say we were joyous. This should lead anybody to think that joy, sorrow, pain, comfort and other emotions and sensations are just responses of a conscious mind to the same sort of stimuli that plants experience silently, deafly and callously. It seems self-evident then that human emotions sprang from the same conditions of vitality that govern all living beings. With their increased mobility and higher intelligence, animals gradually developed pleasure, pain, hunger, love, fear, anxiety and other states of mind as means of prompting themselves to seek the things they need to live, reproduce and die. So to speak, they were not content merely to lie back and let their nourishment come to them when it would; rather they went out and got their sustenance by their wits. So the so-called soul is just a by-product of animality. There's nothing eternal about it. The body is the be-all and end-all of all living beings. The soul is the handy means to an end that a few of them have at their disposal. One might ask himself why so many obviously intelligent and articulate churchmen and religious thinkers persist in the doctrine of an immortal soul, if, as I maintain, it is so obvious that this doctrine is false. The answer is that once these theologians get comfortable in their plush rectories and parsonages, they surely will not want to change the status quo, even if it becomes obvious that their doctrine is false. After all, clergymen need their nourishment too, and they probably eat very well, especially if they are in middle, upper-middle or upper class neighborhoods. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written five books: ELEMENTS OF GRAMMAR and A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction); A TALE OF UNG, THE ENNUNMENT and GVAGMA (fiction). I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Visit my website here. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com
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