I Got Soul but I'm Not a Soldier
Posted: 2010-01-06 11:47:08
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." -- Mark Twain
A few weeks back I finished reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. It was an awesome book, and I highly recommend that anyone interested in theology, religious skepticism, atheism, or anything along those lines give it a read.
The book ends (well, near the end anyway) with the above quote from Mark Twain, and it really got me thinking about the soul. The soul seems to be a sticking point in a lot of religious discussions. Does the soul exist? Is it eternal? Is it cyclical (reincarnation) or linear (heaven/hell)?
Most religions would say there is a soul or a spirit or something of the type. Christianity in specific without a doubt grants the soul high priority. It is the soul that gets into heaven and is eternal, rather than an actual person.
If you ask me, there is no soul. I don't believe in one, nor do I think it's even plausible for there to exist such a thing. But Twain's quote brought up an interesting thought.
Most Christians believe that a person's soul is eternal. Whether you end up in heaven or hell is of no matter, but the soul persists after death. What isn't addressed very often (if at all) is where the soul is before a person's birth.
The problem here is the normal grasp of time. Scientifically, the beginning of time was the Big Bang. In the Christian belief the beginning of time is when God created the earth (some say as recently as 6,000 years ago). Whenever it began, we know two things (both because of the law of conservation of mass): something had to be there before, and everything that is currently in the universe was there on that day of creation.
So, if that is the case, then all of these souls must have been in existence as well. After all, we can't have something from nothing (as most of the Creationists would claim the Big Bang is, despite the fact that their God would have created something from nothing, and would himself have to have been created from something...). Which brings me back to Twain's quote.
People always worry about what happens after they're dead, but no one seems concerned with what happened before they were born. If you have an eternal soul, it would have to have existed before you were born. And where were these souls then? Certainly not in heaven, as you can't get there without Jesus, and you can't have Jesus if you've never been born.
So as I was thinking about this, I came up with an interesting theory. Picture, if you will, that every soul is a string, and every string is laid out in a straight line (time) all parallel to each other, all on the same three dimensional plane.
Now there is another plane just above the one where all the soul-strings are, parallel to that plane as well. That upper plane is the division between earthly life and um, non-earthly life (be it death, or pre-birth).
So you got that visualized? Maybe I'll try and photoshop something to assist.
There, be impressed with my photoshop skills. Does this make it more clear? You've got your two planes, bottom is non-existence, top is existence. The lines are the souls that exist forever in time, and for a brief moment, each soul pops up into existence and then disappears again into the plane of non-existence.
Wow, I am mentally exhausted from trying to explain that. It seemed so simple when I was sitting in a coffee shop, wired on caffeine at 7:30 in the morning.
So what am I getting at? Nothing really. It's just a thought. If you think the soul exists and is eternal, then what do you think of this? It had to be somewhere before you were born, so where?
I'm with Twain on this one. Being dead for billions of years didn't bother me before, so I probably won't feel much different about it when it happens again.
Bspar said:
Pretty sure thoughts similar to this, with a few others included, got me an F on a religion paper once....
Skovari said:
I think you were overanalyzing this too way much. I would assume Christians believe the soul is created at conception, not before. So if they a soul is eternal, that doesnt necessarily mean it had to exist at the beginning of time. But, the whole concept of Christianity doesnt add up, so I am not so sure its an interesting theory when you know souls and life after death dont exist in the first place.
theBEattitude said:
Hey Urgack. Followed your link from Twitter.
Very weird. I was thinking about this exact thing a couple hours ago and was planning to write my next post about it. You stole my thunder. ;)
In my youth, the idea of nothingness after death scared the crap out of me. Which might explain why I held on to faith in Christianity for the first 32 years of my life.
The thing that helped me move past the fear of nothingness after death was the nothingness before my birth. Exactly as Twain so cleverly described. Billions of years have past without my existence and I don't remember any of it. Did my "soul" exist in some other form or plane as you describe it? Maybe.
I had a major life change just over a year ago, and my perspective toward the unknowns in my life evolved dramatically. I think the unknowns are what make life exciting. I don't look to primitive storybooks to explain everything anymore. I look forward to learning and discovering new things and revel in the awe of things I will never understand.
Where will I go when I die? I have no idea and I just fine with that.
By the way, I'm super impressed by your Photoshop skills.
DrZ said:
This is nitpicky, but the Big Bang isn't necessarily the beginning of time, just the beginning of the Universe. There are a lot of hypotheses on what does or does not exist outside the observable universe, and personally, I lean more towards something rather than nothing. As a society, we've gone from thinking our planet was the center of the solar system, to our solar system is the center of the galaxy to our galaxy is the center of the universe to our universe is the only universe. The farther out we look, the more we realize we're not special, and until someone comes up with a theory that shows that our existence isn't remarkable, I won't be satisfied. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, I recommend reading "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene. It deals with current hypotheses on what space is, what time is, where it all comes from and where it's all going. It reaches a bit beyond what we know for sure, but as long as you don't take that stuff as fact, it's a very good read.
As for souls, I haven't seen any evidence of an immaterial, immortal soul. It seems rather unlikely. In refernce to my comments above, I'm less curious about what happens to me after I die than I am about what will happen to everything else!