soulless souls

zen nudist

many years ago --around 1984-6-- my youngest brother asked me why I would waste my time persuing a religion which only promised that a copy of me would inhabit paradise if I died now.

at the time the full impact of his question escaped me...

years later in a spiritual time of crisis that question reared its head and bit me hard... it suddenly made sense.

JWs teach that the soul is you, all of you, alive or dead. there is no immortal soul for the JW, only an impersonal spirit which animates the body and like electricity is cut off and symbolically returns to god who gave it. so when dead there is nothing left of the believer but the memory of him in the mind of Jehovah.

so who is this person raised from the dead? me? hardly, I died. its a copy made from memory. there is nothing that links the current me to that copy of me at all, just a memory transcribed onto a new body.

being that Jehovah can do anything there is actually nothing to stop him from taking his memory of me right now and making a duplicate or as many copies of me as he wishes.... yet if I am alive I will without doubt know that none of them are THIS ME.

there is nothing that will make any one of them me if I should die while they are alive...

so what would change if they are made after I die? I see nothing at all... so there seems to be no reason to believe that I would be raised from the dead... only a copy of me.

many JWs never give this a second thought... think hear things like being asleep in the dust of the ground and simply assume that some part of them will persist to wake up... but that is NOT JW official teaching the ONLY thing left over is memory in the mind of god and I dont think its possible for that part of me which makes me me and not a copy of me to hide in a memory which can be mass produced at god's will....

what say you?

SixofNine

I say that the witness made-up story of the afterlife, is about as good as any other made-up story of afterlife in terms of logic, if not in terms of drama. That will likely include your made-up story of the afterlife, and any of the multitude of other made-up stories of afterlife I'll hear before I die.

Valis

It is also still a very Jewish based belief that you will somehow be remembered or not in the memory of dog, or in the book of life or whatever you want to call it. Its also another reason why the JWs hate the early philsophers like Plato and Aristotle so much. They started a serious look at what the soul is, and became the cornerstone, IMO, for modern Christianity's belief in said soul. Just my 2 cents.

Sincerely,

District Overbeer

Spudinator

For some more insight into this problem, you may enjoy reading physicist Frank J. Tipler's book, The Physics of Immortality.

Valis

Reminds me of this Dali painting he did entitled *Portrait of My Dead Brother"...in Dali's portrait he is missing one dot to represent the missing gene which inevitably led to his borther death. Just rambling...

Sincerely,

District Overbeer

zen nudist

READ IT

it really does not answer the fundamental question as it cannot really address it with physics.

after all no one has been able to pin down how consciousness actually works and whether it is a function of matter and energy or the otherway round.

Eyebrow2

Wow....I have wondered about this too, but had been unable to describe it as you have.

The saying that Jehovah will recreate us....it always bothered me...that was one of the reasons I was determined to live through Armageddon...and besides the belief that those that had to be resurrected would not be allowed to marry...how cheap is that?

It reminds of that clone movie Arnold S was in...was it the 6th day? the scientist had cloned his dead wife several times...and the last clone pretty much said...hey I am not her..or something to that affect.

zen nudist

when it finally bothered me, the first thing I thought of was the star trek transporter which I recall Dr McCoy always worrying about. pondering if the person dematerialized was really killed and a copy was made on the other side... I tried to reconcile my doubts using this...but I kept coming back to the notions of being killed on one side and what would make the copy me?

what I see as myself is my conscious awareness... if that is snuffed out, the thing which makes me me and not you, then how is that part of me going to be installed into an exact replica? JW theology provides no means of doing this.

if our awareness is just a function of our body in motion, then a new body no matter how perfectly copies from the old will still generate an awareness from its own parts, having nothing to do with the awareness I currently enjoy... more disturbing is that if our awareness is only a function of biological processes, what happens when we go into dead sleep? did I wake up this morning as a new person with no connection to the awareness which inhabitted this body yesterday? if that were true, why would I be held accountable for what he did?

it leads to a whole lot of questions and no really good answers... I figured out something that worked for me, and when I discussed it with some JWs, I got a meeting in the back room which told me to drop it.... which left me accepting what I found but never mentioning it again.

jschwehm

One of the interesting things is that when the JWs talk about the resurrection of the anointed ones they will say things like 'the life pattern of the anointed Christian is taken up into heaven and given a spiritual body at the moment of their death'. Or when talking about Jesus coming to earth they will say that God took the "life pattern" of Jesus and put it into Mary's womb. What is this "life pattern"? It sounds a lot like an immaterial "soul" to me. Another thing too is that for a Christian who believes in the immortality of the soul, everytime a new human being is conceived the entire universe changes because that new soul will live for all eternity. Hopefully, that new soul will choose to reach its full eternal potential by wanting live forever in the presence of God but souls can choose to reject God.

Also, think about this...a husband and wife actually get to participate with God in an act of creation when they conceive through the sexual act. As God creates the soul because of an act of love, a husband and wife get to create through the grace of God a body for that soul through an act of love also.

Unfortunately, we as humans often misuse this beautiful gift of sex from God...but that is another topic.

Jeff S.

zen nudist

What I have come to believe since my escape from the Borg collective known as JWs, is that everything I have ever known has been within my mind as symbols not realities. maps not territories. what the territory actually is I cannot know since I have no ability to get outside the symbols to see the reference sources... but I have reasons to believe that our true nature is nothing like what we believe it to be by living in this symbolic world. From buddhism and other sources I came to understand the indescrible nature of our true reality, they call it emptiness, not because there is noTHING there, but because all things we can discuss are only symbols in our minds and its easy to see that the reality must be something other than symbols. Consciousness gives science a really hard time because there is no easy way to show that anything we know can be responsible for making it... and I have come to see that the answer to that is obvious, they are examining elements of the dream trying to see which one of them makes the dreamer which cannot be... the dreamer cannot be made out of dream elements. Dream elements include matter and energy and so the dreamer must be something other.

I dont believe any new souls ever arise, but that we have always been ONE and MANY together and just not always able to remember our true nature, just as we are always conscious while asleep yet unable to remember most of it.

we are as drops of water in a single ocean only conscious of the ever changing waves.

soulless souls

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