I'm a soul man?

Do we have a soul? What do we mean by soul? Soul is defined as the animating and vital principle in humans, credited with the faculties of thought, action, and emotion and often conceived as an immaterial entity. (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. ) I don't think we have a soul. The reason I conclude this, if I did not have a brain and nervous system then I as a Homo Sapien Sapien could neither function nor have knowledge or memory of who I am. For example four years ago, Terry Schiavo, a brain damaged woman was unable to feed herself and after two weeks she died from dehydration and starvation because her brain and nervous system could not animate her limbs to feed or hydrate herself. Also, Alzheimer's disease shut down the brain activity over-time until the brain cell shrinks and stop signaling the heart and other key body functions via the nervous system and thus the person die. For an excellent presentation on the brain and Alzheimer see www.alz.org. If I am wrong then I don't lose anything except I had an incorrect conclusion. Apologists like Dr Peter Kreeft and Gary Habermas believe in an immortal soul may disagree with me, but what evidence do they provide that is factual. There is no evidence for an immortal separate soul, because if there was then a person with severe brain damage would be unaffected by the damage, they would be aware of who they are and should somehow be able to communicate this. It is a fact that if the brain is damaged or diseased then my ideas, memory, knowledge, identity of who I think I am will change. This is significant because if I am right then I need to live this life because I won't exist as the personality or identity I currently am because once my brain activity cease at death then my conception of myself dies. Think about it....

To Hell with Hell

Yesterday I was reading one of my favorite blogs called Debunking Christianity which was founded by John Loftus a former minister who is now an atheists. The item on his blog that I want to blog about is a film I watched as a child called the Burning Hell by a Southern Baptist minister who died in 2005 named Estus Pirkle, the film was produced in 1974. I remember as a child my mother who is a minister would have the movie delivered to the house on a movie reel, and she would rent a projector and show it at the small Pentecostal church where she was the pastor. I remember the dread I felt when I would come home from school and see the reel in the house. I remember one year I happen to get home from school before my mother and the reel was waiting at our front door, I took and hid the reel. My mother called the film company and asked them if they sent it and I had to sneak it back to the front door. The scenario was two bikers stopped by a minister's (who they did not know was a minister) house to talk about bible prophecy, it is really not clear why they wanted to stop by a stranger's house to talk about Jesus and bible prophecy. Anyway it appears that both bikers where attending a new church that taught the hell wasn't real but here on earth and a message for the modern age. Then Estus gets up pick up his bible and tell them this bible teaches of a literal hell and that they were going there if they did not change their beliefs, and by the way he just happened to be preaching on the subject of hell for his Sunday sermon. One of the bikers got upset, which I would have too, if someone claimed that I was going to hell, like he knew, he just believed it was true, because he read it in a book. Anyway the biker tell the preacher if he goes to hell he was going to have a party because all of his friends would be there. The other biker apologizes to the minister and they leave. The biker, who got upset and made the partying in hell statement, was driving all erratic and reckless and he wound-up dying in an accident, while his friend just happened to have bike problems and had stopped. The biker leaves his dead friend at the accident site and goes to the minister church (which he never told him where the church was), leaving his dead decapitated friend on the side of the road like road kill. This is one of the worse written movies I have ever seen. This movie scared the heck out of me as a 8 to 10 year old child, you see these demons who looked like the Kiss rock band, people where screaming and all kinds of things where happening showing people who died in the bible stories and went to hell. As I reflected on this movie, I thought about the Christian or Muslim gods (both believe in god and hell), and if hell existed and if god would send people there, god is worst than any recorded despot or serial killer in the history of humanity, this would include Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Rwanda, Bosnia, or Darfur atrocities. If a god who send people to hell existed he is more worst than any of the genocide mass murderers, because when the genocide victims died, their suffering ended. However, god will allow his enemies, nonbelievers, and those who happen to believe in another god, to be tortured for eternity, I don't know how long eternity is, but it is claimed to be forever, with screaming and gnashing of teeth, were the worms does not die, they eat on you forever, just because you thought for yourself and was skeptical of the fall of man, Jesus, and thought the stories of the bible was just another mythology, or you believed in another god by accident of birth. The bottom line is none of the atrocities of known history could not even hold a candle to the biblical or Islamic god, the one who send infidels to hell. Oh but he loves you... Think about it.

Black Socates

Meaning of Life Part 2

I think one of the best quotes I have every read came from a debate between William Lane Craig and Dr. Ray Bradley in 1994. In the Q and A section of the debate an audience member asked Dr. Bradley if there's no God then what's the meaning of life. Dr. Bradley answered "The quickest way I can answer is to invite you to consider the following analogy. You open a book, a good novel perhaps or a history. You read it. What do you read? You find all sorts of sentences that in the book have meaning. The book comes to an end. There's a period at the last page. There's nothing more thereafter. Does this mean that because the book--your life by away of analogy--has come to end, there is no meaning in life? On the contrary, I want to suggest the meaning of life lies in the little things that we do for each other in life. It lies in the texture of everyday existence. It does not lie in yearning for something in an afterlife. If it lay in the latter, if this life had meaning only by virtue of there being another life afterwards which gave it meaning, then what is the meaning of that life? It would have to be followed by a still a third, and so on." The entire debate with the exception of the Question and Answer section can be heard on Common Sense Atheism , this site have over 400 plus debates.