Today's Rant:
"The Soul of the problem" or "Who put all these shoe parts in here?"
It has occurred to me that one of the great mysteries in life is that of the soul. There is very little information about regarding the little buggers. Some people claim they store them in jars, and others seem to be turning a tidy little profit by selling them on Ebay. But the fascinating question is just what are we jarring and selling?
One day, long ago, I was in a room with a number of scalpel wielding friends and an equal number of preserved fetal pigs. We put the two together and soon had pig parts all over the place. We trimmed out and dissected their various internal organs, examined the fine anatomy of their eyes, and carefully opened their little skulls and extracted their brains. One particularly enterprising person slowly and carefully removed the spinal column for his pig. He trimmed everything off, neatly arranging each part of the pig in order on the rubber pin board. Then he neatly trimmed the spinal column to nothing but cartilage and bone and a head. The pig was completely dissected. It's entire existence bare, unhidden, exposed in clean white fluorescent light on a blue rubber pad, with little blue pins stuck through it here and there. Whatever mysteries of it's existence it had hidden, they were no more.
From what I gather, people are not much different.
We are made of the same stuff as the pig, as the trees, as the road, as the dirt, as the mud. By what luck would an arbitrary sack of mud aquire a soul?
......Dang. That's a good question.....
Let's make an assumption that we have some universal force that recognizes certain types of mud and assigns them souls. Let's call it God. So, certain types of mud get souls: people.
Right off we can make some interesting conclusions: The number of souls on earth is not constant. There are many more present on a daily basis now than there ever were before. This implies that there are vast, perhaps infinite numbers of souls in all existence, only some of which are temporarily here, at some earth-bound stage of their life cycle. However, we don't know if souls are only here for one time or if they are recycled. If a soul is recycled, it can also be concluded that whatever a soul did in it's previous lifetime has imparted little, if any of that experience on the individual connected to it. Only a very few people remember what they did in a previous lifetime, and those people are usually wearing tinfoil hats. Most, if not, all, human behavior can be traced to genetic and environmental factors, and a person's memories and behavior are stored chemically in the brain. When a person dies, these memories should be destroyed. If a soul carries a persons memories, it would have to somehow interface with a persons physical existence to get them. (It is certainly possible this is a function of God). This might be important if those experiences were an important part of a souls journey.
A soul's purpose is a bit mysterious as well. If a soul is only momentarily attached to a person and aquires nothing from the joining, then what purpose has it served. It certainly seems that all of a bodies functions are handled autonomously without external help, so it is not required for life. Perhaps life is required for a soul. Many religions depend on the choices/behaviors of a person to determine the ultimate destination of a soul. Perhaps the soul requires a soujourn among the mortals for some other greater task that we cannot perceive.
Another interesting question is that of the homogeneity of souls. Are all souls created equal? Are some superior than others? Different religions claim opposing view points, and there is not much evidence as to what souls are like. Lab specimens are fairly hard to come by for some reason. Often those who believe that souls are different use class, race or gender as a basis for the difference between souls. Going back to the mud hypothesis, everything physical is made out of the same stuff, there really isn't much difference between either of these groups. One might argue that God can detect slight differences in piles of mud and bestow different types of souls to different mudstacks. But, there are several historical examples of good souls being from inferior levels, Ghandi, Joan of Arc, Mother Theresa. You can actually try this yourself: find someone who is of a inferior group to you (or find someone to do it for you) who is obviously a superior individual by every measurable means and ask them to tell you (honestly) if their soul is better than yours. The results of this test are somewhat controversial, but it's fun, and you might generate some interesting data about the person's true personality.
So, what have we concluded? Nothing.
Another subject clear as mud.
11-2-03