RE: [asa] Evolution of the Soul

I was raising a scientific question, is the soul explainable by purely
physical concepts? I suppose your comments imply there is no scientific
answer since you invoke religion. Or, is your answer a mixture of both
science and religion?

Moorad

________________________________

From: RFaussette@aol.com [mailto:RFaussette@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, September 25, 2006 12:28 PM
To: Alexanian, Moorad; gregoryarago@yahoo.ca; asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] Evolution of the Soul

In a message dated 9/25/2006 12:04:36 PM Eastern Standard Time,
alexanian@uncw.edu writes:

        If by evolution one understands a truly physical (material)
theory, then how to understand concepts like soul, spiritual,
rationality, consciousness, life, etc. seems to me to become
insurmountable problems in such scientific theories of the physical
aspect of Nature.

        Moorad

The concept you need to explore is SELF consciousness, not simply
consciousness and that exploration is possible because only man is SELF
conscious, a state that arose in the last 4 millions years as man
abandoned instinctive behavior in favor of learned behavior. Before SELF
consciousness, there was no thinking ABOUT the world, there was only
REACTION to the world that arises from instinctive behavior. Once there
was SELF consciousness, man mistakenly assumed all manifestations of
nature were SELF conscious like himself and attributed god like
qualities to all natural phenomena resulting in many gods.

According to ALL the formal religions, man is returned to God when he
returns the SELF consciousness that arose with the eating of the apple,
the awareness of self has to be surrendered to be in the presence of
God.

Now, even though the self sacrifice is first seen in the Vedic hymns and
traveled both East and West, (East via Buddhism and West to
Christianity) in the East all supernatural issues are addressed by
teaching the religious adept to make the self sacrifice (don't doubt,
have complete faith) without any transcendental questioning at all which
is forbidden. In the West, this basic discipline has been suppressed and
so the questions that are forbidden in the East because they express
doubt and preclude the self sacrifice, are the primary questions in the
West where the self sacrifice has been diluted by transcendental
concerns that make its pursuit impossible.

My paper True Religion discusses these matters and my paper Race and
Religion: A Catholic View expands on the "core of personal religion."

rich faussette

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Received on Mon Sep 25 14:15:30 2006