What is the "Soul"?

That was a good passage, where's it from? I had never heard about a theory of the soul dying but the "spirit" living on. Interesting.
I agree about your "Religion from Philosophy" point, and think that if there weren't any more institutions, then maybe we'd be more succeptible to growth and change, in lieu of the stagnation we're seeing today.

Maybe I should start my own non-religion. :wink:
Nice post, Heimdall.

Indeed...nice post, Heim.

I'll munch on this stuff for a while.

Heim, I particularly liked your phrase: "My sense is that religion is philosophy after the popular mind has first made a confused mess out of it and then institutionalized the mistakes."

Supporting Aristotle's notion of the mortality of the soul, etymological speculations regarding the origin of the idea of spirit, suggest that it denoted life itself. To inspire is to infuse with life (anima); to expire is to lose that life. Spirit=soul=life=mortality.

Taliesin,

The verses are from the Rubaiyat.

The soul is a capacity for that which is not yet created .... for instance, a thought. The potential exist for a thought but to become a thought requires translation.
We are surrounded by the beyond ..... the question remains ...'does the translation come from beyond, or within.' In that answer lies the soul.

As I said...we can all "define" "soul" in a way that best suits our purposes and sensibilities...

...but in a religious context, "soul" has a specific meaning.

If we are discussing that...the religious implications of an immortal soul...that is one thing.

If we are simply making a list of what each of us individually thinks the word "soul" should denote...that is another.

The former can eventually go somewhere...albeit, almost always a contentious "somewhere."

The latter can go on forever.

Give me a room with 100 people...and I can damn near guarantee 100 different responses to the latter.

I dunno Frank, it sounds like you are looking for a religious answer <feigned shock>
Al we can do is ponder.
Happy Turkey day

Happy Thanksgiving to you, too, Ge.

My favorite holiday! :wink:

Happy Turkey with mole to you, Frank, Gel, Taliensin and Piffka.

Belated Happy T-Day to you all, and a bow to Frank for keeping us on-track.
Let's follow his suggestion and discuss the implications of the soul; Why is it so essential for religion? My theory is that it was developed as a way for humans to go to heaven, i.e. "live on" after death, which I (and I think many other people) have brought up as the number one cause of religion. What are your views?

Fear of death seems to be universal...and I suspect most religions were created to deal with that fear.

For certain...there is a lot of "...you will have eternal life..." involved in religion today.

Taliesin, I suspect--I can't know for sure--that there are at least three reasons for the invention of the soul. (1) as an expression of our fear of death we have cloned ourselves in the form of an immortal gaseous form that will survive our physical death, (2) the concept helped explain the "observation" that when we sleep we often go elsewhere while our body remains where it is sleeping, and (3) to me the most interesting and valid possibilitly, the concept of the soul may have to do with life and nothing to do with death, a vacant and mysterious category for our most essential nature, whatever that may be.

JL: Hmmm...intriguing. This:

is why I like this forum; everyone's capacity to invert ideas and hand them to me, and make me think about them differently. I agree with 1, find 3 very interesting, but 2 is a point of contention. I don't feel there is anything really "spiritual" about dream-states. As I've said, I think the Collective unconscious is responsible for our dreams, but that's not so much a "going elsewhere" as it is a "something being able to talk more clearly when we're asleep." That might just be semantics, but those are my thoughts on the subject. Thanks again for the thought-of-the-day.