Muhammad - I was a little confused on your answer. Also, I wanted you take on these two other questions. Then I'll simply summaize to see what the majority of people think and take it from there. PS: Anyone who hasn't given an answer and would like to... please do. So? 1) God can do anything? 2) Does God know everything? 3) Can you do something that God can not do? Thanks, Michael
Cris In short, there are two ways to go about explaining it 1) What the soul is not SB 6.12.15: One who knows that the three qualities — goodness, passion and ignorance — are not qualities of the soul but qualities of material nature, and who knows that the pure soul is simply an observer of the actions and reactions of these qualities, should be understood to be a liberated person. He is not bound by these qualities. 2) What the soul is BG 2.20: For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain. The first option relies on an understanding of the analysis of the material creation as the three gunas, the second option requires (for an atheist) the ability to work with a theoretical framework - which option would you prefer?
LG, Your statements raise some further questions. First issue; not ignorance. This implies total knowledge of everything possible. 1) Does each soul have a memory copy of such knowledge or do they just link into a central knowledge base, and if so where is that knowledge stored and how is it stored? 2) If a soul wanted to retrieve some piece of information how is that achieved and what is the access speed, i.e. what is the method of perception used? 3) How would the soul process the information, i.e. how does evaluation, understanding, and reasoning occur? Second issue: goodness; If the soul is independent of good or bad what is it that makes a person good or bad? If the soul is not the controlling essence of a person then what is? Or in other words the soul is eternal, but that doesn’t say anything useful about the nature of the soul. 1) How many souls are there? 2) Since life is relatively recent compared to eternity; why do some souls decide to drive lifeforms and for what purpose? 3) You implied earlier that all life must have a life force (soul) to drive it since that is the primary differentiator from inorganic matter. Does that mean every organism has a soul, e.g. every insect and every bacterium? The gunas reference doesn’t seem relevant yet.
I have a couple of questions: God chose to punish all the children of Adam & Eve for their parent's sin. Since his sense of morality is certainly superior to our's, shouldn't we arrest & prosecute children for their parents crimes? God does not intervene, even though he has the power to, to prevent tragedies. Yet if I let if I watched as a small child walked in front of a bus and did nothing, I would be attacked as being a horrible immoral person. What is the right thing to do? Why does God appear to need and want the continual praise and suplication of people. He seems terribly needy and insecure.
That's only because "god" in his/her/its many forms is nothing more than the projection onto the cosmos of our own human needyness and insecurity, our hopes and desires, our loves and hates. When enough people finally realize this, that they are responsible for their past, present and future, at all levels, then maybe we'll see some true caring and respect for other humans. True theists are the lowest form of the highly evolved human species.
yes other humans, but since when have theist, cared about humans. when they earn it, it will be given.
Do I realize that I've apparently contradicted myself. Yes, I do. You produced the exact response that I expected. My first instinct was to answer Yes, Yes and No. However, I had an intuition which I need to think more deeply on which made me decide to answer as I have.
Where's the disrespect in that? I respect all lifeforms, even the ones I eat. Dosen't mean I can't comment on their relative levels of development.
Well the questions can be debated and I can think of some situations where a yes yes and no answer is not logical - which Prince James and others have mentioned - we can discuss these later, for now I am just trying to get a handle on what each SciForums religious reader/poster thinks about God and God's abilities. Michael By the way, how do you reconcile 1) God can do anything … and yet maintain that God can not do some things...? that is rather illogical. Wouldn't it be more logical to simply say, God can not do anything as was posted previously?
lightgigantic - Is this not contradictory? You state that the shastric evidence you provide determines what the soul is, but the quote you gave is once again negative theology. Even though you state that (BG 2.20) is a description of the soul, Krishna is once again describing what it cannot do and not what it can do. General: The entire debate of the soul would change if there was no afterlife. Does anyone have an argument for the existence of a soul without an existence afterwards?
