souls

I no longer believe that I have a soul. Or at least one that is separate from my body and that will live on after my body is ead. I suppose this is the natural result of discarding dualism, but it's come as sort of a surprise to me. Part of it is probably thanks to one of the professors: "Christianity does not teach the immortality of the soul but the resurrection of the body." And, that is what I see when I look at the creeds and at the bible. I'm not really interested in the mechanism of resurrection (how will God resurrect those whose bodies have been vaporized?) and I don't know how useful it is to ask questions about those bodies (what age will my body be? etc, etc,) but that's where I've come to and I feel pretty good about it. Souls are a useful concept, but they have outlived their usefulness to me. And what reason do I have to believe in them in the first place?

Recently I have been wondering how well a person holds together. I'm in a fiction workshop this quarter, and people keep bringing up certain actions as contradictory, and therefore the character doesn't make sense or hold together. And yet...the contradictions they are criticizing are contradictions that are real and present in peoples lives, and probably actually aren't contradictions to begin with ("he thinks about serious things but also likes to have a good time"). Anyway, it just makes me think of how making sense of someone necessarily simplifies them, cuts out the anomalies to create a solid concept. Except this solid concept doesn't actually have basis in reality. I don't think that a person holds together as a stable form that can be known. People are gooey. And they don't have souls. Maybe these two concepts go hand in hand, that without the soul there is no unchanging aspect (specter?!) to a person that can be known, just a changing aspect. Perhaps belief in the soul as a stable component to identity that can be removed from the body hinders us from properly knowing each other.

In other words, everything begins to make sense once you believe in evolution. Thank God for Charles Darwin. I'm also beginning to approach Christianity and the bible much more as mythology. I prefer the term mythology to allegory or figure or metaphor ("Genesis should be read as figurative rather than literal"), because I don't think that figurative actually captures what is going on or how it was written. Mythology suggests that there is no difference between reality and metaphor, reality is metaphor and metaphor is reality. I'm becoming more and more frustrated with hearing people talking about Genesis as figurative, because they're still trying to apply a modernist framework of understanding to it, that it's okay to read it as truth if we read it as figurative with the understanding that it wasn't written to be scientific or historical. I think that reading is going most of the way, but not far enough, into mythology. People don't like mythology, though, because it makes them think of something primal, unsystematic, and arbitrary. And those are probably fair elements to pick out, but I do think that is missing the point (there is nothing more satisfying than to say that someone else is missing the point.)

Anyway, I don't want to come across as a bully ("you have no soul, you have no solid state, believe in evolution, stop reading Genesis literally or figuratively"). I don't think that you're intellectually lazy, or an academic invalid if you believe the things I'm whining about. Just consider...