Division Theory
Offline Is anyone more knowledgable about Division Theory than the websites I have found on Google? The sites I have read seem to indicate that the ancient hebrews and other cultures believed in a form of division theory. The theory goes that upon death the "spirit" and "soul" became seperated. One soul was expected to be reincarnated and one became trapped in a dream-like realm (heaven/hell).
In the NT we see the words soul and spirit which may appear to be used interchangably. Are these words interchangable in the Greek or are they seperate words with seperate meaning? Hebrews 4:12 is a good example that states that we are supposed to have a "soul" and a "spirit". Maybe I am reading this out of context, but any thoughts?
"Always seek out the truth, but avoid at all costs those that claim to have found it" ANONYMOUS
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It seems that I am. It's very similar to Theosophic understanding of reincarnation. Basically, human is a part of soul in incarnation. This part of soul, when incarnates, lives and dies has formed by it's life a set of vehicles, which defines it's personality, memory and destiny.
When a human dies, the soul wants the above mentioned vehicles to get back to it, as a thing it went for to Earth. However, many people after death doesn't make it back to soul, not immediately. It depends on awareness of the person. On the way back it has to passs through a plane of existence called "emotional" (or Tibetians called it Bardo) which is very tempting. There are no limits for fantasy, it's very plastic, so a freshly dead persons can find any existence they wanted in their life. There are miners, who day by day go to mines, they mine coal, after work they go to pub for a drink, and they go home and tomorrow they go to mines, again and again. No matter that there is nowhere to go "down" to mines, or "up" from mines to pub, it's all illusion of such people, who are satisfied with such "life".
The more aware people, less emotional, sees that such existence has no sense, and quickly aspires to higher planes of existence, closer to the soul itself, which is good because the soul doesn't have to wait for their return.
When the soul decides so, it sends another part of itself to reincarnate and gather experiences. It certainly maintains some continuity, the next life is affected by previous life, but the persons are less or more different, because circumstances are different...
Soul and spirit are certainly not interchangeable, but it depends on what you call "spirit". Soul is a group being, which unifies all incarnations one person had.
But some people call "spirit" the human vehicle for soul, (except of it's physical body), and other sources calls it a higher structure above the soul. (above in graph, higher in spiritual "frequency" )
I really don't know how much Greeks and other ancient people understood it. You see, the people in these times were so emotionally oriented, that they expected everyone to get stuck in Bardo, but today is much more people who won't do it, or at least stay in higher parts of "Bardo" and for a shorter time. They're more aware. The Bardo, or emotional plane of existence, is like Hollywood. We say, that Hollywood has a glamour, and so has Bardo. And we equally know that this glamour is a cheap tinsel. Be aware of that and you'll be more spiritual than any medium or spiritist.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
I would just say these words "spirit and soul", will vanish when our understanding of consciousness is scientifically better understood.
Nothing is of itself, or divided ..... all is connected, ONE.
Atheism Books.
Hi Cali_Atheist2
The interpretations by christian theologians of soul and spirit (and much of the confusion to which they themselves are prone) stem from the use of the Greek words "psychi" and "pneuma" at the time the NT texts were being written and the very different meanings each had. These words and their meanings had been established long before the Greek culture, or its successor the Roman, was exposed to Jewish concepts of religion. The Romans had similar terms "spiritus" and "animus", which also mirrored the Greek meanings but tended to be more mundanely applied.
Both believed that life animated us like wind or breath animates an inert object, and when that wind blew itself out we died. Once infused with this breath (or wind, though that sounds more like a religious explanation for farting), we possessed character, thoughts and a will to live that was purely our own - our psyche. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans really gave much thought to the source of that wind - the gods definitely had little or nothing to do with it. Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides did go a little further and rooted this force firmly in nature. No will or purpose needed to be ascribed to it beyond that it existed and that we derived benefit from it, but it was still very much "luck of the draw" stuff. Those whose psyche was strong enough to hold on to the pneumatic life force were fortunate more than deserving or skilled at doing so. A very basic Darwinian theory, if you think about it. Socrates and Plato et al refined this by suggesting that life's inspiration was influenced in where and how it manifested itself by our psyche - a revolutionary concept that hinted at the fact that we were conscious progenitors of subsequent life and not just accidental inventions. This might even be called Darwinian theory as it is understood now at gene level.
The Romans hadn't refined this concept any further in any real way, so this was more or less where philosophy was at when the iron-age stupidity of the Hebrew ancients arrived in its midst, on the back of a new cult which itself was freely misinterpreting even that body of belief and sticking in bits almost as it went along. Greeks attempted to translate Hebrew using their own traditionally held beliefs. Later cult members, increasingly Latin speaking (and often therefore unaware themselves of the essential semantic difference in meaning between "spiritus" and "animus" when used as translation for their Greek counterparts), freely added even more bits'n'bobs until, by the time the cult had grown through political patronage to be the only permitted belief system in town, it was the proud possessor of a huge array of diverse and contradictory statements - all alleging to be part of the cult's creed.
It was crying out for editing and received it, but by then the church (as the moronic, yellow-pack judaic cult had now started calling itself) had its hands full with an even bigger problem - the numerous heresies that such semantic indifference and half-baked "make your own religion" ideas had sponsored. Attention was paid first and foremost to eliminating the heretics and excising the worst examples of heresy-inducing contradictions from the large body of literature that was then purporting to be the cult's creed and testament. Less attention was paid to the errors in the remaining texts, except in that they became "standardised" in their Latin versions, thereby enshrining like bugs in amber the ignorance of the scribes who had failed to understand the nuances of the words they had been translating, and who now even added a whole new set of examples. The Platonic meaning for spirit and soul disappeared from the official interpretations (and indeed would have disappeared from the world completely if it hadn't been for islam - but that's a whole other bag of theist-droppings).
Theology, much like the philosophers in Hitchikers Guide charged with finding the question to which "42" had nonsenically been applied as the answer, has tripped over itself, run around in circles, and frequently disappeared up its own arse in the meantime trying to ascribe a "deep" meaning to essential nonsense, made even more stupid by bad translation. The "spirit" and the "soul" are a case in point, and the ambivalence with which both words pepper the biblical texts with semantic abandon has led some to arrive at some very weird conclusions indeed. It's a bullshitter's paradise (as luminon amply proves above in the thread) even to this day. An Ohio library clerk's view is as valid (or "invalid", better said) as anyone else's since the premise they all set out from is based on semantic nonsense. One such clerk, a guy called Novak, has come up with the "division theory" you refer to.
I feel a new cult coming on ...
I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Thanks for the information Luminon. I think I understand this concept somewhat better now, but the crux of my OP was that early christians seemed to believe in a Binary Soul Doctrine (BSD) that most do not believe in today. The scripture I quoted Hebrews 4:12 states that "For the word of god speaks is alive and full of power; it is sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating the dividing line of the breath of life (soul) and the [immortal] spirit. It seems most cultures at one time believed this and there are still some very small christian churches that believe in BSD. This just goes to show that early christianity as it was practiced 2000 yrs ago is vastly different than what is practiced today.
"Always seek out the truth, but avoid at all costs those that claim to have found it" ANONYMOUS
As I recall, the ancient egyptians had a separation along those lines.
The Ba and the Ka. A few google searches will likely tell you more than you ever wanted to know.
If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear. - JP Sartre
Howdy Nordmann
I guess this goes along with the sheol/hades/hell interchangability thingy. The imperfect adaptation of translating one language into another.
Are you saying that the souls is a material object that dies at the death of the body and the spirit is immortal? Again this is still not consistent with what is taught in churches all over the world, yet seemed to be a thought of the earlist practicing christians. Yet again showing the evolution of thought in religion. I guess there can be no true conservatives in christianity because by definition change is bad. Hahaha..... loved the whole life infusing fart.
Oh Jake..... not another one.
"Always seek out the truth, but avoid at all costs those that claim to have found it" ANONYMOUS
Oh but I want them gone nowwwwwwwwww.
"Always seek out the truth, but avoid at all costs those that claim to have found it" ANONYMOUS
I'm not saying anything, except that this is what the Greeks believed, and within Greek thinking there were many conflicting ideas - or at least in conflict according to christian thinking. The word "psyche" for example could be used to mean an individual's unique character in order to postulate a reason why people behaved as they did, or it could be employed in the myth of the journey into the afterlife, for which the Greeks had several different versions and even a whole branch of thought which dismissed the myth as untrue and irrelevant. You can already see why a Greek speaker would have at least an element of confusion about encountering the Hebrew "nephesh" (which approximates to "pneuma" ) and then a whole litany (literally) of applications he was in the process of writing about where the word is used in a manner approximating to "psyche".
Even then, there was another layer of confusion. Having settled on "psyche" as the more apt term he then had to explain how it often incorporated part of the concept of "pneuma", and even more often had ditched what - to him - would have been one of its more common uses as understood by his readers, a person's rational mind, something that had been traditionally seen as the main element of the psyche, belonging solely to the individual but which now had to incorporate a sense of being owned in part by a deity.
To the jews, and to the original sect members of what would become christianity, these aberrations just didn't exist. But just by translating them (or developing them, or sometimes even originating them) in Greek, suddenly there existed a dichotomy of meaning and a rake of extra problems with the cult's theological rationale (if such is not a contradiction in terms). It was to lead to several decisions that had severe repercussions on western thinking for centuries - namely the invention of the trinity, the exact nature of which led to a lot of bloodshed and far-reaching schism in establishing, and the banning of Plato and other philosophies altogether, purely because they had a better, but to the christian pagan, explanation which avoided the problem altogether.
The evidence such as it remains suggests that the very early cult members just didn't think about it at all. After all they were Hebrew or Aramaic speakers steeped in the monotheistic "owned" version of the soul in any case. In judaism there is no doubt where "nephesh" comes from! The problems arose with a vengeance when the whole thing was taken over by Greek speakers, with no significant jewish input at all. When it did so it went through a gradual transformation, initially typically Greek in its treatment of the subject but eventually more formalised into the meaning we take today from the christian use of "spirit" and "soul". The clincher was when it was translated into Latin, where direct parallels linguistically existed for the old Greek terms, and which traditionally had been less laden with philosophical implications than the Greek. That was when the church could at last stamp its authority on the subject.
But as history shows us, the case was by no means closed. What we are left with after two millennia of semantic obfuscation are two words about which few know or care what they really mean. The church, and christians in general, have grown to prefer it that way - which is why foolish claptrap like luminon's above can be said as if it should make perfect sense. It doesn't, but then neither does christianity's perversion of what once had been a fine intellectual vein of reasoning that might have led to a more scientific and rational appraisal of humanity had it not been hijacked (and attemptedly obliterated) by non-intellectual thuggery disguised as its opposite.
That's what I'm saying!
I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy