Souls exist in many, though not all, religious belief systems and therefore also in works of fantasy that assume the reality of ghosts or a hereafter. How many works by Poul Anderson?
SM Stirling's Church Universal and Triumphant perverts Eastern religions by teaching that some human beings are soulless and can lawfully be killed. Either every person has or is a soul or none have.
Do I believe that people are souls? No. Do I believe that people are "soulless"? No. The adjective is metaphorical, not metaphysical, and implies the Nazi concept of a life without value.
11 comments:
Kaor Paul!
I think it is equally questionable to doubt the immortality of the soul as it is for you to to be skeptical departed souls have an afterlife. Plato offers us four arguments for the immortality of the soul in his dialogue "Phaedo."
I don't think the idea of bodily resurrection from the dead can be truly said to contradict Classical about the soul's immortality. Rather, the resurrection is best understood as a REVELATION from God, not as something we could know from reasoning alone.
Some of the stories of PA where belief in the afterlife can be found or even proven would be: "Pact," THE KING OF YS, the two OPERATION books, etc.
Dang! I really need to reread the Emberverse series. I had forgotten how the CUT believe some people have no souls and therefore they could be rightly killed.
And I do believe we are bodies with souls!
Sean
That bit of the CUT's doctrine is actually taken from genuine theosophism, tho' a distinct minority strain within it.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Dang! And I'm reading JRR Tolkien's translation of BEOWULF and a collection of Franz Kafka's stories called THE METAMORPHOSIS & OTHER STORIES. I need to hustle on reading those books so I can get to your works! (Smiles)
Noted, how one strain of Theosophism denied some people have souls. One of those bad ideas floating around in the 19th century, it seems.
Sean
I have known Theosophists but had never heard that abominable doctrine.
Sean, granted there is no logical contradiction between immortal souls and resurrected bodies. Nevertheless, they are two very different concepts of survival after death. Greek philosophers laughed when Paul said God had resurrected a man. Jehovah's Witnesses understandly insist on Biblical resurrection of the body while denying the soul. Only mainstream Christianity has combined the ideas and there is a tension between them. Theologians had to debate whether a soul is judged immediately after death or not until after the resurrection. I have read a description of a buried man "awaiting the resurrection." Is he not already in the hereafter?
CS Lewis said that each of us is a soul with a body, not a body with a soul! I was taught that we are a combination. I now say that each of us is a mortal psychophysical organism.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Agree, what you said about Theosophism. Stirling has REALLY dug into this rather obscure strain of religious speculation!
I agree, immortality of the soul and resurrection of the death are DIFFERENT. I remember about that incident in Acts where St. Paul debated with Greek philosophers in Athens. It was the resurrection which they could not accept. Only one man, Dionysius the Areopagite, was willing to listen further to Paul.
Needless to say, as a Catholic, I disagree with the JWs about the soul. The consensus of Catholic belief is that the soul is judged immediately after death. And both the saved and the damned will receive their bodies back at the resurrection.
I believe we are more than merely "a mortal psychophysical organism."
Sean
The notion that killing someone who is 'soulless' is less bad than killing someone with an immortal soul, seems backward to me.
The first destroys the person forever, the latter does not.
Jim,
If, as many believe and I was bought up to believe, the soul is the seat of intellect and will, then soulless organisms would be just animals but Stirling's CUT is not saying that.
Paul.
I guess to some extent I got my notion of 'soulless' from stories based on old notions of fairies & mer-people in which they were capable of thought & speech, but did not have 'an immortal soul'.
Jim,
Indeed there are such stories and they contradict certain philosophies and theologies according to which thought requires an immaterial soul.
Paul.
Kaor, Jim!
And if AIs ever become a reality theologians will have to wrestle with the question of whether they have rational souls. An issue grappled by Anthony Boucher in his classic story "The Quest for St. Aquin."*
Ad astra! Sean
*That story has a very striking opening!
The phrase "AI" is now applied to currently existing artefacts that simulate intelligence. Conscious artefacts, if they ever exist, will have to be assessed by philosophers and theologians.
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