Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="s/LaSH" data-source="post: 809989" data-attributes="member: 6929">Right, I wondered about the terms we're using here, so I asked a guy with a degree in theology (he's also a Catholic priest; highly qualified there, I think). Here's what he had to say.There are two models under which you can refer to souls: the Greek, and the Judaeo-Christian.Under the antique Greek model, there is the body, and there is the soul. The soul is kinda the lifeforce-identity thing (I believe it's called psyche in ancient Greek, whence we get the word psychic as well as psychology).Under the Judaeo-Christian model, there is the body, the soul, and the spirit. The soul is what animates living things. The spirit is a fragment of God itself. (Divine gender indeterminacy intentional.) Animals do not have spirits. Logically, therefore, higher functions of intelligence are spirit-related.Further information: Angels do not have souls.This creates a charming mess that needs to be resolved.Under the Grecian model, an intelligent undead would either be a corruption of the original soul or a negative energy duplicate that uses some kind of impression left within the body. Most people seem to be using this archaic model.Under the Judaeo-Christian model (only a couple thousand years old), an intelligent undead can simply replace the soul with a negative energy duplicate. The spirit can then remain, retaining identity and so forth. If it does depart the body, where do residual life skills like language come from? The back part of the brain?Anybody want to poke this can of worms any harder?(Yay, I got the post through without a kernel32 crash!)</blockquote>

Verification