I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure “soul” has no legal or medical definition.
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Yes, we are not debating medical or legal terms at this point in the drift.
And I would have said that the soul is exactly the cause of those things - without our soul we would just be piles of meat. So I guess without knowing or agreeing what a soul is or does, it’s sort of a pointless discussion.
Yes, it’s drift like this that leads to the loss of legal and medical rights.
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Everyone forgets about Enoch.
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A newborn baby has fundamentally different capacities and potentials than the chimp. Some of these capacities are biological, in the baby’s brain. Some of them are situational, in that the baby is part of human society, and that is also part of the baby’s potential. However, that potential is manifest. It is not potential in the sense that, “in the future, unique human behavior will occur.” Instead, that unique human potential is happening in the present with the baby, in which it is taking advantage of its human capacities. In this way, it is unlike the “potential” of a human zygote to grow entirely new anatomical features in the future. Note that atypical development of anatomy may prevent this potential from being reached in some individuals, but it is not characteristic of people in general.
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I think you have to distinguish two uses of the word “cause”.
One meaning of “cause” is when object A causes something to happen with object B. That is an interaction between two different objects that evokes some behavior in the second object. The gas causes the car to go because the car’s engine burns the gas.
More broadly, cause can just mean “the reason.” The soul causes human agency in the sense that it is the reason for the human agency. But it is literally the reason (in this view.) It is not another body that is interacting with the human body, like oxygen might. To say that the human body has a soul is the same as saying the human body can act and move with special human life. If the body cannot move with unique human life then it has no soul.
It is not a pointless discussion. Prior to the modern period, we would be arguing over what exactly the soul was, meaning what was the human potential. What are humans naturally trying to be? What should they do with themselves? The modern period dropped that as a reasonable scientific question. We still hear echos of it. When people argue that the nature of the sexes determines the sorts of lives men and women should live, they are arguing from that older view.
I’m not sure what you are asking. But i meant what i said. I don’t think a zygote is complex enough to support a soul, whether you think a soul is a real spiritual object or a metaphor for what makes us people. Like trying to run a complex computer algorithm on an hourglass. Yeah, an hourglass does some primitive computation of a sort. But there’s just but enough there there.
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Lazarus? From what I understand he was comfortably chilling in Heaven until Jesus yanked him back out of eternal paradise.
And again, you make a converse argument that only holds up because of your specific idea of what a soul is. If my view of a soul is that of the driver who gets in a car and controls it, then none of the rest of your argument holds. A person can sit in a car and not do anything. A person can sit in a broken car and not be able to do anything.
By your view, a dead body by definition cannot have a soul. It had a soul before, so why can’t the soul still be there a minute, 5 minutes or 3 days after death? There is absolutely no test or experiment we can perform to prove it either way. And we may have conflicting views about what a soul even is. And without a way to resolve it and have a common definition.
Debating an unknown that neither party really knows anything about, with no way to arrive at a more informed answer - pointless.
Although, it’s more accurate to say that nobody saw Enoch actually die.
Almost like actuarial science . . . while you do eventually get to find out the “right answer”, it’s too late to do anything about the original answer.
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Meanwhile, I reject the notion of a soul.
Why must a soul be necessary? What is it? What is it made of, what does it do, what would the lack of a soul mean?
I see no reason to require a soul and believe that I function just fine without one. I also find the concept of ensoulment vastly irrelevant to the topic of abortion.
We kill many innocent people who you might presume to have a soul simply because their lives are inconvenient (see the stats in Israel/Palestine thread where Israel’s data, allegedly more reliable than Gaza’s, say they successfully have only killed 1 innocent per combatant and this is considered very good results.)
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Which, I’d like to further expand on - I find it really frustrating and disheartening when politicians hold the life of a fetus extremely sacred but don’t hold other life sacred.
Like voting against Medicaid or food stamps or drug rehabilitation programs, because fuck those poors and veterans and addicts, but future-babies are the most precious thing and depending on the state we will risk the mother’s life for an embryo.
IMO, the fake moral outrage about murdering babies is simply effective propaganda. People are inherently predisposed to care for infants, thus they use big pictures of recognizable babies rather than a 1/6 inch picture of an embryo.
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Yeah. Lazarus was not given any choice in the matter.
I think you are saying it is not a scientific question. I tend to agree, with some nuance.
But that is the interesting part: is it a scientific question? Now, most people would agree it is not. This was not always true.
One the one hand, you have an approach to science that thinks in terms of understanding the potential of different objects. A person has the potential to be a person, tries to become a person, and we have to wonder what is that potential? A rock has the potential to be a rock, so it tries to go to the center of the Earth as rocks want to do.
On the other hand, you have a mechanistic view of nature in which most things have no agency of their own. They must be pushed to do something by outside forces.
Obviously, the mechanistic view won, mostly and at least for now, for a variety of reasons. But that doesn’t make the question pointless.
But what is the point?
I propose there exists a flergl inside each of us. We are enflergled upon our first breath, and the flergl stays with us for as long as we live, and then goes away to a magical alternate universe.
I don’t see a point to arguing about the exact nature of the flergl. Especially regarding healthcare legislation.
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Interestingly, the idea that you go immediately to heaven came much later. Now you still find certain protestant groups who argue we all sleep between death and the second coming of Jesus.
Now, THIS makes sense, both theologically and scientifically.
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I apologize if I sounded crass in dismissing the concept of a soul. However, this thread is about abortion legislation, and religion already encroaches far, far too much on healthcare and government in general.
Therefore, I’ll openly say: I do not care whether a fetus has or doesn’t have a soul, and support abortion rights either way.
Or, more accurately: I do not believe a soul exists, and if you can prove to me it does, it would fundamentally change my entire life.
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I or one of the mods will clean some of the posts up. I won’t have sufficient time to do it until tomorrow, however.
I think the side-bar issue is interesting, but agree that it’s drifted pretty far from the current thread’s topic (which is still relevant).