Soulless drones - the fix for Christian soteriology

[Quid est Veritas?]

But I don't think that's spirits, magic, or "woo." (Of course, I'm not sure precisely what "woo" is, except for whatever our friends the dogmatic skeptics have decided to ridicule in their infinite wisdom and even more infinite tolerance for other views.)

The probability stuff is pretty neat, though, yes. I think it's only weird from a Newtonian perspective, though. Before that, people pretty much assumed potentiality was an inherent part of reality. Because Aquinas said so. Because Aristotle said so. And maybe they were right! I've tossed this article around a couple times: Quantum mysteries dissolve if possibilities are realities

Not really even from a Newtonian perspective. Classical Physics still maintains Potentiality in Energy and such. The idea that an object held above the ground has Potential Energy expended as kinetic when it falls, still treats potentials as real things in a sense. The confusion sets in when we start addressing ideas of energy states in particles instead of continueing macroscopically. Interesting article, by the way.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

To address the worry of @Quid est Veritas? that this belief might encourage born-again Christians to mistreat the soulless drone humans (such as myself), there is a possibility that the seed sown by God through the gospel may lay dormant in the soil of the human host before sprouting into a born-again Christian. So although the born-again Christians might be tempted to convert me into Soylent Green there would be the risk of destroying a potential born-again Christian in the process. This is similar to the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares.

That would be functionally no different from assuming everyone has a soul. However, we know that the soul only becomes operative in your scheme on faith - for was that not how it solved the problem of the condemnation of others? So a 'dormant soul' is a non-existent one, for it would be equivalent of the seeds strangled by weeds or fallen on the path.
You shall know them by their fruits - so people acting in immoral ways, would be soulless in a sense, if adopting this system.

I don't know if you are aware of it, but there are those who think that it isn't a soul that is condemned, but that which might have been one. It is the dregs of a person, as you only become really yourself in Christ. It is the effluvia of sins, opinions and such.
A good way to think of it is like the Khandas of Buddhism - heaps of ever changing ideas and self-referents confused for the self. Perhaps within that mess is the Soul, that on being saved, accrues good Khandas to itself, thus purefying itself for the hereafter. That the earth and our lives act as a crucible forging saints. Existence being dependant on God, cannot exist outside Him.
The dross that accrued to someone' soul without Christ, slowly decays and destroys that soul. Breaks it down, so that what could have been wheat, but ends up as tares, and gets burnt. Without it being able to commune with the godhead, as it breaks down, a point arrives in which its very existence become untenable as well.

It is worth noting that the Ancients, even the world's first real Botanist, Theophrastus, believed wheat changed into tares/darnell. They thought it depended upon the soil, weather and the nourishment received, which plant you would get if you sowed, but that the change was then permanent and the seed forever corrupted. Today, we think Agriculture selected weeds inadvertently that look like wheat, thus breeding a weed that survives by mimicking wheat in our fields.
Reading the parable with this specific background, makes one wonder if the tares mixed in with the wheat might not be the corrupted, trying to poison the wheat, before that which survives gets gathered and the rest discarded. It could be evil passions or opinions, or in the context of the discussion I had with my wife, psychopathic soulless people corrupting our world, perhaps due to the Fall. Usually it is taken as a call for tolerance though, as God would sort out his own in the end.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Decartes. Not sure that's ancient. Here's an article on it: Descartes and the Pineal Gland (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). From that article it's not so clear how accurate the usual summary is.

Just to add, the Theosophists connected this with the Third Eye of Hinduism, creating an awful mess. Western thought abandoned this idea otherwise, pretty quickly in fact. (Lovecraft wrote a story where waves stimulated the hypophysis creating extra-dimensional awareness, based off this association.)

If you accept that notion, then all these New Agey notions gets the air of the ancient, profound and exotic, while really the fever dreams of 19th century syncretists and charlatans.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

The Turing test is that a black box with behavior similar to a human has human intelligence. I think there is a difference between intelligence and consciousness. Consciousness is a belief about self. We must go inside the black box to know consciousness. We might be able to attach a debugger to a software process to examine the data structures and thereby confirm if that software believes itself to have consciousness. Or if we understand the program sufficiently we might be able to guess from external behavior that it must be utilizing an abstraction of consciousness inside the black box.


There isn't a problem as long as we are incapable of distinguishing the people who have souls from the people who do not have souls. A way to distinguish in the future might be if a computer can simulate a person's decisions and prove that person has no freewill. Such a person could then justifiably be treated as an inferior being.

Another interesting thought. Christians often wonder if they have truly been "born again" or wonder this about fellow Christians. If a computer can determine if freewill exists, then we would have a way to know which Christians have truly been "born again" LOL

I don't see how you can guess use of an 'abstraction of consciousness'. The only reason we assume it amongst ourselves and perhaps in higher animals like Great Apes or Elephants or Cetaceans, is because we base it off the example of ourselves. From their actions we can just as easily assume instinct as an idea of self. With a computer, programming to mimic Self or autonomy seems far more plausible than Consciousness itself. It is simply an idea that cannot be verified.
I mention those animals as there is an ongoing attempt to legally confer personhood on them, by certain animal rights activists. The problem is the inability to prove Consciousness in them, in spite of many behaviours such as looking in mirrors, seeking revenge or mourning, or using signs and rudimentary sign languages, that strongly suggest it. If we ascribe consciousness to a computer, it would remain an external subjective call we made, for I don't see how we could show it based on functionality, both internal or external, as we have no referrent to make it off of.

 

[cloudyday2]

That would be functionally no different from assuming everyone has a soul. However, we know that the soul only becomes operative in your scheme on faith - for was that not how it solved the problem of the condemnation of others? So a 'dormant soul' is a non-existent one, for it would be equivalent of the seeds strangled by weeds or fallen on the path.
You shall know them by their fruits - so people acting in immoral ways, would be soulless in a sense, if adopting this system.

I would say the seeds are all that matters. As long as the seed might potentially sprout, then we must protect the human host where it resides. No seed implies Christians can treat that human similar to how we treat other animals. If Christians treat animals nicely then they should treat the drone-human nicely too.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

I would say the seeds are all that matters. As long as the seed might potentially sprout, then we must protect the human host where it resides. No seed implies Christians can treat that human similar to how we treat other animals. If Christians treat animals nicely then they should treat the drone-human nicely too.

This sounds more and more like the prevenient Grace of Arminianism. It seems you want to solve the problem of the Elect of Calvinism by its arch-nemesis.

Perhaps talk of souls muddies what is really being meant here, as it seems more the spread of Grace and its acceptance and rejection at play here.

 

[cloudyday2]

This sounds more and more like the prevenient Grace of Arminianism. It seems you want to solve the problem of the Elect of Calvinism by its arch-nemesis.

Perhaps talk of souls muddies what is really being meant here, as it seems more the spread of Grace and its acceptance and rejection at play here.

That's part of it. Skeptics often object to the injustice of most people in Christian cultures being "saved" and most people in non-Christian cultures being "damned". This injustice becomes even worse when Christians believe that God must first inspire a hope or faith in a person before that person has a choice of accepting Jesus.

So this is a solution. All humans are the walking dead until they become born-again Christians. Therefore God is not being unjust to save only the "elect" humans. God saves every truly living human, because by definition the only living humans are "born again".

 

[cloudyday2]

I don't see how you can guess use of an 'abstraction of consciousness'. The only reason we assume it amongst ourselves and perhaps in higher animals like Great Apes or Elephants or Cetaceans, is because we base it off the example of ourselves. From their actions we can just as easily assume instinct as an idea of self. With a computer, programming to mimic Self or autonomy seems far more plausible than Consciousness itself. It is simply an idea that cannot be verified.
I mention those animals as there is an ongoing attempt to legally confer personhood on them, by certain animal rights activists. The problem is the inability to prove Consciousness in them, in spite of many behaviours such as looking in mirrors, seeking revenge or mourning, or using signs and rudimentary sign languages, that strongly suggest it. If we ascribe consciousness to a computer, it would remain an external subjective call we made, for I don't see how we could show it based on functionality, both internal or external, as we have no referrent to make it off of.

It seems to me self awareness probably results from trying to learn the causes for your own behaviors. The actual bottom-up biological causes are not helpful in practice, so the brain imagines a "self" that has motivations. Another factor is probably communication because that requires imagination of the other person's "self".

I wonder why self awareness should be the criteria for legal rights? It seems to me that an ability to suffer should be the criteria.

 

[Hieronymus]

We don't have a soul, we ARE "living souls".

 

[cloudyday2]

We don't have a soul, we ARE "living souls".

Only if you are a born-again Christian. As an agnostic, I am simply a blob of biology.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

It seems to me self awareness probably results from trying to learn the causes for your own behaviors.

Complex feedback loops exist, with negative control, for many physiological processes - such as hormonal control of reproduction, sympathetic nervous (fight or flight) response, etc. This is perfectly capable of modulating behaviour.
Why would it be required to learn the causes of one's own behaviour, if we think from a purely developmental perspective?

I wonder why self awareness should be the criteria for legal rights? It seems to me that an ability to suffer should be the criteria.

It is because they are using writs of Habeas Corpus to oppose unlawful imprisonment. They need to argue that animals in captivity are slaves, basically. If the animal is unaware it is imprisoned, this cannot be done.
There are already anti-cruelty laws, but they want to argue legal inherent rights for animals, not just statutory ones.

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

We don't have a soul, we ARE "living souls".

Actually, we are composites of Soul, Spirit and Body traditionally. That is why Jewish and early Christian thought supported bodily resurrection at the end of days. The former two are ambigiously connected, so a dichotomous existence is usual instead of a trichotomy.

The quote that "you don't have a soul, you are a soul with a body" is a misquote often attributed to CS Lewis, but is quite alien to his thought. God loves matter it seems to me, so I see no reason we need to denigrate our material existence in this way.

 

[Silmarien]

That's part of it. Skeptics often object to the injustice of most people in Christian cultures being "saved" and most people in non-Christian cultures being "damned". This injustice becomes even worse when Christians believe that God must first inspire a hope or faith in a person before that person has a choice of accepting Jesus.

So do most skeptics ignore the fact that the Vatican's official position is Inclusivism, that most liberal Protestants are Inclusivists or fullblown Universalists, and that some of the most beloved saints in Orthodoxy were also Universalists? I get annoyed by all the focus on a pretty modern Protestant interpretation to the exclusion of all else.

 

[cloudyday2]

Why would it be required to learn the causes of one's own behaviour, if we think from a purely developmental perspective?

It's just what brains do. Brains learn patterns. That is why we all think about "cause and effect". Without a concept of self why would the brain exclude the self-body from the pattern searching that it applies to everything else? Unlike a rock rolling down a hill, human behavior is hard for a brain to understand as "cause and effect", so the brain develops a belief in an invisible "self" that wants certain things and makes choices. IDK

 

[cloudyday2]

So do most skeptics ignore the fact that the Vatican's official position is Inclusivism, that most liberal Protestants are Inclusivists or fullblown Universalists, and that some of the most beloved saints in Orthodoxy were also Universalists? I get annoyed by all the focus on a pretty modern Protestant interpretation to the exclusion of all else.

Yes. (LOL)
Actually I don't see how Christians can be universalists. We need some people who can weep and gnash their teeth in the darkness. God has graciously promised that for those with no teeth, teeth will be provided.

Seriously, I don't see how a person can look at the historical Jesus and think He would agree with Inclusivists and Universalists. "The elect" has little meaning unless there are some that are not so lucky.

 

[Silmarien]

Yes. (LOL)
Actually I don't see how Christians can be universalists. We need some people who can weep and gnash their teeth in the darkness. God has graciously promised that for those with no teeth, teeth will be provided.

Seriously, I don't see how a person can look at the historical Jesus and think He would agree with Inclusivists and Universalists. "The elect" has little meaning unless there are some that are not so lucky.

Approaching the text without indoctrination always helps! Every warning in the Synoptics seems directed at hypocritical believers rather than nonbelievers, so I see no Exclusivism there. The Gospel of John is different, but I think as much a reflection of what was going on in the early church as anything else. I've actually got a book defending Inclusivism from an Evangelical perspective that I ought to get around to reading at some point.

Universalists usually insist upon a non-eternal hell rather than no hell at all, so they don't believe in a free pass, so to speak. I don't think we're allowed to discuss that here, though.

 

[cloudyday2]

Approaching the text without indoctrination always helps! Every warning in the Synoptics seems directed at hypocritical believers rather than nonbelievers, so I see no Exclusivism there. The Gospel of John is different, but I think as much a reflection of what was going on in the early church as anything else. I've actually got a book defending Inclusivism from an Evangelical perspective that I ought to get around to reading at some point.

Universalists usually insist upon a non-eternal hell rather than no hell at all, so they don't believe in a free pass, so to speak. I don't think we're allowed to discuss that here, though.

Well the beauty of my proposal in this thread is that you can have your cake and eat it too!!! The drones can weep and gnash their teeth in hell. The born-again Christians can be the recipients of God's selective and arbitrary mercy. But all the souls are saved, because only the born-again Christians have souls. The drones suffering in hell are not truly suffering, because they are only philosophical zombies.

Theological problem solved!!!

 

[Hawkins]

One unappealing feature of Christianity is the belief that only a few will be saved ("the elect") and everybody else will be lost ("the world"). Universalism attempts to fix this problem, but there are plenty of sayings in the gospels that seem to contradict universalism.

So here is another fix - soulless drones. How do I know that you or I actually have a soul? Science seems to suggest that we are automatons and that consciousness is a delusion.

Let's take the parable of the sower. Imagine the soil is a population of billions of soulless human drones with no freewill. Spiritual seeds are scattered randomly and a few of these seeds sprout in their human host. These few humans now have a soul; they have been "born again".

All souls are saved, because every soul must be born through the Christian gospel (the seed)

Everyone is invited but not everyone is chosen. Why the drones need to be invited. Moreover, your hypothesis simply makes the "preaching of gospel" not necessary.

On the other hand, I simply think that people made the assumption that we all are the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. We however don't know the future to assume so. If in the case that a whole city is turned into zombies and vampires, it's natural that "a few" will be saved.

 

[Hieronymus]

Only if you are a born-again Christian. As an agnostic, I am simply a blob of biology.

You don't have to be a (born again) Christian to be a living soul.
A living soul is a blob of biology with the breath of life.
I assume you breathe too.

 

[Hieronymus]

That's part of it. Skeptics often object to the injustice of most people in Christian cultures being "saved" and most people in non-Christian cultures being "damned". This injustice becomes even worse when Christians believe that God must first inspire a hope or faith in a person before that person has a choice of accepting Jesus.

So this is a solution. All humans are the walking dead until they become born-again Christians. Therefore God is not being unjust to save only the "elect" humans. God saves every truly living human, because by definition the only living humans are "born again".

That's the question though, isn't it?
"the flesh must die first" for example, indicates otherwise.
It's one of the mysteries that one can be born again yet still in the flesh.