mrmayor:
1. Do babies/foetus have souls?

2. If they do; at what point does the soul enter the body?

3. Are babies/foetus going to hell or heaven since they were conceived in SIN and also inherited Original Sin from Adam, Eve and Serpent/Satan?

musKeeto: This is an offshoot of the 'Where do aborted babies go' thread..


Of course, all views are welcome..

musKeeto: Do we start with defining what a 'soul' is first? This no, yes, no don tire me..

musKeeto: Can you explain further..
What's the difference between a soul and spirit?

Jenwitemi: There is no fixed or officially accepted definition of a soul, bro. It is open to individual definitions. As far as i am concerned, a human being is made up of spirit, soul and body with the spirit being the highest of the 3 and the body the lowest.

logicboy:

There is no such thing as a soul. ou have never been in touch with a soul, you have never seen a soul and you can not describe a soul.

Ask 1,000 christians do describe a soul and you will get 1,000 different answer

Jenwitemi: Any organism that is alive and moves has a soul. Physical body can't function without a soul. It is the seat of the operating system that works the physical body and this operating system continues to grow throughout life.

Logic Mind:

and those in coma?

Jenwitemi: Let me put it this way, the SPIRIT uses the SOUL to operate the BODY to interact with the physical world. The spirit is the real you, the real us that was never created and never dies. The Spirit is the experiencer of the physical world and is part of the Creator (whatever the creator is) itself, just like a droplet of the ocean is part of the ocean.

The soul, on the other hand, begins to form once the physical body starts to receive external stimuli from the physical world it is interacting with right from the unicellular stage up to the day the organism dies, and so is the same for humans. The soul, thus, is created in the physical world but lives on once the the physical body expires.

The mind is also part of the soul and both continue to form and mature as one grows older experiencing life.

There is much more to be said but that is just a brief explanation from my own individual angle.

musKeeto:

The SPIRIT's the real you, that which was NEVER created and NEVER DIES.... sorry Jenwitemi, I couldn't get beyond this contradiction...

Jenwitemi: It is no contradiction, bro. The spirit is immortal and timeless because it is part of the CREATOR and that is the real YOU. Your true self is the spirit and the other two parts of yourself(soul and body) are just the temporary parts of you that you (spirit) put on to be able to exist and interact in the physical existence for a very limited time.

When that time is up, the spirit (YOU) simply shed the body and soul (death) and move to a new experience via a new body in a new physical world. That process goes on indefinitely in a never ending loop.

Jenwitemi: Let me put it this way, the SPIRIT uses the SOUL to operate the BODY to interact with the physical world. The spirit is the real you, the real us that was never created and never dies. The Spirit is the experiencer of the physical world and is part of the Creator (whatever the creator is) itself, just like a droplet of the ocean is part of the ocean.

Jenwitemi:
The soul, on the other hand, begins to form once the physical body starts to receive external stimuli from the physical world it is interacting with right from the unicellular stage up to the day the organism dies, and so is the same for humans. The soul, thus, is created in the physical world but lives on once the the physical body expires.
The mind is also part of the soul and both continue to form and mature as one grows older experiencing life.
There is much more to be said but that is just a brief explanation from my own individual angle.

Jenwitemi: The car analogy is fair but a better analogy would be a PC. The PC operator is the SPIRIT; the operating system and all the installed apps in it plus all the data files(audio, video, image, documents, etc) on the hard drive constitute the SOUL; the PC hardware itself is the BODY.

Finally, what the PC operator sees on the screen becomes the reality he/she is experiencing at that time with the help of the OS and the hardware just like the reality the spirit is experiencing via the soul and the body. We shouldn't forget the mind which is part of the soul.

Jenwitemi: The car analogy is fair but a better analogy would be a PC. The PC operator is the SPIRIT; the operating system and all the installed apps in it plus all the data files(audio, video, image, documents, etc) on the hard drive constitute the SOUL; the PC hardware itself is the BODY.

Finally, what the PC operator sees on the screen becomes the reality he/she is experiencing at that time with the help of the OS and the hardware just like the reality the spirit is experiencing via the soul and the body. We shouldn't forget the mind which is part of the soul.

Jenwitemi:
The soul, on the other hand, begins to form once the physical body starts to receive external stimuli from the physical world

musKeeto: The issue with this analogy of course, would be that what OS, files, data, etc end up on the system are input by the user, not the body. So this external stimuli from the physical world, would I be right in saying that the 'physical world' here would be the PC operator(spirit)?

musKeeto: Then in this case, should the topic be At what point does a spirit inhabit a body? Because if the SPirit determines the Soul, then a foetus cannot be said to have a soul....
OR AM I JUST CONFUSED?

emöfine2: Interesting subject and introductory post originally composed by mrmayor.

I’m curious; do those who adhere to the belief of reincarnation and a soul thus believe that there’s a limited number of souls?

Jenwitemi: First of all, we would need to understand here that the the biological computer(spirit/soul/body), which is us, operates not in 1 on 1 correlation with the normal PC. So a 1 on 1 comparison will only lead to confusion. While there are a lot of similarities between the biological computer and a normal PC, there are differences too in their functionalities and modes of operation.

Now, a normal PC would only be a heap of hardware without the OS to operate it, so the OS has to be installed by a technician/programmer or a user, as the case may be, to be fully functional. That is the case of a PC. But in case of a biological computer like us, we start getting our OS from the external stimuli coming from the outside world that is already there. That process is self-automated making the body computer much more advanced than the normal PC.

A fetus, even at the unicellular stage, is already receiving external stimuli from the surrounding world of the mother's womb which, as a result, starts forming it's soul. The more informations the fetus receives from the mother's womb as it continues to grow, the more it's soul forms and develops, meaning that the external stimuli is the programmer here.

This goes on until the fetus turns into a fully grown human baby in the womb before it is finally born into the world where it's developing soul begins to receive a whole different set of stimuli or, in PC speak, a new set of programming from the world the baby is born in. And that programming goes on all the way to the grave.

It is okay to be confused because you are only trying to understand the issue at hand. I was once as confused as you are now. But once i was able to put my own schema together on it, the confusion disappeared. Remember that this is MY OWN SCHEMA. You will have to form yours from your own understanding of how these things work.

Back to the issue, then. The spirit enters the body in the very instance it is conceived as a unicellular fetus or organism. The memory of what the spirit experienced at that stage is forever stored in the soul, even if one cannot make a recall of those experiences in the later stages of life, the informations are still there.

The spirit does not determine the soul, it only uses it. The external stimuli from the outside world determine the formation of the soul and mind and that is why religions employ the indoctrinations of the very young because their souls/minds are still very malleable at that early stage.

musKeeto: I'm a software developer

judebeyou: As for me, soul is what the human uses to interact with world outside of him. While spirit on the other hand, is the part that humans use to interact with things which are not seen. Example, we have emotions, fear, anxiety etc. when all these things are taking place from the inside, it is know as the spirit realm, while the soul is the output. Put it this way: the spirit is the hard drive and soul is the part that displays all the information thar are on the drive and this happens with the help of the body. The body is the human identity in the material realm, this doesn't mean they are different, it's simply the human configuration, without these three, then we donot have a human being.

Jenwitemi: Of course babies and fetuses have souls. A unicellular organism has a soul talk less of a fetus.

Jenwitemi: First of all, we would need to understand here that the the biological computer(spirit/soul/body), which is us, operates not in 1 on 1 correlation with the normal PC. So a 1 on 1 comparison will only lead to confusion. While there are a lot of similarities between the biological computer and a normal PC, there are differences too in their functionalities and modes of operation.

Now, a normal PC would only be a heap of hardware without the OS to operate it, so the OS has to be installed by a technician/programmer or a user, as the case may be, to be fully functional. That is the case of a PC. But in case of a biological computer like us, we start getting our OS from the external stimuli coming from the outside world that is already there. That process is self-automated making the body computer much more advanced than the normal PC.

A fetus, even at the unicellular stage, is already receiving external stimuli from the surrounding world of the mother's womb which, as a result, starts forming it's soul. The more informations the fetus receives from the mother's womb as it continues to grow, the more it's soul forms and develops, meaning that the external stimuli is the programmer here.

This goes on until the fetus turns into a fully grown human baby in the womb before it is finally born into the world where it's developing soul begins to receive a whole different set of stimuli or, in PC speak, a new set of programming from the world the baby is born in. And that programming goes on all the way to the grave.

It is okay to be confused because you are only trying to understand the issue at hand. I was once as confused as you are now. But once i was able to put my own schema together on it, the confusion disappeared. Remember that this is MY OWN SCHEMA. You will have to form yours from your own understanding of how these things work.

Back to the issue, then. The spirit enters the body in the very instance it is conceived as a unicellular fetus or organism. The memory of what the spirit experienced at that stage is forever stored in the soul, even if one cannot make a recall of those experiences in the later stages of life, the informations are still there.

The spirit does not determine the soul, it only uses it. The external stimuli from the outside world determine the formation of the soul and mind and that is why religions employ the indoctrinations of the very young because their souls/minds are still very malleable at that early stage.