Man of a thousand questions
Submitted by F.O.D. on September 01 1999 at 14:19:29
In reply to Re: OK lets try something else then :) Submitted by Dirk G on September 01 1999 at 09:59:33
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Hi Dirk, don't try to find a line of reasoning in my line of questioning. I've got a thousand different questions, and they're not all necessarily related, not directly anyway. The question about sin is just a general one. I know I'm sinful, but I don't understand the relationship between my sin and Original Sin that Adam brought upon us. The best explanation I've heard refers to Adam as Representative of the Family Corporate. The whole race losing face through his indiscretion. But is that really fair? The question is also related to one's attitude towards modern biological theories of evolution - did Adam in fact exist? Because the argument of Rom 5 and elsewhere appears to hang on the existence of the one man. Or could we say that with respect to Gen 3, Adam is not the first man, but merely the representative chosen to inhabit the Garden, while the rest of mankind made do outside? My question about the soul is not related to the question of the ubiquity of sin. Rather it is a major test of the existence of the spiritual world at all. We generally understand a person to be made up of the physical - his body, and the spiritual - his soul (or for the pedants - body, soul and spirit. When I asked my question of the relationship of soul to body to some believers recently, they responded by handing me this tract on "Man: body, soul and spirit", completely missing the point of my question. That's why I'm a bit sore about that point) OK, so at some point as a foetus is biochemically formed, it receives a spirit from God. How does this happen? The background for this question is the recent developments in biotechnology - cloning, on the one hand, organ growing on the other. So the question is this: I can take a handful of cells from my body (attached to my soul), and those cells can be grown (now disattached from any soul) into a new organ, which can then be transplanted into my body, becoming again connected to my soul. Or I can take those very same cells, and under a different biotechnical treatment I can make a whole new person out of them - a clone. But that clone will be a new and different person, with his own soul. So at one point the cells are mine, associated with my soul, then at some point they lose touch with me and become associated with another soul. How does this all happen? The reason this question disturbs me is that the simplest explanation is atheistic. There is no soul, no spiritual aspect. The body is all. Or the next simplest is pantheistic: we are all God and God is all of us, the soul in every animal, plant and rock is part of the Great Soul of All. But to ascribe a distinct soul to each differentiated body seems very difficult. What have I missed? Looking forward to your writing on Rom 5 :) Fod ps you've got me on my bluff ;) What is the distinction between Original Sin and Original Guilt? What did St John Cassian do to bring the ire of St Augustine upon him? |