when does the soul begin?

There seems to be a lot of religious discussion tonight... the typical weekend blahs, I guess. I just read a thread in which people were discussing soul. My question is: when do you think the soul begins? Conception? Birth? When the infant starts developing a personality?

I guess I just don't really know. I believe that there is a soul. I don't believe that it's there suddenly... I guess I believe it develops somewhere between conception and age 18. ;)

I had to abort a baby. Some people will say that you never have to: I know. But it was not the time of mine or my family's life to bring a child into it. Heart-wrenching decision, and I worried about that baby's soul. I still do.

Fred Wesley blows his horn, and the Godfather of Soul slithers up to the mike. That's when the soul starts rollin'.

It took me by surprise.

do not beat your self up over it. It takes a lot of soul searching and agony to come to the decision to abort, so you must have had a good reason . Please do not do this to yourself

Sorry Shakeydave - had to borrow your sound for that one.

Nice shot, JBP!

on edit: d'oh! - I may have misinterpreted who you were talking to based on the placement of your post. I thought you were joking with roughsatori. If you were talking to KCDem instead, my apologies for the inappropriate *snarf*. Truth be told, I didn't read KCDem's message until after I'd responsed to the title alone in my first post. I probably would not have jacked this thread if I had.

:evilgrin:

Just kidding, I'm basically fine with the decision by now. It just really was a rough one. I've given $ to NARAL and Planned Parenthood. But having to face that decision yourself really sucks.

I tried to respond to JBP earlier, but my browser fucked out on me.

:mad:

My pro-choice Catholic Mother and my anti-choice Southern Baptist sister both believe the soul enters at conception. I asked my sister what happens to the soul of the aborted mass of cells in an early abortion. She said it goes to heaven. I asked my sister if she really thought all these souls were going straight to heaven, and that abortion must be a good thing then if by her reckoning most of us are going to hell, and all the aborted souls go to heaven. I told her that made me wish Mom had aborted me so I would be in heaven instead of this conversation. She told me I was going to hell.

Good thing to say to those anti-choice freaks.

I was happy that none of them were at the clinic that day. Far better to terminate than bring an unwanted child into an already overpopulated world.

A student of religion history once told me that the reason the Catholic church made suicide a mortal sin was because they were having a rash of people purifying themselves and then committing suicide so that they would go to heaven before they had a chance to sin again.

The next step people took was to kill infants. Since they had not sinned, then their souls would go to heaven and it was considered to be a great service to dispatch the child. The church responded by declaring it was one's duty to have as many children as possible, and that God commanded that they live on in his service.

Of course, it is senseless to try to apply logic to religion. People who want to believe, will believe anything, and facts, science, or rational thinking are irrelevant to their world view.

for the "absolution." I felt kinda dirty for jacking where I really shouldn't have. :spank:

Just last week, my tendency to respond to subjects without reading the posts resulted in my inadvertently offering to spank a guy. :o Maybe shortbus will learn his lesson one of these days.

Nah, shortbus, we love you for who you are. Altho, I miss the old name!

with the big f*cking foot in his mouth!

You're a sweetie. And don't you worry about WhataBildeberger. I let him out of the basement for fresh air at least once a week.

This is pretty serious for the lounge - but I had been thinking about this recently.

Conception doesn't make sense to me - 2 cells... or at implantation - 10 or so cells. So anyway - I don't think anyone knows.

...in the rhythm and blues and gospel music of the 1940s and 1950s. Hope that answers your question! ;-)

the physical individual just created around it recently.

that I know is from Psalm 139: "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb."

Doesn't say a whole lot. Those that believe in a soul being created at conception have absolutely nothing in the Bible to support it. In fact, I don't think Judaism when the Psalms were written even thought of the soul as a separate thing. That was more a Greek idea that crept in later.

Life begins gradually. It's a difficult enough decision to have an abortion as it is.

I always thought that it wouldn't be a difficult decision... until it was. Thanks for your words.

That's as likely a possibility as any offered today. Science has made a dog's breakfast of the whole issue by offering arguments about any moment during gestation.

At conception? Why would the first phase of a developmental process be expected to contain all the properties of the end of the process? What sort of rule applies here? I think this is the weakest assumption.

Does ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny? If so, does the fishlike stage have a fishlike soul or a human soul or no soul at all? Perhaps when we look at photographs by those Swedish guys, we can determine the phase that is most human appearing and decide that that is when the soul arives but that seems awfully superficial and subjective to me.

Viability is probably the most significant issue. If we say the soul arrives when the foetus is viable, that makes for a very tricky determination considering so many external factors may affect viability.

I don't think we can know. Neither scientifically nor theologically. This should not be confused with the abortion issue, which I don't think is really about when the soul arrives.

Or if it does, it's not in the same way that a body or a mind suffers.
My own crazy set of beliefs tell me that the soul simply is. We sometimes lose track of our souls in the process of trying to deal with life's worldly elements; but I believe our souls are always there, from birth through life to death and rebirth.

I know how you feel, KCDem. I've been there myself, and often wonder about the life that could have been. But you and I made our choices; and they were for the best.