Joe Fec 2003 -joefec.blogspot.com

So lets kick around this idea of the Ghost in the Next Room.
The Soul then exists in heaven. It is given a body. The soul-mind/body connection is maintained. The creation was frustrated, and instead of perfect vessels we are imperfect.
The animal sins, the animal rejects God, the soul goes to hell. What is bound on Earth is bound in Heaven. Accepting Christ, you accept your own true self as you would listen to its advice and yearnings.

The soul then is connected to the animal in someway, and both are one. The animal can change, it can loose its mind, it can have its control structure frustrated. The sprit is still bound, now
through a less perfect tool. Communication is inhibited. Perhaps the wrong gene sequence is fired, and the communication is now with dangerously mentally ill person.

What of Hitler ? Say he was genetically ill. or Jeffery Dahmer. If evil is a curable genetic condition then no one goes to hell, which many thinkers have already found preferable, since Origen onward. We simply need to dispense with any construct that is clearly invalidated by science, e.g. Young Earth Creationism. But I suspect much of human isn't fully determinstic, at least not to the level of preventing a Hitler.The soul makes the decisions, the soul has control, and clearly environment influences. Had Hitler been a successful artist, or born in the US or France, a different outcome for sure. Perhaps not for Dahmer, who I see as even more sick than Hitler, but with far less power. Perhaps there is a difference between volitional evil and simply psychotic behavior, as our court system supports. Our whole justtic system hinges on the idea of free will really.

But as such we are still mostly in the dark about the nature of the mind. Its is clear that Homosexuality is not a freely chosen behavior. I think the issue is settled and conservatives need to get the memo and drop it. As Conservative churches, same thing. Theology must stay flexible to adapt to the convergence of these sciences in the next decade or so. It is clear that the older churches are going to struggle with this, but in the end only those who accept some genetic determinism are going to survive and thrive. Sure there are probably environmental influences on homosexuality, but according to Empty Slate, 90% of the time you can predict who is going to be gay per their genes. So Tabula Rasa, has been totally discredited. The other end, Determinism, is being explored by me now, but the trend is that there are genetic flags that increase a probablity of X happening. This does not violate free will. As the human decays,or he sins and falls away, I submit that there is no decay at the soul level. Our soul is a collector of that which what we do right...the soul sees and learns via the animal, but after conversion is not bound by him. The exact nature of this communication is unknown, and to affect change on the human's decision, there is going to have to be some sort of physical -- spiritual interaction. That nature of which cannot be discovered, but think of this -- If a human via science can predict behavior based on genes and environment, cannot our spritual conterparts do better ?

So there it is, I think the Ghost Next Door is a new piece of my theology. The Soul isn't in your body. The animal self conflicts with the spritual, and in the end the spritual has gathered what is best on earth. Experience of The Believer is now added to Security of the Believer. This belief brings with it pre-existence..
What does it do to the abortion debate ? A little. Now we are not stuck trying to guess when God puts the soul in -- the moment of conception isn't necessarily when God is bound to put human existence on earth. However, I still remain anti-abortiion. Abortion takes a human life. That is without doubt. It robs us of the life that God WAS going to use. Imagine now the Soul in the Room having essentially the connection severd to earth. How sad that creature must be, the child's soul, who never got to come down here and enjoy a childhood and the experience of human life. Since I believe God limits his knowledge, I woudl say that the soul is surprised and saddened when its proxy is destroyed here on earth.

But God is wise, and I say that those souls that were disallowed are given another chance to make the jump. I wonder if God sends his mightest souls here, for it is a great test, a crushihng experience sometimes.

Ghost in the Next Room (GNR) has implications to AI and the souls of animals. Essentially, we don't know. I would say a soul would be given the chance to come here as any creature it wanted to. Perhaps we create a machine of significant complexity I don't see why a soul would necessarily reject it. I would imagine that the ability of designers to impmenet free will would be a prerequisite, since choice is central to a sentient beings experience. However, beyond humans every thying is conjecture neither experience or the bible will clarify thie issue.

You know sometimes I think people would prefer Christianity if we just framed everything in alien terms. " We were create by aliens for aliens enjoyment " is more acceptable than "We were created by God for God's enjoyment."

Got some thoughts about the book Empty Slate by Steve Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist from Havard. Basically what we have is here a man who is out to dispel three socio-political constructs: The Ghost in the machine, Tabula Rasa, and the Noble Savage. I am only uncomforatble with the first.

Here is the problem : If a man can be changed by the scalpal, if his very 'soul' can be altered....what does that say about his eternal soul. The point Pinker makes is that there essentially is no soul, that indeed there isn't really an indiviual. We are simply kidding ourselves -- we are a mass of conflicting urges and chemicals, built on an impressive computational machinework that determines a great percentage of what kind of person we'll be. How can a man be held responsible for sin if he is determined by chemicals to do it. How can we yell at gays, murderers, mean people, if its all in the DNA? No mistake about it -- Determinism is making a comeback, bigtime. Flipping the issue to the positive, now we can make better humans with genetic engineering. Are we interfering with God's work ? As I am a christian humanist, and I tire of religion slowing down science, I say we can and should do gene engineering. We have to move the ball foward. Murder and sin entered life through evil and it is our purpose as humans to rid ourselves of evil in any way we can. How do we know that God didn't set us up to do that very thing.
So where is our Soul ?
Many of the theologians, back to Origen, say that what is here on earth is wholly irrelavant, and that our eternal being is a replacment and a vast improvement over our current bodies. Plato thought that the spirit would come back as a perfect sphere, a shape that Plato thought to be ideal. Origen, 2 millenia ago, address this as well, saying that that which was animal is destroyed. We are then no better than the beasts, and whatever is here on earth is some sort of projection of what lies in heaven. The Ghost isn't even in the room. He's dialed in via a T3 connection. My soul, my free will, lies in heaven and controls the machine, but the connection is not guaranteed. Cut our Corpus callosum , the part of the brain that connects the two halves, and sure we'll exhibit strangness. Alzheimers, etc also destroy the mind. Madness is not new. But the mind cannot affect the soul. The connection to my ethereal self is easily frustrated, but this brutality isn't affecting my ethernal soul.

This attack on the Ghost in the Machine disturbed me. I suppose I had thought that in the mystery of the mind, in the quantum mess that is our brain, there we were. God of the Gaps, in a way. The physicist Roger Penrose suggested that the brain is a quantum machine, and there is cultural teachings that reinforce the idea of the soul physically in my body. Indeed all the video games you play, when a charcter dies you see his spirit rise up in a beam of light, only to be resurrected in some structure. But more than that it feels like the soul is in charge, and here I oppose Pinker. There is individuals, and we are not part of some internal chaos of the mind, hidden to ourselves by ourselves. There is a point where recursion is silly.

Ghost in the Next Room opens some interesting ideas of what we are going to be like after death. Since that which is immortal is timeless we will also be timeless. Now think again about the idea of the Ghost. When is our spriit done ? Are there portioins in your life where you were better than your current condition ? Of course. As a matter of fact I'd say few of us are at our best form at the end of our life. Life is hard, making us bitter, poverty, death, sickness. However, the Ghost then, even still getting experience from our life, does not change for the worst. That would be a polution of the perfect, and thus a contradiction. Continin -- the soul, timeless, can retain the positive traits from our entire life whilst picking up none of the negative that our animal bodies will learn. This fits very nicely into the Security of Believe doctrine....indeed I could doub this Security of the Positive Experience.

What follows is something of a surprise then. In heaven I anticipate that we will see our souls as an amalgam of all our ages. Our souls will be the the collection of the best of us through time including our childhood, since many of us think, rightly so, that the most optimistc and positive and happy we've been is during our earliest years. Certainly our faith is the most pure, from the tender ages of 3 to 5 up to early 20s.

So in part, what is the best of us through our childhood would be retained. The innocence even ? Then I I look into my beautiful kids eyes I miss their every year, but at the same time I'm excited to see them grow. The typical parents dillema. Could a portion of the joy of the eternal sould be that I can visit my children again at any age ! Or simply what was best of them. See into their eyes as they are now. Now, I may not want to live forever with the actual baby....there is so much for them to learn and they're selfish and self-centered. But the idea that the sou will be the repository of what makes them so delightful, their very essence, brings great joy to me. Perhaps this all sounds pathetic, a parent wishing his kids not to grow, praying for time to stand still. Yet, it is completely consistent with what timeless beings would experience, and the concept of Eternal Improvement of the Soul gives us.

If that idea took you to the edge of the table, I risk now taking you off the edge and onto the floor. Consider the idea of time travel. There is no real reason to think that we will not be able to travel in time as beings of energy of some sort. If so, we will be able to actually visit our as today, and tomorow and yesterday. Then no memory is lost. This of course assumes we are going to be out of time, or at least capable of moving around in time, something partical physics has alluded to. If we are to believe the words of Paul, that the pain here is not comparable to the glory of Heaven, then I say none of this is idle fantasy. Imagining the glory of heaven is a useful exercise to help us through the darkness of this planet. All it requires is a little imagination, and a dedication to consistency.
Heaven then becomes a filtered reality, distilled and concentrated Goodness.

Its tough. As i approach 40 and I see my life zipping by at ever the quicker pace, I am not happy with mortality. I am very comfortable with humanistic christianity. Move the ball forward , help each other, and Believe in the Hope of Mankind, which is the salvation of Man through Jesus.