In this episode of DXP we spend time considering the age-old question, “If you freeze a baby and then thaw it out, where did its soul go?” Well OK, it may have been a bit more sophisticated than that (as in, in cases of frozen embryos or near-death experiences, does the absence of heart- and brain activity prove that souls don’t exist? And if so, is abortion moral?). Then turn our attention to Hillary’s defeat of Bernie for the Democratic nomination (cough***rigged!***cough) and debate just how democratic this Democratic Republic of ours really is. After our break we weigh in on the Brock Turner rape case, covering such topics as consent, sexual ethics, and involuntary castration.
Also, did we mention he should be castrated? Because he totally should be castrated. For real.
Podcast #199: Famous Lives Matter
Podcast #265: Foreign Accents, our Forties, and Faux Racism
Podcast #360: On Wells, Tables, and Bad Arguments against Christianity
Podcast #181: Jedis, Death, and Israel
Wait a second. If many Christians are mistaken about the makeup of the human person, and we are indeed physical beings with no immaterial “part” of us, why would that be necessitate biting any billets or make Christianity false? Why wouldn’t it simply mean many Christians have been wrong about whether we have a soul or we are a soul?
Maybe I should mention this is a serious question and not of the devil’s advocate sort. I do think the preconceived notions of the human person brought to the seedbed of early Christian thought by the Greek world certainly muddied the waters and caused many after them to not notice the Hebrew and Christian scriptures using different language to describe those ideas.
• “I’m a pastor. I have no useful job skills.”
• Okay, you drink first, and I totes promise to take my shot of Kool-Aid after you die. Pinkie swear.
• “If you give $50 per podcast, Jason won’t kill himself, but will resort to cutting just to feel something again…”
• For $100 per podcast, he’ll just sit in a dark room listening to Morrissey.
• I’m glad I never remember your voice mail number when I’m drunk.
• Speaking of drowning, back in HS, I had spent about 2 hours surfing (poorly), and was out further than I should have been, and felt tired. And I realized that I was so tired I wasn’t sure if I could reach the shore or not. Now, I could have stuck up my hand and tried to get the attention of the life guard, but 16 year old me spent a good 5 minutes debating whether I should drown with dignity or save my life and be embarrassed about it. In the end, I decided to try swimming to shore one last time which fortunately worked, but it was like a scene out of movie where a guy adrift at sea crawls up on the sand and collapses.
• The moral of the story… teenagers are dumb.
• Is cryogenic freezing a way to take a vacation to the afterlife?
• I’d like to book two tickets to Valhalla.
• If Batman has taught me anything, it’s that someone cryogenically frozen comes back as a supervillain with an Austrian accent.
• You can’t provide evidence of a soul, let alone evidence of how it works with the body.
• I say 12 angels can dance on the head of a pin.
• The cryogenically frozen head of Walt Disney sits beneath the Matterhorn.
• The election was not rigged. Look… losing sucks. It does. It sucks having a candidate you really like and feel strongly about get rejected. But the voting process was not rigged. Do you have any idea the number of people that would be involved in a conspiracy like this? And none of them talk? Do you really think the government is competent enough to pull that off?
• Anyway, go vote. You can be as cynical as you like, but vote anyway, at the very least, you might stop a loudmouth egomaniacal buffoon from having his hands on nuclear weapons and getting to name SCOTUS judges.
• And, for that matter, find out about your local and state candidates too. They are the farm team from which major national politicians will come. Support progressive and socialist local pols. Get out the vote for them. Show that your ideas can win elections. If enough people do that, then we can change the system.
• Anyway, what annoys me the most is the mentality of ‘I didn’t win, so I’m going to take my ball and go home.” Bullshit. Get out and work harder for your values. Hell, run for political office yourself. Do something other than sitting around on your ass feeling smug and self-satisfied because you refuse to vote for anyone other than your perfect candidate.
• When you vote for Hillary Clinton, you are voting your values. You’re voting to continue providing health care to those without it. You’re voting to maintain gay rights. You’re voting to restore voting rights. You’re voting for a hell of a lot of progressive things. Maybe they aren’t as progressive as you like, but you’re helping to move the country in a progressive direction.
• Okay, she’s more hawkish and more business friendly than I like, but she’s still going to move us towards a more progressive country.
• Plus, she’s totally going to put us Christians all in FEMA camp for sure this time.
• Heard an interview with Ivan Reitman where he basically said that they based the Ghostbusters theme off of Huey Lewis’ song. Lewis sued the studio and got a settlement out of it.
• Amadeus. Amadeus. Amadeus. Amadeus. Amadeus. Amadeus. Amadeus. Amadeus. Oh oh oh Amadeus….
• I’m sure there wouldn’t be any rape if we just banned contraceptives.
• If you rape someone, you are a rapist. Doesn’t matter if you used to be a volunteer at a homeless shelter or a pastor. And you deserve years in jail.
• Here’s a very simple rule to follow: Do not stick your dick or fingers into a woman unless she asks you to do so. Even if she asks you to do so, if you get back to her place and she appears unable to ask you to do so again, don’t. Put her bed, stick a bucket by her bed, sleep on the couch and buy her an Egg McMuffin and coffee in the morning to help her hangover. Or call an Uber.
• If a girl already invited you over and you hold her hair when she pukes and buy her an Egg McMuffin and coffee to help cure her hangover, chances are good she’s inviting you back.
• No, I don’t think you’re weird. I think normal people want to be wanted. They want to be found attractive. They want to be desired.
I get why the freezing embryo argument is compelling. It does make a certain sort of sense that if death is the point where the soul leaves the body then being able to be in long term physical limbo raises some questions about the soul. But I think they’re more about this whole dualistic picture than about abortion. For one thing, why is the soul associated with brain activity? It seems like if the soul is truly independent of the body. then your body could be frozen and your soul would just hang around, aware of what’s going on but unable to leave the body. Then 200 years later when your body is revived it’s the same age while your soul is 200 years older. And you’re some kind of weird old/young hybrid like a vampire. So the reply might be that consciousness is dependent on brain activity. That I can agree with. But then isn’t the disembodied soul conscious for all the singing and praising or burning and torturing that’s supposed to occur in the afterlife? Either way, it seems odd to me that we act as if the soul exists independently from the body but can’t indwell without brain activity.
Jason, why equate the soul with the mind? Couldn’t these be entirely different things? I think we could grant the existence of a mind (however we define it) without being committed to the idea of an immortal soul.
Also, I’m not sure you get an immortal soul out of the Bible that looks or acts the way we generally think of it. I think that’s another thing that was imported from the Greeks.
All this soul talk reminded me of the time in high school when a girl told me her beloved cat had just died. She was really torn up about it. Being the good evangelical Christian teenager I was, I went to my pastor and asked him if animals had souls. In a round about way with some justifications I can’t remember now, he said “no”. I promptly went back to the grieving girl and told her not to be so upset because her cat didn’t have a soul anyway. I’ll never forget the way she looked at me.