“Aside from the fact that I did not say you claimed your spirit or soul has existed forever, it would be interesting to see on what you base the assertion that your soul was created before your conception in you mother’s womb.”
Actually, you did:
“ThaT God can see the end from the beginning does not authorize one to assume everything in existence has been existing since the beginning of everything. Try again.”
This was your response to my saying my soul existed before my body, so what else could you have meant?
Again:
Jeremias (Jeremiah) 1:5
Before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother, I knew thee: and before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee, and made thee a prophet unto the nations.
How could God know me if I didn’t exist? What part of me exists independent of my body? My interpretation of this is that it is my soul. What do you think it means? And why is your interpretation more valid than mine?
As for Mary contributing DNA to Jesus’ human body:
“Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb.” Not ‘you will implant in your womb’ or ‘you will surrogate in your womb’. Conceiving implies contributing DNA, that is the normal definition. If you want to believe an exception occurred and in this case conception occurred without the DNA contribution of the mother, I believe that the burden of proof is on you for this one. I’d assume the other half came from the Holy Spirit, but there’s no reason God couldn’t have doubled Mary’s and provided a Y. I’d like to see Jesus’ DNA profile. What does spiritual DNA look like?
Love,
O2
God exists outside time and is omniscient.
THAT’S how He knows what’s going to happen before it does.
That in no way means your soul existed before you were conceived.
And besides, since when are Catholics authorized to interpret Scripture themselves? They constantly criticize non-Catholic Christians for each having their own personal interpretation of Scripture, and then turn around and freely do what they condemn in others.
You’re funny. Thanks, I needed a good chuckle.
If you lived in 'Flatland', a place with only length and width, no height (a 2D realm as a plane), a person living in a coordinate system which included length, width, and height (a 3D realm as a volume) could see from a different vantage point 'above' the plane of Flatland what is on the other side of a Flatland barrier such as a line. The 3D being would see you on one side of the line and what is on the other side of the line, simultaneously.
What part of me exists independent of my body? My interpretation of this is that it is my soul. What do you think it means? Your soul and your spirit exist in a different coordinate system than your body. And they each have a different coordinate system. Just as the coordinate system of your soul has some intersection with the coordinate system of your physical body (yet is existing in a perhaps 'greater' coordinate system kind of like the 3D is more complex than the 2D), so also the coordinate system of your spirit intersects that of your soul, but is greater than that of your soul.
What do I think it means? I think the writer of the passages regarding God knowing us before we were even fashioned in our Mother's womb is telling us God has a greater dimensional eye to all of time. God created dimension Time, so He is greater than that dimension, even than all the variable expressions of Time.
Each of us comes into existence somewhere in the volume of Time, along a plane of events less broad than the volume, and our lifetime is a linear expression of a span. For the physical body, the span has a beginning and an end point. You might express that thought as 'your physical body follows a linear time, your soul exists in a planar time, and the spirit God created as you has a volumetric temporal reality.
You asked what I thought it means, there it is in as succinct a package as I can give it. Your body had a starting moment, your soul had a starting moment. Your body is in one spacetime coordinate, your soul is in a different but intersecting spacetime coordinate system. These different systems exist, as attested by the fifth chapter of Daniel, the Passage of The Christ out of the rock-hewn tomb without rolling a way the stone, etc.
It could be that your spirit has existed from the moment God created the volume of spacetime. I don't know. But I am convinced that the soul and spirit are grounded in different coordinate systems that can intersect such that the you reading this too long posting exist in spirit (with or without God's spark of Holy Spirit Life in it), in soul (your mind, emotions, and will), and physically with a fleshy vehicle destined to return tot eh dust from whence God fashioned you.
God uses the dust (atoms) to bring His process of gestation along, making a body for you to use with the soul of you which develops during your lifetime. When your spirit He created joins your soul is a momwent I have yet to apprehend. But I'm still asking about that one ...