Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God.
Poor Ken has too much time on his hands.
"DO YOU HAVE A "SOUL"?"Yes.
Fortunately, that question isn't on the final exam.
“Do you have soul?”
Some, but I prefer country/western.
Does it matter? Yes, if we believe Jesus’ words at John 4:24 about worshiping God “in truth”.
I guess I think this is charmingly naive. and I guess I think that because I followed this same line (or, at least, a very similar line) of argument myself in 1971.
As a side comment, I'd offer: Going to lexicographers for theology and philosophy is a risky business.
Here's a distinction: The Platonic idea of the immortality of the soul is that the soul is uncreated, that it is the life principle, and is intrinsically and by nature immortal. In that view the soul of every living thing is immortal by definition.
When this writer gives a list of people with the idea of an immortal soul and puts Aristotle right next to Plato, he makes himself incredible. It's as if he said in a treatise on economy and the idea of private property that "the idea of private property held by such men as Adam Smith, Karl Marx ... ." Aristotle's idea of soul is very different indeed from that of Plato, so different that to lump the two of them together is simply silly.
That the Catholic Church does not have the Platonic idea of soul is easily seen from the Catechism, paragraph 368 where it is stated that the soul of a human is created by God.
Fortier does not seem to appreciate the difference between a Platonic "soul" which is uncreated and intrinsically immortal, so that even if there were a personal deity in the Platonic view that being could not kill the soul, and a soul which is immortal because God made and makes it so.
Further, Fortier makes the mistake of thinking that the Bible is a tome of Systematic Theology, and that its diction is as rigorous as the diction of a theologian. Theology, the discourse about God, is informed by Scripture. Theology addresses, or tries to, what Scripture is as well as what it says. But the Holy Scriptures are not theology.
I don't know who Mr. Fortier is or what he does. I don't have any personal brief one way or the other as far as he's concerned, even though he seems to be a lapsed Catholic.
Having said that, I find it amusing when what purports to be a treatise on the words nephesh and psyche in the Bible includes a lengthy section on how wicked, deceiving, and deceived the people are who disagree with him. And it grates on me when somebody uses words like "thusly" and sentences like, "Is not the Word of God sufficient for us to believe it?" when "Is the Word of God insufficient ...?" would be better, and foregoing rhetorical questions altogether would be better still.
The lack of discipline and reflection suggested by the jumbling together of Plato and Aristotle, the excess of zeal indicated by the time spent examining the defects of those with the effrontery to disagree with Mr. Fortier, and the recourse to frenetic and affected rhetoric all lead me to think that this is, well, not top-drawer stuff.
However, I think it could be edited into a very useful review of the words nephesh and psyche in the Bible.
Yeah. I know. Who asked me?
Big whoop.
None of my stuff is there, I don't get my truck inspected there.
My bank isn't there, my ISP isn't based there.
I need Israel for what, exactly?
My mate Petersen once brought a pair of shoes with artificial intelligence. Smart Shoes, they were called. It was a neat idea. No matter how blind drunk you were, they would always get you home. Then he got ratted one night in Oslo, and woke up the next morning in Burma. See, the shoes got bored just going from his local to the flat. They wanted to see the world, man, y’know? He had a helluva job getting rid of them. No matter who he sold them to, they’d show up again the next day! He tried to shut them out, but they just kicked the door down, y’know?
Last thing he heard, they’d sort of, erm, robbed a car and drove it into a canal. They couldn’t steer, y’see.
Petersen was really, really blown away by it. He went to see a priest. The priest told him, he said, it was alright, and all that, and the shoes were happy, and they’d gone to heaven. Y’see, it turns out shoes have soles.
I looked up Ken Fortier’s website, as you (or someone else?) on another thread recommended him as an ex-Roman Catholic Christian thinker. I have to say though, I was singularly unimpressed.
I read several of his essays...and they all had lots of assertions (like the claim that Hell is merely a pagan/medeival construct), with however, zero proof, either from scripture, or scholarship. When someone says, “why the great majority of scholars today say....” without citing who, or, on what basis (even generally) they supposedly say that, my skeptical ears go up...
He had lots of his own high sounding opinions about the supposed extra-scriptural idea of Hell—without ever dealing with the evidence (from scripture, and, mostly, from the very lips of Christ) defenders of orthodox conservative theology (both Roman AND classical Protestant) rely on for their ancient understandings.
Yes, he rejected Rome, only unfortunately to embrace his own brand of liberal Protestantism (or is he an Adventist?)....
From what I read, to my mind, he went from the frying pan to the fire.
"You know what you are. What you're made of. War is in your blood. Don't fight it. You didn't kill for your country. You killed for yourself. God's never gonna make that go away. When you're pushed, killing's as easy as breathing." John Rambo.