Thoughts Upon The Sole's Foot Of Our Sole Life That Shall Never Possess A SoulA Poem by Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de Graham A Prose Poetical Article expounding upon matters of the soul ...
Thoughts Upon The Sole's Foot Of Our Sole Life
That Shall Never Possess A Soul (Nephesh)
To Be Kept Or Lost Upon Death's Door Knocking
Written By Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de Graham Copyright © 2024 Marvin Thomas Cox DBA: Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de Graham All Rights Reserved
Within this research article of speculative conjecture -- supported by evidential proofs whenever and wherever possible -- we shall discuss thoughts upon the sole's foot of our sole life that shall never posses a soul (Hebrew: Nephesh) to be kept or lost upon death's door knocking.
To cut to the proverbial chase, as well as for the sake of brevity, here is the proof of the factual pudding: Biblically, as well as Scientifically, there is no such “thing” as a Human Soul, no such “thing,” Biblically, due to men-as-Man's manipulated, intentional misapplication, twisting of word defining word meanings, and blatant misconstruing of the Tanakh's (Old Testament's) initial passage of Scripture within the book of Genesis translated into today's standardized King James English Version's translation.
Gen 2:7 KJV -- And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
The above passage has errantly served as that very nonexistent foundation upon which the very word “soul” was to be based upon thousands of years into the future. Ironically, the future was to be shaped, patterned, and painted by inspiration of the alleged execution of a Jewish carpenter, his purported resurrection from the dead, and the writing of four anonymously penned Gospel accounts curiously written in Greek, rather than Hebrew, well over a hundred years later according to the estimation of a notable number of respected Bible Scholars.
Yet, the cold hard fact is: The word Soul is derived and translated from the Hebrew word Nephesh, which, literally, means to exist as a living, breathing, metabolizing, existing-being (i.e.: To exist): Alive and not dead. Thus, there is nothing to be found, no connotation of any kind whatsoever, within the word Soul (Nephesh) which would/does serve to indicate any existence of any essence of you or I, remaining and continuing on after our deaths, though I do wish as such were true, for who the hell would not -- and as such is the true crux of the problem: Wishful thinking, and nothing more. Allow me to paraphrase Genesis 2:7 in further explanation's clarification:
Gen 2:7 KJV -- And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being -- to exist.
Next, let us arrive at an understanding of what the Gospel's word hell is derived from and accurately means. The word hell is derived and translated from the Hebrew word Sheol, which literally translates as that destruction of the Human body that begins to take place immediately after death and consumes the Human Body to a point of leaving only bones in a tomb or grave. The word hell accurately means death and decomposition of the Human Body, both of which are synonymous with the grave. Therefore, when Jesus allegedly said:
Mat 16:26 KJV -- For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
Mat 10:28 -- And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
The above passage should be accurately paraphrased something as this:
Mat 16:26 KJV -- For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own life's being, of -- to exist? or what shall a man give in exchange for his life's being, of -- to exist?
Mat 10:28 -- And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the life's being, of -- to exist: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both life's being, of -- to exist and functionally-living body in that resultant process of decomposition which begins immediately upon death and culminates in finality of the grave.
As for Scientifically? Regardless of wishful thinking's, Blind Faith, conspiracy theory-like claims to the contrary, there does not exist a single shred of established and substantiated evidence that is to be relied upon as verifiable proof of the existence of a Human Soul to be found within any credible field of Scientific Study and Research -- to date.
Right about now of at this point, someone will proclaim, “What about that famous test conducted in 1907 which is said to have concluded the Human Soul does exists and weighs 21 grams?”
Let's get real people: Do you have any idea what 21 grams is in weight? 21 grams is just short of an ounce -- much more than any imagined misty mythical essence. But, please be patient and we shall have a good ole look see at attempting to answer such a question.
Thus, the foremost question at this moment is, can I back up and support all which I have shared above? Yes, I can. Shall we begin with examining the Biblical evidence from a couple of reliable source article excerpts, and work our way towards debunking the 21 grams of alleged Scientific evidence?
The origins of the doctrine of the “immortality of the soul”
Immortality of the soul: the common belief vs. the Bible
“... Nephesh: “the essence of life, the act of breathing, taking breath ... The problem with the English term 'soul' is that no actual equivalent of the term or the idea behind it is represented in the Hebrew language. The Hebrew system of thought does not include the combination or opposition of the 'body'and 'soul' which are really Greek and Latin in origin" (Vine’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, 1985, p. 237-238, emphasis added).
“Nephesh” (or “Psuchi” in the Greek New Testament), soul, is, according to the Word of God simply the breath, the life. Genesis 2:7 demonstrates this truth very clearly:
Genesis 2:7 “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul [“nephesh” in Hebrew]. ”
See that the Word does not speak about soul as something separate from the body. “Man became a living soul”. Everyone of us that breaths today is a living soul. When we will have breathed our last, we will no longer be living souls. We would be sleeping, having no consciousness, exactly as during deep sleep people have no consciousness.
If we adopt the definition the Word of God gives to soul and not the one of the “Greek and Latin in origin”, as Vine calls it, we will not then have a problem when we realize that the animals also have soul:
Genesis 1:20-21 "And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature [nephesh, soul] that has life [nephesh, soul] and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature [“nephesh”, soul, so also in the MKJV and others] that moves, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after hiskind: and God saw that it was good"
and Genesis 1:29-30 "And God said "Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yield seed; to you it shall be for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps upon the earth , wherein there is a living soul [nephesh in Hebrew] I have given every green herb for meat:" and it was so."
There is obviously nothing metaphysic in soul. Whatever breathes, man or animal, is a living soul ...”
Allow me to cite yet another excerpt source of evidence as proof of that which I have shared above?
The Bible Meaning of Soul
@ Learn About The Bible.net2
AN ANIMAL LIFE OR BODY SUBJECT TO DEATH - NOT IMMORTAL
Num 19:13a KJV--Whosoever toucheth the dead bodyH5315 of any man that is dead, and purifieth not himself, defileth the tabernacle of the LORD and that soulH5315 shall be cut off from Israel. To the average person, the word "soul" carries the meaning of an undying, immaterial essence that continues in conscious existence after death. This conception is accepted without thought or examination.
As soon as we start to look into the question, however, we begin to make very interesting discoveries. We find, first of all, that the BIBLE meaning of soul is ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT from this, andimmediately the question arises:
How can the commonly accepted religious conception of soul be entirely different from the soul of the Bible,seeing that the beliefs of Christendom are supposed to be based upon the Bible?
CHRISTENDOM ADMITS "IMMORTAL SOUL" UNBIBLICAL, AND BASED ON GREEK PHILOSOPHY
When we turn to works of reference by the learned expositors of the immortal soul theory, we see how this "believing a lie" works out quite naturally. Most of them make no attempt to conceal the fact that scriptural teaching and popular theology are very different regarding the meaning of "soul." They are in fact, proud that they have developed many "improvements" upon what they consider the partial and hazy conceptions voiced by the "Holy men of God who spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:21). Webster's Dictionary says:
"The Christian conception of the soul derives from the Greek, especially as modified by the mystery cults, as well as from the Bible..."
"The more exact determination of the Christian conception was reserved for the Church Fathers,especially Saint Augustine, who taught that it is simple, immaterial and spiritual, devoid of quality and spatial extension. He argued its immortality from the fact that it is the repository of Imperishable truth."
Funk & Wagnall Dictionary is even more to the point:
"Among the ancient Hebrews 'soul' was the equivalent of the principle of life as embodied in living creatures, and this meaning is continued throughout the Bible …
"It was Augustine especially who, in part on religious grounds and in part as the disciple of the later Greek Philosophy, taught the simple, immaterial and spiritual nature of the human soul view which has remained that of the scholastic philosophy and of Christian theologians down to the present time." Hasting's well-known Bible Dictionary freely admits:
"Soul is throughout a great part of the Bible simply the equivalent of 'life' embodied in living creature. In the earlier usage of the Old Testament it has no reference to the later philosophical meaning the animating principle still less to the idea of an 'immaterial nature' which will survive the body." The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia says:
"Soul has various shades of meaning in the Old Testament, which may be summarized as follows: Soul, living being, life, self, person, desire, appetite, emotion and passion.
"Nephesh or soul, can only denote the individual life with a material organization or body. "In the New Testament 'psuche' appears under more or less similar conditions as in the Old Testament."
Having presented the above Biblical evidential excerpt proofs, shall we examine the famous matter of 21 grams? How much does the soul weigh?By Stephanie Pappas @ LiveScience.com3
“... at the turn of the last century in Dorchester, a neighborhood in Boston. A reputable physician named Duncan MacDougall had a bee in his bonnet: If humans had souls, he thought, those souls must take up space. And if souls take up space, well, they must weigh something -- right? Weighing the soul
There was just one way to find out, MacDougall reasoned. "Since … the substance considered in our hypothesis is linked organically with the body until death takes place, it appears to me more reasonable to think that it must be some form of gravitative matter, and therefore capable of being detected at death by weighing a human being in the act of death," he wrote in the scientific paper he would eventually publish in 1907 about this effort.
MacDougall
teamed up with Dorchester's Consumptives' Home, a charitable hospital
for late-stage tuberculosis, which at that time was incurable.
MacDougall built a large scale, capable of holding a cot and a dying
tuberculosis patient. Tuberculosis was a convenient disease for this
experiment, MacDougall explained in his paper, because patients died
in "great exhaustion" and without any movement that would
jiggle his scale. MacDougall's first patient, a man, died on April 10, 1901, with a sudden drop in the scale of 0.75 ounce (21.2 grams). And in that moment, the legend was born. It didn't matter much that MacDougall's next patient lost 0.5 ounce (14 grams) 15 minutes after he stopped breathing, or that his third case showed an inexplicable two-step loss of 0.5 ounce and then 1 ounce (28.3 g) a minute later. MacDougall threw out Case 4, a woman dying of diabetes, because the scale wasn't well calibrated, in part due to a "good deal of interference by people opposed to our work," which raises a few questions that MacDougall did not seem eager to answer in his write-up. Case 5 lost 0.375 ounce (10.6 grams), but the scale malfunctioned afterward, raising questions about those numbers, too. Case 6 got thrown out because the patient died while MacDougall was still adjusting his scale.
MacDougall
then repeated the experiments on 15 dogs and found no loss of weight -- indicating, to his mind, that all dogs definitely do not go to
heaven. MacDougall reported his results in 1907 in the journal American Medicine and the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. He also snagged a write-up in The New York Times. Unanswerable questions
MacDougall's study had a minuscule sample size, and his results were all over the place, so even at the time, it cast the notion that he measured the soul into serious doubt. To MacDougall's credit, he admitted that more measurements were needed to confirm that the soul had weight. That hasn't happened ...”
A most pertinent point regarding the inconclusive evidence of Duncan MacDougall's 1907 experiments above, one which requires the assessment of serious doubt as to the experiments accuracy, as well as reliability? The above experiments were not conducted by a team of qualified Scientists, nor in a Laboratory under controlled conditions, which is specifically the manner in which Scientific Facts are established, proven, or proven to not be fact at all, but nothing more than an adventurous theory.
As an Ex-Christian Preacher, please allow me to ask a sincere question: Why does your church Pastor allow you to believe teachings that are Biblically untrue, teachings which he knows are untrue, had to have learned in seminary? Because, should your Pastor begin teaching the nonexistence of the Human Soul, then very soon it shall dawn upon you that there is also no such thing as any Afterlife, Eternal Life, nor Heaven and Hell.
Point of fact in closing: Prior to the Babylonian Captivity, the Jewish people held to no concept of an Afterlife or Eternal Life for the individual. It was only after living among the Babylonian Polytheistic peoples that such concepts began to take hold, and assimilated into the Jewish culture and mindset, as per this final bit of evidence in excerpt, which I shall share in kindly bidding my readers adieu:
The ancient Hebrews had no idea of an immortal soul living a full and vital life beyond death, nor of any resurrection or return from death. Human beings, like the beasts of the field, are made of “dust of the earth,” and at death they return to that dust (Gen. 2:7; 3:19). The Hebrew word nephesh, traditionally translated “living soul” but more properly understood as “living creature,” is the same word used for all breathing creatures and refers to nothing immortal. The same holds true for the expression translated as “the breath of life” (see Gen. 1:24; 7:21-22).It is physical, “animal life.” For all practical purposes, death was the end. As Psalm 115:17 says, the dead go down into “silence”; they do not participate, as do the living, in praising God (seen then as the most vital human activity). Psalm 146:4 is like an exact reverse replay of Genesis 2:7: “When his breath departs here turns to his earth; on that very day his thoughts [plans] perish.” Death is a one-way street; there is no return. As Job laments:
But man dies, and is laid low; man breathes his last, and where is he? As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, so man lies down and rises not again; till the heavens are no more he will not awake, or be aroused out of his sleep. (Job 14:10-12) [4]
(Written April 17th, 2024) © 2024 Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de GrahamAuthor's Note
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Added on April 17, 2024 Last Updated on April 17, 2024 Tags: Prose-Poetical-Article, Soul, Nephesh, Religion, Weight-of-a-soul, 21-grams Author
Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de GrahamSmalltown, TXAbout“Hello! Welcome to my profile page. As a Creative Writer, I pen a variety of material that ranges from piss poor attempts at Poetry, to morbidly Dark Fiction, to investigative, in depth, re.. more..Writing |
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