Bodies

I presume I have a different view of our bodies than most of you reading this:  I do not believe that you and I have, encased in our mortal, physical bodies, in some mystical or metaphysical way, an immortal soul that holds the essence of who we are.  Rather, I believe (and I do mean "believe" here:  there's not enough evidence for me to think one way or the other) that you and I are just bodies, that all that we do and are as thinking, feeling, individual beings can be chalked up to physical processes - electro-chemical reactions, gene expression, firing neurons, autonomic systems, etc.  In crass terms:  we're all meat with no animating, eternal spark that usually goes by the name of "soul."

As you can imagine, my belief makes me ambivalent about my body.  On the one hand, I'm fascinated by the complexity and intricacy of our bodies, that my thinking, creative, imaginative self is attributed to physical processes.  On the other hand, bodies are fragile vessels to hold such wondrous individuality.  Who I am as an individual is as much a result of my genetic complexity as it is of my upbringing and life experiences, of my inheritance from my parents as it is of my parents' raising me.  But at any time during my upbringing and subsequent life, any of a myriad of possible and all-too-common mishaps could have quite easily ended my individual self for all time and space.

Scripture's testimony regarding bodies and souls is actually closer to my belief in a mortal body than it is to a more common belief in a body/soul duality.  Whereas many people hold a belief in a "living soul" (the KJV's translation of the Hebrew nefesh chaiyah), they actually believe in an indestructible, immortal spirit that animates or gives the spark of life to a mortal body.  The Hebrew Bible understands "living soul" to be a body made from the dust of the ground that in animated by God's breath, the breath or "wind" of life.  On a person's death, God's breath leaves a person, leaving the dust behind.  The Christian New Testament for the most part continues this conviction:  only rarely does the New Testament speak of persons having an immortal soul (I challenge you to find such a reference), emphasizing, instead, the resurrection of the body (Paul's contention that "we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed . . . the corruptible will become incorruptible).  Even in the New Testament, when Jesus dies on the cross Mark says he "gave up his spirit" or, more literally, "he expelled his wind" (the Greek pneuma translates the Hebrew ruach, both meaning "wind" or "breath" or "spirit"), pointing to a conservative, Jewish conviction that bodies are animated by God's breath.  So if you take away God's breath (at least in a crass sense:  I do hold a spiritual conviction regarding our animating spark, though that's in no way an immortal, individual essence) Scripture and I share body theory.

This belief certainly contributes to my depression, at least indirectly.  Whereas Scripture's depiction of our delightful dependence on God's very breath for our very selves is in no way a depressive depiction, my convictions regarding the fragility of our mortal lives leads to some degree of stress thrumming through my daily life.  For instance, the other day a mosquito bit me as I was sitting on our back porch, and my mind went immediately to thoughts of the West Nile virus and speculating whether that mosquito (which I wiped out of this life) had spent any time sucking on birds.  The thought that I, too, in all my individuality can be wiped out by something as minuscule as a virus from something so innocuous as a mosquito bite lends an undue amount of stress to my life, as do so many similar and common maladies.  And as I've written before, stress aggravates depression, so I concede that my belief in a "mortal soul" (another translation of the Hebrew nefesh chaiyah) - because of its low-level but pervasive stress - probably fuels my depression.

However, I do wonder whether our world would be better off if more people shared my belief.  Take Middle Eastern, irate mobs for instance.  A mob of bodies sharing one all-consuming anger is a spiritual matter, at the very least because the conglomeration of bodies share one spirit of vengeance and retribution.  Further, a mob by its very numbers - or a protest or march or public movement of a large number of individuals - seeks not just to enact justice (so they think), but to instill in those observing the mob's behavior the same rage, the same "spirit."  Too often, such violent mob action leads to death, whether by the mobs hands or by the hands of the authorities confronting the mob.  I can't help but wonder whether the mob that killed our ambassador to Libya would have spared his life if the common belief among those mobsters had been more like mine than an Islamic body/soul duality.  I wonder whether any murderer would have refrained from murdering if he or she believed that murder was not a matter of liberating a soul from its body but of eradicating totally an individual unique among all the many billions of our kind that have ever lived.  Crassly, belief in an immortal soul means you can't really kill a person, just by killing them send them on to the next life, and that's not really death at all.

I will never kill a person, nor will I ever support killing a person in the name of justice (war is a different matter, but I think almost all wars are evil and not necessary evils either) because killing means, to me, obliterating a person's entire existence.  I hate killing anything, even the pesky fleas that are leftover from our pet-sitting this past summer:  in their own way, fleas are just as remarkably and wondrously made as am I, though I doubt they're individuals.  I'm conflicted about eating meat, especially pork since pigs seem so intelligent and intelligence is primary prerequisite for individuality (if pork didn't taste so good I'd be less conflicted).  In fact, because I do not believe that we humans alone of all creation have immortal souls I find a remarkable unity among all life:  all of us, from the simplest plant to the most complex animal (which may not be us) share a remarkable, so-far-irreproducible marvelous thing called "life," a process still mysterious and, hence, mystical (or at least mystifying).  To kill end even one life is to diminish forever life's marvelous complexity and unity.  Thank you for reading.