What is a soul?

[off-kilter]

On another board, there is a discussion about whether or not animals participate in the afterlife and what their role there is, if any. This led to discussion of souls and such, making me wonder: what do most people think a soul *is* exactly?

I am am mostly an intellectual agnostic-atheist, which means I can't say for certain, of course, but all evidence leads me to believe that there is no sentient and personal Higher Being out there nor consciousness after death. If there is an afterlife, it'd be so far removed from what I can understand at present to be almost meaningless to me.

In my view, a soul is a concept of what makes up a person, animal, or other thing. A quintessential "essence" of that being or thing, as it were. It's a bit hard to define, but a person, animal, object, or even a concept/idea can have a soul to me. That's a really clumsy way of describing it, and I might have to come back and try that again after thinking it through a bit. An email pen-pal and I were discussing this in the context of a TV show we are fans of and I wrote to her, "I don't know what to think about souls. If I have one, there's nothing I did to cause it and not much I know to do to affect it, so what does it *mean* anyway? If I do NOT have one, there's nothing I can do about that fact either, and no way for me to affect the lack, so what does THAT mean?" I have yet to answer these questions.

Perhaps some of your views can help me better define mine. What is a soul to you? Do only people have it? Can a person be "soulless"? Is a soul separate from consciousness/intellect/awareness? Any other soul questions?

I'm interested in hearing from you!

[Lori]

I'm not really sure. I don't think that a soul is some sort of actual entity, but I also don't think it's simply reducible to our personalities or consciousness. I guess on a basic level I'd say that I think our soul is what will go on after we die, and the part of us that is connected to God. But I don't think of it as a "thing" that somehow got inserted into us, but as the capacity to know and experience God and whatever it is that makes that capacity possible.

Which is all very vague, but it's something I'm very vague about.

I read Walter Wink's The Powers That Be a while back, and it very much influenced my thinking about things, and he would argue that institutions (corporations, governments, nations) have souls, in the sense that you're talking about, as being the kind of quintessential "essence." I like that idea, but I'm not sure that the kind of soul he's discussing in terms of institutions is equatable to the kinds of souls that individuals have, or if he'd try to argue that.