Does the soul live after the body dies?
 

As the title suggests: does the soul live if the body dies?

The soul does not live, it is;always.

There is no such thing as death, there are only transitions. What ever has a beginning has an ending; a beginning can not happen without something ending, and with each ending comes a beginning.

That which you call your “soul” already exists in what we call “the afterlife.” Life is not what I do rather life is what I am. Get to know yourself on a deep level and you will come to experience these things beyond words and thoughts.

From my "pseudo-Christian" perspective ~

In similar regard as to the so called "Holy Trinity' (Father, Son, Spirit) our soul exists as a part of our "individual/personal trinity" (SOUL, self, Spirit). (In the case of the Holy Trinity, J.C. REPRESENTS the "Son" - that component that became physical).

In the individual/personal trinity, the "self" REPRESENTS the body collectively (typically we say : "This is my self"; "I'm just being my 'self'..." - we do not say; "This is my soul"; "I'm just being my soul...").

Our "physical" parameters will always exist in a temporary & constantly transformative state of matter - yet always bound to the material universe at large. The soul is not dependant upon those parameters for it exists beyond any temporal chronology.... It is pre-existent in the * kairos.

* (wikipedia : Kairos (Ancient Greek: καιρός) is an Ancient Greek word meaning the right, critical, or opportune moment. The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos (χρόνος) and kairos. The former refers to chronological or sequential time, while the latter signifies a proper or opportune time for action. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.)

Outside of naturalism/secularism, the answer is generally yes, the soul is inevitably released from the 'prison' of the body. Inherent in this primarily Greco-Roman dualistic concept is the idea that the soul was ultimately created to exist apart from ('lowly') coporeality and was never meant to exist as one with ('corrupt') flesh. This (Gnostic) view is quite popular even today though it's to be noted that such an idea is in direct contrast to Judeo and especially Christian thinking, which in recent years I've come to gradually lean towards, even if I personally don't much care for what may very well be the truth of the matter.

With regard to the eventuality of the human soul, in my study of the early church writers (those who wrote in the first two centuries A.D. and who considered Arianism a heresy) it was interesting for me to learn that their view of the afterlife differs from many in mainline churches today, who probably do not realize that their concept of the postmortem soul is more Greco-Roman than it is Judeo-Christian.

Obviously, the question of why it is we die needn't require a religious explanation. The naturalist in me views mortality as something quite sensible from a practical standpoint. As with the animal world, we reproduce our kind, and since there is only so much living space on Earth, nature has seen to it that humans, like animals, exist only for a short period of time in order to allow room for others being born.

Yet, the greater part of me instinctively knows that there is something more to us than just decaying flesh, blood and bones. I do not say this as one who necessarily longs for immortality, but as one more so resigned to the (scientific) understanding that we are part energy and thus a part of us cannot be destroyed. So much for sweet oblivion, it seems.

It is the soul that for many of us is thought to perdure after our physical selves have returned to the earth. Where it goes and what becomes of it, no human knows for certain.

Although I accept the validity of near-death experiences, I do not necessarily trust the accuracy or truthfulness of their content. All this talk of encountering a loving being of light might only be a deception, after all. One thing I am relatively certain of, however, is that whenever an NDEr claims to have glimpsed hell, that the terminology is inaccurate. Hell, so far as the Bible teaches, is a place reserved for the unsaved upon a future and final judgment, as described in the Book of Revelation. Scripture, nevertheless, does seem to indicate that there is a hellish holding place of sorts until that time, for those who die 'not in Christ,' but technically speaking this place is not hell but might be thought of as a place of hair-splitting.

Then there is the early first- and second-century Christian understanding of heaven, which viewed this realm not only consisting of spiritual (that is, holy) bodies housing immortal souls (not a place of spirits) but that also is only a transient stop and not the eternal home of the believer. Hence, where the Resurrection comes in, the most fundamental Christian doctrine, in which the immortal soul and (an eventually renewed, incorruptible) material body are reunited as one to live where the God of scripture intended for humans to be -- not off in some nebulous dimension as ethereal bodiless forms floating around on clouds, but as tangible, physical beings on Earth.

Enter ghosts, a factor which seems to open a whole new can of worms. I'm not sure how a reincarnationist would explain these sightings, but whereas a spiritualist might describe these apparitions as low-level disembodied entities lingering about the earthplane, a first-century Christian would have likely attributed these 'wispy' anomalies to something other than unbodied human souls, considering what they believed becomes of the human soul upon 'death': that it survives as a state of consciousness, first in Sheol/Hades (the so-called 'realm of the dead,' of which there seems to be various levels and where inhabitants cannot interact with the human realm) before being ultimately consigned either to paradise or Gehenna.

(The early Christians, it is to be noted, those closest to the apostles, never believed in the heresy of soul-sleep/annihilation of the wicked, as pleasant and lovely as these may sound.)

In discussing the question of whether the soul survives the body, one can only speculate, but my feeling at this moment in time is that it does in a sense, but that it cannot survive without being in some form of a container/body. As one who does not believe in reincarnation, that doesn't leave very many scenarios left.

Indeed, what if the only spirit being is the Creator and every other sentient being (including angels and demons), as part of God's creation, requires some type of a body (some less material and dimensionally restricted than others) in order for their souls to exist?

The soul, like matter is never destroyed. We are light beings. Our body is electrical. When we leave our physical body, we become pure energy. I know that the loved ones that I have lost are still here even though their physical body has died.

The problem for Christians is that there is no consensus regarding the constitution of man. There is the bipartite view that man is body and soul/spirit….this being that soul and spirit are being used interchangeably. There is the tripartite view of body, soul and spirit….each being distinct parts. The first view(bipartite) concludes for the immortality of the soul. The tripartite view concludes that it is only the spirit that is immortal. Personally I ascribe to trichotomy…3 parts. Naturally I believe my argument is persuasive…..:). But I see no reason to present it to unresponsive ears. Generally people are wed to their convictions. The significant point is that either persuasion has the same end result…..namely an acceptance of immortality.

Consciousness/soul entered the body sometime before birth and departs sometime after death. Soul never dies.
People say birth is harder than death. I've yet to find out.:biggrin:

?? Enters=comes to life ? Departs is the opposite of enters ? How does it follow that departure suddenly equals life ?

I'm talking about on this Physical World................ Your soul/Consciousness never dies. It may flicker on and off though in the Astral, according to Allen Watts.