Soul -- seems to have more of a sense of a feeling and not the domain of the intellect. Depends a lot on cultural context for meaning. In some traditions there is no separation - body and soul are intertwined. In others it is very separate, as per Paul - flesh and spirit. Are we recognizable without our bodies? What is the soul when the mind goes as in Alzheimer's? Is there some essence that remains from birth (or before) on beyond after death? I hate to hear preachers say we will see people again after death or that they are in a "better" place -- I don't find it all comforting. But then I am not much for believing in "after" - see here. I am fascinated by the common usage of the word "soul" and what it indicates about our understanding.

Actually, everything exists in memory. The universe, our experience, our sense of self -- all are things we remember. The present is unknowable except as it becomes the past. And the people we know live on, in memory. I'm seventy-eight and the people I've known are beginning to pop up in my dreams. My dad last night (died 1982), my kids (usually 10-14 years old), co-workers (I'm always trying to finish editing a manuscript for my old boss at Dell Publishing) . . .

When we'd phone Mother in her final months, she'd say she'd just seen Dad, or her mother, but now she couldn't find them. Memory and present reality had become blurred for her. Will we live forever? No evidence of it. Will we ever be separate from our loved ones? Not so long as we live.

When we buried Mother on her 88th birthday, my husband and I read the burial office for her (the good Baptist was gone, we Anglican offspring remained). We had no Sure and Certain Hope of the Resurrection, true, but the words had weight, and expressed her continuing presence in us.

Soul seems to me a metaphor. We experience ourselves as a sort of invisible pilot sitting in the cockpit of our skull looking out through the eyes. In reality, we are consciousnesses created by organic processes in our nervous systems. We can't imagine not existing -- so we conceive our consciousness as a Soul that will survive the flesh. But as Ann alludes above, too often the Soul, our metaphor for Self, doesn't even survive senility.

I've had long arguments on other discussion threads with those who feel in touch with spiritual powers outside themselves. Maybe they are -- there's no way to prove it. We can't feel what others feel, though we may suppose that their feelings are much like our own. But I'm with Ann -- this life seems enough. We're shaped by stories told by our forebears (and by ourselves), but we've learned to check them against evidence. Maybe evidence isn't the whole story, but what lies beyond is mystery. If there's no way to settle the matter, then we must live with it.

Stephen Asma's article is close to what I believe about religious language. The word "soul" can be used in many different language-games, none of them necessarily having anything in common. Where he stresses an expressive approach I would lean more toward a prescriptive approach, as in R. M. Hare. But we both would stress that talk about souls is generally nondescriptive. "I know that my redeemer liveth," for me expresses a commitment to living a certain way and is no statement of fact.

Along with Wittgenstein, I would bring in Freud on mourning and his distinction between mania (where mourners think they have got over the death of the other) and melancholia (where the mourners are taken down by the death of the other). As Maria Torok says, it is a choice between what one has eaten and what is eating one. Mourning combines both.

I would add to this the work of Avital Ronell on spirit and Jacques Derrida on language.

All this to say that the Wittgensteinian approach of Asma is only one approach to these complex linguistic issues.

I would bring this back to question of the two kinds of writing Derrida mentions in Plato's Pharmacy. Rather than a split between living speech and the dead letter, an opposition which expresses Plato's distrust of writing and rightly discredited Christian attitudes toward Judaism, Derrida refigures it as a the necessary undecidability in any act of communication/writing.

Words can either give life or risk total loss/forgetting/oblivion.

Here Derrida is bringing in/rewriting Freud on the death drive.

Derrida sees religion as related to the notion of dating or commemorating. On the one hand, there is dreary calendrical time, a date which could apply to anyone, such as month/day/year. But there is another memory which is infinitely singular which resists the calendrical. But in order for any kind of memory to function it must rely on a mechanical archive, writing. Its conditions of possibility are also its conditions of impossiblity.

Gary Paul Gilbert

We had no Sure and Certain Hope of the Resurrection, true, but the words had weight, and expressed her continuing presence in us.

Then what's the point?

How comforting can prayer or ritual be if you don'tactually believe in it? What exactly is the purpose of playing at Christianity?

As for the soul stuff- like God and the Risen Christ, these are matters of faith, not philosophy and certainly not science.

I find the post-modern practice of subjecting Christian doctrine to 20th century (usually atheist) philosophical concepts to be a tiring. "How can we believe in X doctrine when so-and-so philosopher says Y?" The real question should be, "Why do you trust in such-and-such philosophy when your faith should be in the Lord?"

I'm not suggesting blind attachment to dogma, and I'm no fundamentalist- but if we believe in God and Christ, then other ideas must at some point subjugate themselves to that belief. And if we don't believe, then what's the point in pretending we do?

Adam, Murdoch and I found the words I read from The Book of Common Prayer at his mother's funeral very comforting. Citing a particular tradition one is familiar with is very good when one has to deal with some troubling new reality. it is like reading a favorite poem or listening to a certain kind of music.

Reducing things to a point sounds violent to me, as if everything has to be made to conform to a particular philosophy or theology rather than letting things be in their infinite singularity. Letting things elude one may be good or rather accepting this elusiveness of language. Playing at something may be very close to working at it.

In order to get something out of a particular religious practice or tradition one has to practice. Such practice may be mere simulation but it may also be, as I tend to believe, all one can do.

You seem to be confident that it is easy to distinguish between authenticity and inauthenticity, whereas what I am saying is closer to the experience of the person who says, "You can't possibly know what I am feeling. Here is a line from Wordsworth which says exactly what I feel." The authentic experience, then, becomes a citation from a poet, as if the speaker needed to swallow a drug called Wordsworth in order to experience anything. But that experience, if it is an experience, is more of a loss of experience and recitation of a poem. It is an experience of simulation.

I don't buy the opposition between pretending and doing something for real because one has to pretend, at least in the beginning. One recites, for example, the Our Father. At what point does understanding or true belief arrive?

And as Ann told me the other day, the injunction "be doers of the word," in Greek can also mean "be ye poets of the word." Poein also means to do or to make.

What is the point of a poem? Is it to be reduced to one meaning? Is the reader sure it means anything?

Gary Paul Gilbert

Good questions, Adam Wood. I see that Gary has considered them already, more smoothly than this bit that I've composed. For what it's worth --

Human beings live in a world constructed in language. We don't know or remember things directly, but as we've recorded them in words. Story is powerful, and as real as the external world, on its own terms. Sherlock Holmes is as real as, say, Grover Cleveland -- until you check the evidence. There are books that I disappear into as I read, and emerge from as from another world. A super-cinematic world made from words alone. So there is a mystical realm -- language.

We could have taken Mother's body to the cemetery, lowered it in the hole beside my father's grave, and gone home. But some sort of ritual seemed appropriate, invoking the memory of what our kind has done in similar situations in the past. Poetry has its place, even for rationalists. As I said before, Mother will live on as long as I remember her.

I wonder what it means "to believe in God and Christ." Hopefully it means to pursue justice and mercy as taught in the writings couched in these terms. But "belief"? Surely a variety of opinion, based on authority and tradition. We don't pretend to believe -- we try to pursue the values that "belief" has furthered. As for opinions, hallowed or otherwise, we try to ground them in evidence.