I had some stimulating conversations recently about the nature of souls. Both religious and Intellectual interpretations lead to very interesting conclusions.

First, a couple of points to form the basis of my arguments:

 - The brain is impossible to completely comprehend through biological means and there exist portions of our human personalities that are a product of more than just neurological impulses.
 - Personality is the intersection of the soul and the brain. We only actively use 10% of our brains and the rest remains a mystery.
 - Souls are 5th dimensional entities that connect to physical bodies at birth and disconnect at death. Spirit is the glue that marries the soul to the physical body.

On a purely intellectual level, we can imagine souls as 5th dimensional objects floating around in 5-space that intersect and interact with objects (bodies) in our 4th dimension. I.e. planets in a solar system exerting gravitational attractions at all levels. As a fetus develops, it begins to grow a brain as early as week 4 and the soul that is most vibrationally attuned/attracted to the physical body of the fetus, begins to interact and bond with the body through to adulthood. Morality and personality traits develop through childhood and adolescence and at full maturity, the soul and body are as united as possible. At death, the body can no longer support the soul and it leaves. Since souls are 5th dimensional beings, they have vibrations that are constructive/destructive, in/out of phase with each other. This introduces psychological principles of attraction, hatred, friendship, etc. See the article on love for further analysis of these ideas. The only way to disprove the existence of souls is to completely describe the nuances of personality and character and everything we define as human sentient characteristics as a chemical function of the brain.

Again, as with God, it's impossible to disprove the existence of the supernatural because by definition you have to use unnatural scientific methods, which is by nature supernatural and not a naturalistic approach. The supernatural will always find refuge in the infinitesimal quantum probabilities to the infiniteness of the universe and it's birth, because natural discrete methods cannot explain the infinite with something finite.

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The bible is concerned about the soul for the purposes of understanding salvation. To investigate, let's turn our bibles to Genesis. Got it? Good. Here's a synopsis for the Easter Sunday Christians. Genesis 2:9,16,17 God tells Adam and Eve in the Garden that they may eat of all trees in the garden including the Tree of Life but if they eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they will die. Genesis 2:7 shows God breathing life into Adam's nostrils. God is life, represented by the Tree of Life. By allowing them to eat from the Tree of Life, he was inviting them to partake of him and live eternally. The choices they had represents the free will given to them by their Creator. They could either chose eternal life or eternal death. Now, when Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they don't die right away. But as a consequence, they are banished from the garden and barred from eating the Tree of Life. Obviously, if they can no longer eat from the Tree of Life, they are screwed and doomed to die. Not only that, since God represents the Tree of Life, they are barred from communicating with him because of their choice to disobey. Thus the sacrifices for atonement of sin, something has to die to keep us close to God. The death of the soul represents sin. The sin of disobedience when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, pulled their souls away from God. Their souls died a literal death because instead of Him walking and talking with his creation as was normal, he said in Genesis 3:9, "Where are you?", because their souls were hidden away, far away from God because of their sin, because of man's decision to chose himself over God.

The soul of man desires to be close to God. The desires of the flesh only want that which benefits the body not the soul. Free will and the knowledge of Good and Evil represents man's constant struggle to please the soul and body, God or his opposite. Our souls eternal resting place is determined by the decisions we make in life that either bring us closer or further from God. Unrepentant sin is the unwillingness to place God's connection with us on the highest priority. When you no longer care if you and God are close, that's when you are sinning. Without repentance, there can be no atonement through Jesus.  Dante's Inferno describes levels of Hell for all souls and at the very bottom is eternal Cold, not fire, as is usually depicted. Cold represents eternal and complete separation from God. The worst Hell imaginable for the soul is to be so disconnected from God that you don't feel his vibration (read: heat). Connection or disconnection is the ultimate result of the decisions we make from day to day to either find God and cling to him, or to hide away from him, ashamed.

Religion is Man's structure to lead our lives with that Godly connection as the end result. At the end of our lives, we don't judge who goes and who stays, because it is our decisions that leave our souls out in the cold dark or basking in the warming light. God's simply going to point out the obvious conclusion to your life.

I'm a Soul Man,

Bynop