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Generally the comparison made is to a receiver dish, grak, as II notes. The soul's whatever is received and expressed by the body. Damage to the dish causes damage to the signal's expression, but says nothing of the signal itself. S'like if your radio's antenna goes to pot it doesn't mean the radio station has exploded. It doesn't say anything about the radio station -- if you want to know about that, you'd have to go check.

And in this case, the proverbial radio station is an invisible, intangible, unobservable one that's presumably in another dimension or somethin' and is posted to interact with the proverbial radio in ways we cannot detect. We lack the capability to go check.

So, people look for explanations, and they find these in religion until they are proved by other, more scientific methods? If that's what you mean, then I agree.

Not necessarily all people -- there's always going to be outliers, of course -- and not necessarily towards science*, but even within religious beliefs you have people move from one explanation to another, more preferred explanation based on... whatever heuristic they use to evaluate such. Given that even within religious beliefs people tend to shift them based on what they perceive as higher evidentiary merit, the inclination being some sort of explanatory drive seems... likely? At least what I'd tentatively term it such until neurosci actually figures out what the zog those parts of the brain are doing when they do what they do.

To be fair, talking about it until we've got (considerably) better data on the subject is about as much hindquarter extraction as speaking on the unobservable nature of God, but *shrugs*

*if folks are more likely to turn towards science, it's probably because it Gets Shit Done, which nets it a lot of cred -- Jesus curing the crippled he was attributed to coming across in story is one thing, but actual high-functioning prosthetic legs for all who need them is quite another.

Eternal knights aren't mounted :V

The 13 base defense (12, with the armor) makes 'em almost as dodge-y as something on a horse, but they're plain infantry.

Now, now, be specific. The concept of the soul is irrelevant to science and empiricism, not necessarily everything.

Mind you, most everything else isn't going to be held in equal regard until they manage something along the lines of a steam engine or penicillin or whatev', but that doesn't mean it's not there, and plenty of people prefer to put their trust in things not empirically verifiable. They're generally considered silly people and sometimes thrown in jail for getting folks killed (see: death toll of exorcisms), but they are what they are.

Maybe some point in the future the concept will actually become relevant, as observational capabilities expand. It's... incredibly doubtful, and near impossible, but it could happen.

... regardless, christianity [ur=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_in_the_Bible]doesn't really teach the doctrine of the immortal soul[/url], so outside of non-biblical interpretations of the concept I guess it's also largely irrelevant to this thread :V

You're challenging an assumption that has no verifiable truth state, not one that is false, K. The response isn't, "It is known", it's "It is assumed by its proponents, and we can't really say they're wrong or right."

And yeah, traditional aspects of the soul being attributed to states of the physical brain doesn't actually say anything about the nature of the soul.

Because you can't. Actually say anything verifiable about the nature of the soul. The claim of non-physicality no-sells the possibility of that sort of explanation. If proponents of soul-hood claim the soul is partially or in whole non-physical, all science can do is shrug and move on with moving on. That claim makes the non-physical aspects of the soul entirely outside the domain of science. Literal no connection. Also makes it mostly immune to logical analysis as well, since it's inventing its own axioms and denying the applicability of outside ones.

... I'd rather hear about the non-existent point that anything involving the soul or afterlife became an observable and communicable phenomena, because insofar as I'm aware they haven't actually cracked that one.

Last I checked, the afterlife and related paraphernalia is unobservable to the living, incapable of being verifiable communicated about by the dead, and has absolutely no verifiably observable effect on reality. Insofar as science goes, it's a complete non-entity and entirely irrelevant -- until it starts having an actual effect on things, its nature and construction don't matter on whit. It has less effect on the scientific world than the light emitted by stars thousands of light years distant. Definitely fun to talk about, but it's about as impactful in any meaningful sense as fantasy world building.

If you're looking to cast doubt on the historical/factual accuracy of the bible, there's plenty of actual archaeological/historical inaccuracies involved, to say nothing of the whole shady nature of its construction. No need to bring in stuff science and empiricism and whatnot literally can't interact with. Bible can say whatever it wants about unobservable phenomena and science et al can't really do shit. Anyone and anything can say whatever they want to about entirely unobservable phenomena and science et al can't do shit. S'just that it's all entirely and completely irrelevant to anyone alive, and it's physically impossible to justify one account's description of the subject over another. 'Bout the most you can do is point out logical contradictions involved.

And no k, generally the response I've seen regarding physical damage and the soul is that the squishy bits are a filter, more than anything. When your brain gets damaged, it's not your soul taking damage, it's your soul/reality interaction device, or so the spiel goes.

Hinduism is the oldest religion in the world, IIRC.

So no, not the whole time.

Oldest living religion. First veda beat out the torah by somewhere between two and eight hundred years. Various related religions beat out the traditional age of Abraham by a good millennium or so. General egyptian stuff shows every evidence of predating Judaism's roots by a long while, as well. The Abrahamic tradition, for all that it's old, is a relative newcomer to things.

We're pretty sure religions and general spirituality has been around about as long as the modern human species has... maybe longer. There's decent evidence (via means of burial, among other things) for it going back at least 200k years or so. So if YWHW was hanging around, it was pretty quiet about existing for a long bloody time.

Silly xant, books go in boxes, not on bookshelves. Or stacked around boxes or sumthin' when not traveling. Bookshelf too big and unwieldy. Only reasonable option is impromptu book ziggurat or book table.