This is an interesting post that I’ve found a while ago, but haven’t had time to respond. Thought I might get the conversation going:
As I’ve indicated numerous times, I’m a physicalist. I don’t think that I’m an immortal ghost/soul living inside a body. I think that I’m a physical creature. Long before I encountered philosophy of mind or neuroscience, I became convinced that this is what the Bible teaches, making its teaching on human nature stand out like a sore thumb against the pagan Hellenistic theology of the first century.
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Holding and expressing these views rubs some of my fellow conservative evangelicals the wrong way, but for the most part there’s really no disputing that the Bible presents human nature and death this way literally dozens of times in fairly clear language. Affirming dualism and the view that we live on as immaterial spirits after death and go somewhere is a point of view held in the teeth of the biblical evidence. This fact too, I suspect, rubs some of my fellow conservative evangelicals the wrong way.
Read the rest here:
Yikes…that blog post was too long for me to skim over quickly…but I’ll get back to it. I actually came to this conclusion over the past year or two and have totally jettisoned a belief in hell as eternal conscious torment because of it.
This has had huge ramifications in how I perceive life and death…and in how I interpret Scripture.
I’m still figuring it out….but I think Christian materialism/physicalism has some very interesting things to contribute.
However…I’m finding it very difficult to integrate those ideas into my life in church. How do you tell people in the congregation that you attend that you don’t really believe in hell…or for that matter “souls” in the sense of an immaterial essence of a human being?
I haven’t figured that out yet.
You might find some more information on our website : Afterlife | Conditional Immortality, Soul Sleep and Annihilationism.