SOMATOPARAPHRENIA? IS THE SOUL IDEA OR SENSATION A SYMPTOM?

Somatoparaphrenia is a form of delusion.  You think you don't own or have a limb or perhaps even a side of your body.  You are immune to proof that you are wrong.  You have a complex narrative about how you got this side of your body where you deny you have ownership.  Maybe aliens put it there?  Maybe God?  In extreme cases, you may look after your side or limb as if it belonged to somebody else entirely. You may think your leg is another being attached on to you and treat it as if it were.

Some people seem to think transgenderism is somatoparaphrenia involving BOTH SIDES AS IN THE ENTIRE BODY!

Some sufferers do treat and think of their side or limb as being not connected to them but just stuck on like an alien but do not realise it.  They may not say it outright but say it other ways.

It is the position of this author that feeling you are not your body but your soul is the real you is a form of this mental illness.  Most religious experience then is a sign of mental disturbance. 

The idea of a God who is like a ghost in nature and who can override natural rules and processes is part of the confabulation process in developing and maintaining somatoparaphrenia.  The bottom line is the patient thinks a miracle has occurred.  Read between the lines. "The left side belongs to Amelie not me and she  used some machine to make that happen and to make it look like part of me."  It's a miracle machine and that implies divine agency.  Some just settle for saying God put the alien side on you. 

The risk factor alone is to categorise faith in God and the soul as a form of abuse.

THE BOOK - MORE THAN MATTER?
 
Keith Ward in More Than Matter (Lion, 2010) states "What I have tried to do in this chapter is to suggest how conscious personal life and the material structure of the universe fit together in a coherent way if we suppose that the physical universe has the purpose of producing personal consciousness as the natural realization of its inherent and original capacities. Consciousness is not just an alien substance injected into the material universe at an arbitrary point - a picture which Cartesian dualism, if interpreted unkindly, may suggest. Rather, consciousness results from the natural generation of capacities inherent in the structure of matter itself, as it develops forms of organised complexity over time. A picture of cosmic evolution that portrays responsible and intelligent minds as a natural, possibly inevitable, outcome of the growth of an organic material universe could be the key to understanding how spirit and flesh, mind and matter, soul and body, can be integrally intertwined, and yet how the primacy of spirit, as the ultimate purposive driving force of an evolving universe, can be maintained" (page 87, 88).
 
If the universe has the power to make us, then who needs God?

A THOUGHT!

Could trying to experience being a spiritual soul as if it were a ghost in your body be missing your real soul and contacting a demon?  The Bible never says man has an immaterial side but it does seem to say that there are beings around that cannot be detected such as demons.  If there is no soul then the Catholic Church sacraments which are all directed at it are scams.



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