This was prompted by Rev. Donald Sensing's excellent post What About Terri's Schiavo's Soul?, which describes his understanding of relevant Christian doctrine. His post does not directly address his opinions on the Schiavo issue; issues like the soul, death and dying will also be on people's minds right now, and he's wise enough to keep them separate (see Pastoring families of the hopelessly ill for his take on Ms. Schiavo's situation).
It's hard to speak of a "Jewish doctrine" given the mulitiplicity of opinions, but here's a very interesting one by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan of blessed memory, whose brief and excellent book If You Were God includes a Hasidic/ Kabbalah take on the issue of death and soul:
"We know that God is ominiscient. He knows all and does not forget. God knows every thought and memory that exists in our brains. There is no piece of information that escapes His knowledge.
What, then, happens when a man dies? God does not forget, and therefore all of this information continues to exist, at least in God's memory.
....We may think of something existing only in memory as being static and effectively dead. But God's memory is not a static thing. The sum total of a human personality may indeed exist in God's memory, but it can still maintain identity and self-volition, and remain in an active state.
This sum total of the human personality existing in God's memory is what lives on after a man dies.
(This may be why the Kabbalists speak of this as Binah - understanding, rather than memory. For understanding is a dynamic process, where information contained in one's memory interacts in an active manner. The soul in not in a passive memory state, but is in a dynamic state of Binah.)
....To speak of a concept such as God's memory is indeed very difficult. It involves a deep discussion of the entire transcendental sphere. We therefore give it names that have meaning to us, such as Gan Eden, paradise, the World to Come, the World of Souls, or the bond of eternal life. However, the bible speaks of immortality as a return to God Himself (Eccl. 12:7) "The dust returns to the dust as it were, but the spirit returns to God who gave it."
The rest of his section on Immortality and the Soul gets into that discussion, which includes some provocative conclusions (see esp. his description of what the fire of Gehenom from which sprang the different Christian concept of Hell actually is - it is not a place, or an exile).
Joe, that is very Ghost in the Shell , the idea that you are composed of information. But Dr. Sensing did not answer my question-- what is a diminished soul? The cortical tissue that formed the first Terri Schiavo is long gone. The edifice of thought and memory, the pattern of electro-chemical connections that was that Terri is gone with the substrate that hosted it.
What is in there now, a diminished soul? And what happens to that soul after death?
Is the soul diminished? Does the light bulb cease burning because the room door is mostly shut?
Physical acts cannot diminish the soul - only moral acts can. What happens to Terri's soul is no different than yours or mine.
Suppose we succeed in creating inorganic intelligences, or in assembling humans from vat-grown components. Will they have souls? How would we know?
Will there be any empirical test that could be used to distinguish a souled creature from a soulless one?
Go watch the Animatrix -- "The Second Renaissance" again. Really.
That was a very good answer, Joe. Thank-you.
Actually, my favourite Animatrix cartoon is the last one: "Matriculated".
interesting indeed!