Biology is Destiny?

Its not for me. In my view, the mind is a gateway from the spiritual to the physical, and it stems from the brain. Damage the gateway, and the spirit doesn't come through the same way. Brain damage affecting behavior doesn't negate the spirit, for me.I was gonna reply to an earlier post a couple days ago but didn't get around to it... I'm not gonna go fish it out now, and my respose was gonna be somewhat flippant... regarding the issue with not know where culpability lies because of the way that behavior is affected by the brain, I was gonna say something along the lines of how having a dualistic nature does get you around the conundrum, doesn't it?Whether or not dualism can work, is beside the point that its can act as a band-aid for the problem, no?

Of course I can Awe, darn. I thought it could. Okay, so its unfair. But it could still be there nonetheless.

Yeah, but I don't have any reason to think the CIA's involved... Not so much. Too much thinking is dangerous to faith-based ideas I've always thought of it as an underlying nudger rather than an all out controller. The mind controls the body and its actions, the spirit influences the mind, but so does the brain (because the mind stems from the brain). And I suppose the spirit can be affected as well... from the phyical world, to the body/brain, then through the mind on to the spirit.Edited by Catholic Scientist, : No reason given.

Well fuck, I don't know. I supose I could speculate for you, but I'm just making this shit up:I'd see the mind as the gateway to the spirit. The mind is housed in the brain, lets say its a lense. If you mess with the brain, or mess with the glass in the lense, then what you see that has came through has changed. Not necessarily changed on the other side, but the result you see is different.The physical affects the mind, so when the sprit is comming through that affected lense, it could be distorted. Here, comming through would be the outward expression of your behavior and/or the inward experssion of your thoughts, which too, can end up deciding your behvior. Its as if we're all a bunch of spiritual beings tapped into this physical world as a way to interact with each other and develop in preparation for the afterlife, which is entirely spiritual. I also see the spirit as emerging along with physical body, as if there isn't a place where the spirit sits around existing waiting for a body, but rather that the spirit emerges as the individual does.So Fred (from the OP) seemed to not have a pedophilic spirit, but it came out as pedophilic after being distorted by his mind, because of the tumor in his brain. This assumes there's qualities to the spirit that affect our behaviors.I do think the sprit could change too. As you get older and have interacted with so many people (other spirits) and learned so much, you grow spiritually too. You might even get more bitter. I see young children as less spiritually developed as adults. I think our spirits need this time here in the physical world, so they can interact with other spirits through the minds of the people as they physically interact. So yes, I'd see things like hormones and disease having an indirect effect on the spirit, as long as they affected your mind. So the stubbing of your toe, itself, would not affect your spirit, but how that impacted you mind, say through anger or something, could and/or would.I suppose that underdeveloped spirits might have an afterlife similiar to underdeveloped people in the physical worlds do, a gradually limited view down to nothing at all. Too, maybe some of those monks have an overdevloped spirit that plays a more significant role in the afterlife.I think that there are some genuinely bad people, as if they had an evil spirit or something, and visa versa. I don't know if they'd have started out predisposed that way, or if it would have been a result of how their spirit developed, or maybe a little of both. I don't really take the stance that the spirit actually does exist. I honestly don't know. I approach it form the angle of, assuming it does exist, what would what we do know about our world mean for that. And I prefer to keep things consistant. So obviously the brain affects the mind... if the spirit exists, what would this mean for it... If the spirit doesn't exist, then this is just mental masturbation. You changed it from invisible to undetectable.... how would the CIA even know if they were using undetectable rays?"Have you fired the undetectable rays?" "I dunno, sir, but I'm not detecting them."

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So I wrote out my reply, and then have been distracted awat from my desk a few times, and then have been going back and adding struff in here and there so hopefully its not too disjointed.

I was asked, it isn't that much effort, and I like it. As I said, mental masturbation.Anyways, what actual answers are we beginning to get?