It is argued that personhood does not exist by those who favor Eastern religion over the so-called "rational" doctrines of the West. The argument is that individual personhood dissipates upon death and is either subsumed into the eternal, infinite cosmos, or ceases to exist. The former is congruent with a New Age Pantheism, similar to Hinduism, while the latter is in concord with Naturalism, which teaches that there is nothing except that which we can verify through empirical sense-data. Naturalism holds that there is no god, no angels, no demons (certainly no devil), no afterlife, no soul. Most naturalists are materialists, believing that only matter exists; however, some naturalists do believe in immaterial entities: namely the laws of nature (gravity, cause and effect), or the laws of logic (law of non-contradiction, law of identity, and law of excluded middle).
RC Talk - The Official Blogs of Ratio Christi Chapters
Lenoir-Rhyne University
Jan 22
South American Prison Speaks to Atheist Professor
South American Prison Speaks to Atheist Professor
The captive prisoner smiles as he notes he has been awaiting trial for two years now. The crime? Stealing a pack of gum. "I'm so very happy you've come to see me," he says to his American visitor. In the upper portion of this South American prison, where beatings and filth co-join as malevolent twins in a quagmire of bureaucratic arrest, the professor of criminology stares in awe at the man's happy demeanor. He notices the prisoner's Bible on the shelf of his cell, along with a picture of Jesus in a state of downcast agony, a head full of thorns with blood dripping down like sweat, and the deep lines of a worn, weary man etched into his face. "Not the handsome, happy, American Jesus," the professor tells the audience.
