Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

• Matthew 22:37-40

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

• Deuteronomy 6:5

“Julien Offray de la Mettrie was born in Brittany. He studied medicine and served as an army physician. The Atheist sentiments expressed in a thesis he published in 1745, stating that emotions are the result of physical changes in the body, caused outrage, forcing him to flee from France to Holland. In 1747 he published Man a Machine, in which he expanded his materialist ideas and rejected Descartes’ theory that the mind and body are separate. The book’s reception caused him to flee again, this time to Berlin.”

• Sam Atkinson (senior editor), The Philosophy Book, Big Ideas Simply Explained

Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751) was a French physician and philosopher.  While he irritated many by his writing, he was a good physician. He saved the life of a French envoy to Prussia.  The Count gave a party in his honor as a result.  He gorged his “machine” on exotic paté, made by a famous chef.  He got an intestinal disorder which he might have easily diagnosed, but he became delirious from the fever and died, with no other physician near his skill level, or so the story goes.

Many sources still contend that the mind is part of the body.  If you look at the two Scriptures, the difference is interchanging the strength with the mind.  Yet, most theologians would argue that there is the brain, which is the organ controlling the nerves, and the mind which is non-physical that deals with emotions, thoughts, sentience, and consciousness.  The soul is a spiritual part of us that does not die.  There is argument whether soul and spirit are two different things, and I have written about how they could be from a biblical standpoint, maybe the spirit being the motivation and desires.

But whether humans have a mind that is part of the body, or whether the non-physical part of our consciousness that controls our thoughts is a separate entity that dies or lives upon our passing, our bodies are much more than a simple machine.  Consciousness and sentience are aspects that are not fully understood, but they are known to exist.

We can map out the brain, a bit different with each person, but male-wired brains are more specialized than female-wired brains.  The “knowledge” of right-brained and left-brained usually came from military casualties who lost certain aspects of the lives when their brains were wounded in battle.  Females during the time of this research were not part of the military.  But with studying vehicular accident victims, they started finding a totally different pattern that was not specialized in females in the study.

But the soul and/or spirit live on, independent of our bodies when the body dies.

Thus, no matter how much we learn of the human body, there are some things that are not measurable, thus, not a machine.

Most of the information on male and female brains comes from the book, Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women by Anne Moir, and David Jessel.  Some people consider the book to be controversial. For instance, a male-wired brain does not identify gender, just how specialized the areas of the brain are, most-often found in the male, but almost everyone is somewhere between the extremes.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.