by Trent Wilde Today, the word “spirit” usually means something non-physical. The “spirit” of a person is thought to be the immaterial part of them – sometimes equated with the soul. The “spiritual realm” is considered to be a plane of existence beyond the bounds of space and time. When reading English translations of the […]
Tag Archives: materialism
Before Spirit Was Spiritualistic: Philosophical Materialism from Genesis to Jesus (Series Info and Videos) – April-May 2023
(Corresponding Podcast – Follow Podcast) Before Spirit Was Spiritualistic: Philosophical Materialism from Genesis to Jesus ← This is the title of a series of talks we hosted and published over seven Saturdays, from April 8 to May 20, 2023. What’s the series about? It’s about Jesus and his philosophical predecessors and successors and how they […]
Who May Travel Into Yahweh’s Tent?
(Podcast Version – Follow/Subscribe) I’ve recently been writing about a philosophy within ancient Israel that understood Yahweh to be the God of Truth and truth itself to be the supreme principle. This was actually part of the materialist school in ancient Israel. If you aren’t familiar with ancient Israelite materialism, I recommend reading/listening to the […]
God: A Purely Material Person
(Podcast Version – Follow/Subscribe) So, it’s the Day of Atonement, and we’ve covered a lot in seven blog posts/podcasts over the past 10 days starting with Dirt You Are (Israelite Anthropology). Fittingly, today we’ll be talking about the subject that is holiest of all, the person of God Himself. In our last post, we covered […]
Jesus: A Purely Material Person
(Podcast Version – Follow/Subscribe) In our last post, we saw that Jesus and his early followers had a materialistic understanding of human nature. They believed and taught that bodily resurrection is the only hope for a future life (a doctrine that is fundamentally inconsistent with the idea that we have immaterial souls). In this post, we […]
Resurrection: The Only Hope of Future Life
(Podcast Version – Follow/Subscribe) In the past few posts, we’ve seen that ancient Israelite ideas of death were rooted in their ideas of human nature. Death, to them, consisted neither of “soul wakefulness” nor of “soul sleep” (that is, if by “soul” you mean what most people mean – a non-physical “self”). Rather, they saw […]
The Scripture Doctrine of Materialism by Thomas Cooper
THE SCRIPTURE DOCTRINE OF MATERIALISM. ▬▬▬▬ BY THOMAS COOPER ▬▬▬▬ PHILADELPHIA: 1823. Website Publisher’s Note: While Thomas Cooper was more minimalistic in his views than are we, we commend this tract to you as a clear and persuasive argument in favor of the proposition that a central tenet of Jesus’s teachings was philosophical materialism. Who […]
To Dirt You Will Return (Israelite Anthropology)
(Podcast Version – Follow/Subscribe) In this post, I’ll answer the question from the end of our last post: What did ancient Israelites think about death? Before getting started, I should repeat a qualification I made a few posts back. I’m generally referring to “what ancient Israelites believed” on these subjects, but please keep in mind […]
Cognitive Kidneys (Israelite Anthropology)
(Podcast Version – Follow/Subscribe) Have you ever had a hard time wrapping your brain around a new idea? You just keep racking your brain, but get nowhere! Then someone comes along with a completely different background and a different education, and to them, it’s a no-brainer. You can see that they understand it so much […]
Israel’s Despiritualizing Philosophy
(Podcast Version – Follow/Subscribe) In the previous post, we went through a number of ancient Israelite texts that present a materialistic view of human nature. Unlike the popular idea that humans have a dual nature (physical and non-physical), these texts portray humans as made of only one substance – dirt. Humans, like the other animals, […]