Q. But how can an immaterial thing have an effect on a material thing?
A. I want to assume you mean besides giving that material thing life and all the consequence symptoms of life such as growth, reproduction, self-movement, sentient life and even consciousness?
Q. Yes… Because all of those things you’ve listed assume the existence of a soul.
A. So how does an immaterial thing have an effect on a material body?
Q. Correct. How?
A. Well, the same way in Archimedes famous instance, the effect of discovering the immaterial truth of buoyancy had on his material body: he leapt out of the bath and went running in excitement in the public square screaming eureka!
Q. I’m very reluctant to accept that point… So you’re saying that something immaterial can have an effect on something material?
A. Well in the case of man, the cause-effect dynamic also works in the other direction. Something happens or changes in your material body, and it affects the spiritual part of you. Like bad news of the death of a loved one can make you lose your appetite.
Q. Wow! But isn’t that all just dopamine and other hormones at work?
A. In part yes. But they too would fall in the grouping of the material body. So they can be affected by something immaterial like the same sad news or alternatively they can affect the spiritual side of you as with drugs.
Q. As I said: reluctant to accept it, but it does make sense on the face of it.
A. I think it’s also good to keep in mind that in the philosophical tradition the spirit that animates a body has generally been called a soul whether it animates a plant, an animal or a man. And this sometimes causes confusion because we generally use soul in its narrow meaning to refer to that spirit that animates a human being.
Q. Ah yes. You’d written about that in Q&A 191 or thereabouts.
A. Perfect! So you can just refer…
Q. Ok. Now going back to our initial topic about all men having been created to have sex and propagate the species and all that…
What makes Jesus so different a man that he did not have intercourse or what makes numeraries able to suppress it, or are you all just fabricating/ hiding the fact that you have had intercourse?
A. Hahahaha!
Q. What’s so funny?
A. Just the bluntness of the question! Very refreshing I must say…
Q. Ummm… You’re welcome I guess…
A. I would say that in a hypersexualised world where sex is everything, it may be hard to believe, but sex is not the most important thing to a normal man or a normal woman. True, in TODAY'S world, it has been made the ONLY thing worth anything! Adverts are worth zero if they don't have some link to some sexy lady barely dressed; love between a man and a woman (married or unmarried) can only be shown by him poking his Willy Wonka in her oven, your calibre as a man or woman is measured by how sexy you look or how many sexual conquests you've had. This is the world today. The hypersexualised world.
But believe it or not, sex is not the sun of a normal human's solar system. Ask any married person - or better yet any widow or widower - what do they love most or miss most from their spouse? It's not sex. Ask your dad or mum what is most on their mind when they think of each other. It's not sex. In a normal person, sex is usually 4th or 5th place. Our hypersexualised world tries to make it 1st place because that generates habits like lust that they can monetize much more easily. Unfortunately, it has succeeded to a great extent. But as the ancients said, nature will not be mocked.
Q. You still haven’t answered my question.
To be continued…
19th September 2019