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those translated to mean soul. In a nutshell, and over-simplified tremendously, man is a soul, but man has a spirit. In Genesis, God creates Adam as a living soul. But the spirit, or the breath of God, is a separate entity. The holy spirit, for instance, descends upon the apostles on the day of Pentacost. This spirit, with which the Christians are filled, is the breath of God, and obviously different from the soul, which is our identity, our humanity and our moral agency.

Now, in this regard, the soul is that part of us that is consciously alive and differentiates us from the animal. It is that part of our existence that is strictly human, that critical element of our consciousness that makes us moral agents. It is that part of us which allows us free will, that allows us to choose sin or obedience, that makes us more than the sum of our genetic code. Our spirit, on the other hand, is that immortal and perhaps indestructable part of us that exists as a conscious and ethical entity that is responsive to God. It is the part of us that is wholly supernatural. It is the part of us that will go to heaven or exist in hell.

Of course, in any discussion of theology, there are so many viewpoints and differences between sects, that all I can do is present a mainstream and predominant summary of Christian views.

PHILOSOPHY

Outide of theology, phiosophy really makes no distinction between the spirit and the soul. In fact, philosophy is relatively mute on the subject because the spirit and the soul are really outside of the nautre of what we can know and what we cannot know. Those that struggle with those philosophical issues relating to the supernatural are more properly dabbling with metaphysics or religion, but not philosophy. Of course, there are aspects of philosophy that do deal with religion and the supernatural world, but they rarely become involved with the semantics of the difference between soul and spirit. In the case of philosophy, the soul (or the spirit) is that part of the human being that is conscious of its existence (self-aware), a moral agent (ethically aware) and real (as opposed to ideal, or even imaginary).

METAPHYSICS

Dependin g on the tradition to which you belong, or choose to follow, the spirit and the soul differ in their mystic and supernatural qualities. The Kabalists, the Christian mystics, the pagans, the Sufis, the Buddhist-Taoist-Hindu mystics, all have different answers to this question, and yet they all see a significant difference between

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