The body, even just a single cell, is soul temple

People have fallen away from understanding what the soul really is and its relation to the body. The Bible is clear that the body is to be honored because it is the temple of the soul.

It is through the body that the soul receives its shaping during its time in the material realm of time, energy and matter. Thus a soul gets "dirtied" by continual sin, where sin is an act performed by the mind and/or the body. Or the soul is glorified through the goodness of the mind and body's daily activities. Thus when one dies the soul returns to God, who had made it in the first place, and the condition of the soul is judged based on the effects that the deeds of mind and body experienced through his or her one and only life.

So here is the modern (and sometimes the ancients got confused) error in logic. I refer to it in my previous post. The ancients were better than the moderns are today at remembering that the body is the temple of the soul, and that the soul is present at some point before the baby is born. Moderns have drifted into ridiculous and dangerous lack of understanding that the soul is shaped (benefited or harmed) by the living human's bodily and mind experiences and thus seem to think that the soul is just along for the ride, or doesn't really exist. That's like thinking the passenger in a car doesn't matter, only the car matters. The soul is like the passenger in the car and God will judge how that passenger arrives. The other error in logic is that both ancients and moderns are tempted to think that the soul does not experience life unless it is at some sort of recognizable human looking and appearing stage of maturation. I explain why the ancients felt that way in my previous blog. But here is the problem.

We know that from the moment of attachment to the womb the embryo is a passenger in a car and it is already affected by its environment. The soul is already being shaped from the first cell division of its single cell body. How do we know that? Well, simple logic that whatever food, beverage or substance a woman consumes immediately affects the cell of the embryo. The ancients did not really understand biology and how life works (for example, they did not know about cells, or how nutrients are passed through the body and utilized). They could deduce things like what is healthy to eat, but they did not know that food is comprised of fat, protein, carbohydrates, etc and the cellular mechanisms of digestion. But moderns know better. The baby's soul is either supported or harmed by whatever the mother experiences through ingestion from the very first moment of its life. So the soul is definitely becoming shaped and unique by what it experiences. Suppose the embryo is in a starving woman in Darfur. The scarcity and inadequacy of the nutrients she can provide the embryo is "felt" by the soul. When that soul returns to God, after whatever its length of life, that soul is shaped by privation in a different way than the soul of a well fed and nourished European woman, for example. One is not better or more worthy, it is just an example of how the body does not have to be self aware and developed to have an immediate impact on the shaping of the soul. And we also know that caffeine, prescription or illegal drug or alcohol use is also immediately transmitted to the embryo at its earliest stages. The soul is in there, being "shaped" by that experience.

The second thing that moderns know that ancients did not is that even a single cell embryo is directed by the incredible complexity of its individual genes. Even if the embryo has not yet grown its "blue eyes" the genes for blue eyes are going to work to make that happen. Thus the biology and temperament of the future adult is already present and active on an individual basis, baby by baby, embryo by embryo. And what if the baby is one of twins? The soul of the embryo is already "exposed" to closely proximate life from its earliest cellular life. That too "shapes" the soul.

This is why the Bible explains that God knows the person before they are born. They are an individual person with a growing temple that houses the soul from the moment of conception. God creates the soul and sends it to the body-its very temple-the moment the temple is made, which is conception and attachment to the womb with the first pulse of life. To use the car and passenger analogy, one is in the car from the very beginning of the journey, one does not pop into the car only when the car has reached thirty miles per hour. Think of the embryo being made, attaching and quickening as the moment when the car passenger first turns the car key and the car engine turns on. The car is on even though you have not yet left the driveway. An embryo has a soul the moment it exists and "turns on" by being viable, by demonstrating it is alive by performing its first cell division. That is why the Catholic Church is gravely disturbed by frozen embryos. While there is not yet a soul or "passenger" "trapped" in there, it is right on the edge of that happening, all the embryo needs is to be quickened to receive its soul. That should be both comforting and also deeply disturbing to you, if you think about it. Embryos are not to be trifled with.

So the soul is "aware" from its very arrival in the quickened embryo that has had its attachment to the womb and first cell division of life because it is instantly bathed in the experience of the physical reality of containment (the womb and the embryonic cell), the variety of substances of nutrients and otherwise it receives through the mother's placenta, including whether they are adequate or not, healthy or damaging, and also the genetic mandates that initiate growth in the entirely unique bodily temple, plus whether there is another life in the form of a sibling "on board." These are all experiences that do not require a body to be mature enough to be "self aware." The soul does not need a body with a brain, a heart, ears, eyes and limbs, or the ability to feel pain or not to experience life. I mean, duh, the soul is created in God's realm where there is no physical bodily reality at all yet. The soul "arrives" in the embryo having already experienced a material life formative event, which is feeling God's love and desire for the baby to live. So the very first thing that every pre born baby embryo soul feels is that this is a "wanted pregnancy," that God is the parent and loves the child. This is why babies cannot "understand" not being wanted, because every soul arrives with its first experience of being cradled and loved by God.

Thus if, sadly, there is a miscarriage, the soul returns to God with most assuredly a "personality" based on its bodily life temple experience. The soul of a miscarried deprived baby in the Sudan region of Darfur will have a different shaping than the soul of a baby who is miscarried because of a genetic flaw, or because the mother ingested substance, or because of a tragic accident to the mother. Each pre born baby has an already individualized soul from their totality of individual experience in the womb. Obviously babies that are aborted have that experience on the shapes of their souls, and they are comforted in heaven with "extra super duper" love and "you are wanted" in heaven to compensate and erase the rejection of them in life via abortion. They find themselves among those of the ancestors of their biological parents who are righteous and who have merited heaven, even if that has to go back some generations. The souls of babies who perish with their mothers each experience whatever those circumstances were, but are in the company of their mothers to heaven (hopefully for the mother, but a pregnancy is not a free ticket to heaven). Babies who are miscarried by parents who deeply loved them and for no fault of their own cannot thrive also carry with them to heaven the shaping of that parental love on their souls. So there is a wealth of "experience" that is different for every soul from the moment it arrives to the new embryo throughout pregnancy, and each is totally individual. That's how they tell each other apart in heaven, by the way, because each human is individual and different based on their experience throughout whatever the span of their life was, and so there is a "visible" uniqueness that is incredibly obvious to anyone in heaven even if the pre born infant had lived only for days, weeks, or months.

I hope this is helpful.