The Burr in the Burgh

How heavy is your soul? Well, I guess that depends on what you've been feeding it. Not really.

There was a dark and depressing movie a while back called 21 Grams. The title is supposed to be based on a notion that that is how much lighter weight the human body becomes just after the moment of death. Sound crazy?

Apparently, a scientist once conducted studies to determine if the human soul could be empirically measured. He built a super-sensitive scale and laid a number of dying patient on it until they finally expired. Then he took note of any change in their weight. He supposedly took into account all the different variables and concluded that there is a slight change, though it differed somewhat from person to person. Not uniformly 21 grams, in other words. So I guess some people do have heavier souls than others, eh?

Interestingly, when he performed the same experiment upon dogs, there was no change in weight. That only makes senes because God only breathed the breath (spirit) of life into man.

I am writing this tongue-in-cheek because my Christian understanding of the spiritual nature of man is that the spirit is immaterial, as in, not generally having the characteristics of matter, nor being ordinarily perceptible by the five human senses.

Oh, this scientist's studies have been discredited and rejected but . . . it is interesting.