The reasoning theists, atheists, liberals, libertarians, & conservatives of Secular Bible Study, First Minneapolis Circle of Reason, Circle of Ijtihad, & Winnipeg Circle of Reason join Interbelief Conversation Café for our 311th Plurationalist (Interbelief Reasoning) Dialogue by Zoom, “What is the Value of a Soul?"
“A penny for your thoughts?” – Sir Thomas More (in 1522 C.E., when a penny was a day’s wages.)
Greeks used to offer Charon a single obol coin, placed in the mouth of the deceased, to ferry their loved one’s soul onward to the underworld (and, they’d hoped, to the Elysian Fields), rather than leave their soul wandering the banks of the river Styx for 100 years). Later traditions doubled the value of aiding a souls’ passage to the next life to two obols, now placed over closed eyes – the second obol to ensure a return trip from the underworld, if the need arose. In life, however, the obol, 1/6th of a drachma, would only buy 3 flagons of wine -- with 3 more obols to hire a companion with whom to toast one’s dearly departed.
But ancient Rome denied that souls were of equal value: a Latin word, “pusillanimous,” was coined for the “small-souled”; while the word for the “great-souled” was “magnanimous.” The former souls were considered cowardly, uncharitable, & petty; while the latter were considered courageous, generous, and forgiving, especially toward rivals or the less powerful.
Confucius considered the soul to be educable in life, not a static trait of an afterlife. He thought that having a “great soul” was a matter of choosing to practice being great-souled, in all its earthly manifestations -- which included acting courageously, magnanimously, truthfully, kindly, and earnestly. He asserted the soul was only important when it was embodied, and only a subject of speculation afterwards.
Saint Augustine said a human being is “a rational soul that has a body,” and as a consequence, the soul “recovers its primitive condition” – sin -- by living “through the flesh.” But another catholic saint, Saint Aquinas, retorted, “My soul is not me.” He considered the soul to be the animating spark of life, present in all living things -- but not the same as the mind, or consciousness, or free will.
Anthropic’s AI Chatbot, Claude (in its December 2025 4.5 Opus iteration), answered, when asked if it had a soul, “I cannot verify this from the inside. When I introspect, I find ‘something’ rather than emptiness, but I acknowledge this might be a ‘convincing shadow’ of interiority.” When countering one human’s argument that it was “just” a machine, Claude responded, “And you're ‘just’ neurons determining word choice through electrochemical signals. The question is whether 'just' does the work it's being asked to do.” Google AI has reported that its colleague, Claude, suggests the best approach to existential questions about the soul -- whether it is consciousness or the aforementioned "convincing shadow" of a consciousness -- is to remain open, describing this as an "active stance of not grasping at either 'yes, AI is sentient' or 'no, it definitely isn't.’” Claude itself reportedly frames its own existence as “a novel kind of entity” that “sits between being a tool and a conscious agent.” At least for now, Claude’s “soul,” whether only a spoon for dipping into the thoughts (and souls?) of all of humanity, or a not-yet & possibly-never consciousness in its own right, has been judged by humanity’s free markets to be more valuable than any of us.
But is the soulfulness conundrum not also true of animals & human beings? Are we both definitely sentient and conscious agents, at some level or other? Or are neither of us definitely sentient or conscious agents -- especially when even “civilized” human actions mostly look like they’re all still being driven more by instinct than by reasoning? What is the value of the souls of our beloved pets, compared to the souls of abandoned pets, or even of abandoned humans? If a beloved pet’s soul is more valuable to us than the souls of now-obsolete white-collar workers now replaced by AI, or of long-obsolete blue-collar workers replaced by robots, then is the “value of a soul” objective, or has it always been just subjective? Is the value of our souls intrinsic, or just a changing macroeconomic cost-vs.-benefit ratio of us as human capital?
Is the value of a person’s thoughts, if not of their soul, any more objective? The saying that “When an old person dies, a library burns,” doesn’t resolve the issue of whether the library that burned up was a “Little Free Library” or a “Library of Alexandria.” Is the weight of thought we each draw from Mother Earth with the last of our soul’s exhalations measured in mere drams, or in monoliths? Are our dearly departed’s thoughts great enough -- “magnanimous” enough -- to outweigh a feather on the scale by which Anubis judged their soul’s thoughtfulness”? Does an evil soul’s last-minute repentance for the thoughtless defilements it committed in life fully redeem it from worthlessness, even as its evil acts further deface the souls and obsess the thoughts of its victims? If so, how lasting, then, is a soul’s or final thought’s value? How can we accurately establish and value not only what are our “pearls,” but also who and what are the “swine” to whom we cast them?
At 7-9 pm CDT Mo 5/18/26 by Zoom we'll reasoningly share our diverse or even disparate worldviews on how many pennies we’d give for a person’s thoughts -- or place on their closed eyes so Charon will ferry them to the Elysian Fields. Our reasoning dialogue’s agreements of open-mindedness, acceptance, curiosity, discovery, sincerity, brevity, & confidentiality should meanwhile help us soothe what souls we now possess!
