'soul': the spiritual principle embodied in human beings.
I didn't think that I had a 'spiritual principle'. I prided myself on pure intellect and logical thinking and 'spiritual' things didn't make any sense to me. I discounted spiritual matters as emotional matters and I had made myself as unemotional as I could in order to avoid having emotions interfere with my rationality of thought. When I began reading the bible differently, I no longer saw contradictions of logic, but paradox after paradox. Being confronted with paradox forces one's mind to think ABOVE logic but not against it. For example, examine the statement, "Never less alone than when alone". If you break this sentence down into its components, logically it cannot make sense. Yet this phrase describes a very real type of individual; it is describing a person who considers himself to be his own best company. It tells of an individual who is content to spend hours lost in his own thoughts. You have to examine the paradox in the context of what you know to be true about human nature in order to understand it. It is assumed by the author that the reader will not be ignorant of this information.
All the way from beginning to end, the bible contains paradoxes that push one's mind to look beyond what is written to that which is being implied. Skeptics view these paradoxes as errors but if they are indeed errors, they are consistent in the writings of the more than 40 men who authored the books of the bible. I find it strange that men who were intelligent and literate enough to write in that early time could be so ignorant of their own culture and religion to have made mistake after mistake after mistake in issues regarding it. Instead, I think it is more probable that the skeptics are ignorant of the matters about which these men wrote and unable to grasp their culture and way of thinking. Many of these alleged errors are due to poor reading comprehension and the inability to grasp what is being said within the context of the whole.
Some of these paradoxes are presented as a unit, making them unlikely errors. For example, Proverbs 26:4-5 states, "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit." A contradiction in logic would render these two statements as meaningless but there is a truth to be found in them (See "The Games Skeptics Play"). Other paradoxes are not so obvious and do not occur in close proximity to each other.
