I also become convinced that since I am not an immortal immortal ghost living inside a body, when my body dies I will not escape death and live on in heaven, or the underworld, or the astral plane or anything of that sort. I think the Bible teaches that death is very real and it puts an end to our life. There is no conscious state of any sort immediately following death. There is noting at all. Of course, I am a Christian and I do believe in the resurrection of the dead, but that obviously doesn’t happen when a person dies, or I think somebody would have noticed by now.http://www.beretta-online.com/wordpress/index.php/luke-2343-and-soul-sleep/ Yes I too am convinced that I am a living soul, not that I have a separate part of me called a soul that goes somewhere when I die.
I have Joel Green's books very helpful on this topic. Here is an article that summaries one of this book which covers the issue of conditional immortality and the soul:
Adam has much in common with the animals. They are of the earth (Gen. 1:24). They have the breath of life (Gen. 6:17; 7:15,22). They are living souls (Gen. 1:21, 24, 30). Stone concludes: “No exegetical justification exists for finding here the notion of abstract, immortal, disembodied personhood that we usually mean when we speak of the “soul” (p59).
This does not reduce humanity to the level of brute beast. It does, however, recognise that physicality is a vital element to human existence. It is wrong to distinguish the “physical” from the “spiritual”. The fate of all creation hinges on human destiny; a truly human person is a social person; humanity stands responsible to obey God’s word and is called to be his “image” before creation, but none of this requires an “immortal soul” or “substance dualism”. Neuroscience then, far from undermining Christian belief, encourages a closer reading of the text and supports the biblical view of human person-hood.
