Presumably, each of those bodies is as entitled to call itself the “original” as we are. So that immediately raises the question of what is the relationship between my spirit and my copy’s spirit.

In fact, why should we any longer assume that there is one spirit per body? Maybe the better analogy is “spirit is to person as mind is to neuron”. Maybe the spirit is a collective property of ALL of the copies and variants the way the mind is a collective property associated with the entire brain.

I’ve written more about this at “http://thefirestillburning.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/youve-read-this-post-before/”. I think it leads to certain concepts of Mormon theology, like pre-existence, in a way that more naturally bridges the physical and spiritual divide in our thinking.

If a spirit has two eyes and ten fingers, it most definitely has parts. Those are parts. If those parts are separable, then one tends to need a tri-partite model to have the core part of a spirit be intrinsically individual and eternal, unless one is willing to consider a relatively high level of intelligence to one or more of the component particles / atoms / etc, the way Orson Pratt did.

My perspective is that regardless of what a spirit birth means, a tripartite model is very defensible and if you have a tripartite model you need some sort of organization. Maybe the analogy to biology is indefensible, despite its popularity, but something was going on. That’s why the two points I mention above are important.

Matt, I don’t think spirits being eternal entails they have no parts. That seems to privilege substance too much. However to just throw out an other example, consider a pattern in matter that is so strong in its pattern that it is permanent. The parts constituting the pattern may change but the pattern itself is permanent. Logically there’s nothing wrong with such an idea which then means your logic isn’t valid.

I do agree that folks get too caught up on the minutiae of words. Not only do the source records not provide that level of detail but I think we err if we parse Joseph’s words that carefully. He wasn’t writing as a philosopher after all. He’s speaking in a more loose vernacular. As a wise man once said, there’s usually much less to a person’s words than meets the eye.

It’s interesting no one noted how silly all this discussion seems. I think the big problem is that these questions just lead to silly sounding ideas. My personal opinion is that most early 19th century views of spirits weren’t particularly unique to Mormons but were the standard folk way people viewed spirits (as opposed to the educated theologians of Europe). Spirits (including angels and ghosts) were largely anthropomorphic and their “immateriality” wasn’t an ontological one but more akin to the difference between a gas and a solid. Some philosophers like Telesio in the Renaissance started taking such ideas seriously (during era of blowback against Scholastic philosophy) but by and large there was always a big divide between folk traditions (often tied to purported first person encounters) and theology.

Given the history of Mormonism’s origins in first person religious experience and folk traditions I don’t think the evolution of our spirit theology is particularly surprising. Nor particularly novel.

As for your second question, maybe I can do a quick search of Joseph’s usage of the terms and see what I can find, as it’s an interesting question.

I think your point in this post is a good one, that we have to accept that maybe Joseph did not have a fully fleshed out theological concept of our spiritual pre-mortality. At the time it was incredible enough that we knew we existed before we got here. To add to the fact that Joseph may not have figured all this out, we can also state that judging by the many variations in the sermons we have from Joseph (KFD for example), it is difficult to determine what Joseph actually did say on the subject, to a certain extent.

With my interest in spirit birth, I vaguely think that a spirit is the reproductive offspring of resurrected beings. Does this provide some possible explanation for the anthropomorphic form of spirit bodies? I kinda think it does, but I am no good at expressing such things. I would be interested in your thoughts.