religion and your views on your dolls.

Dolls are not alive. They were created from man-made chemicals.
They do not speak. They do not eat. They do not need air or light,
they cannot move on their own. They do not require sleep and do
not have a brain or heart or other working bodily functions.
They do not feel pain or any other human emotion. If they did then
imagine the amount of "suffering" many dolls would feel after being
sanded, carved, modded.......dipped into boiled water and sprayed
with toxic sealers!

The emotions you feel from your doll are from your own imagination
and the personality you gave it reflecting back to you.
Creating characters and giving them "life" does not make them alive.
If your characters are "human" they need the following components
to be deemed "alive": brain, heart, internal organs...

Comparing the creation of physical things like buildings and entire
cities because they stemmed from ones imagination? These things
required actual work....they did not just suddenly appear!

If you actually think you can make your doll alive by giving it a name
character and "history" that requires A LOT of magical thinking.....&
if it were actually true or possible don't you think there are far better
uses, uses that could help the world, then simply "breathing life" into
your doll?

I believe that ALL things have energy. But energy is not a soul or spirit.
I value life, people, animals, plants....our planet is alive...dolls are just
lovely chunks of plastic. Please don't confuse wanting your doll to be
alive with it actually being so. But if it is then by all means prove it to us!

edit: I agree with you on many points yumi, except the bible says
that ALL living things are souls. Not just humans. The world has perverted
the meaning of Soul so that people no longer know or believe what it
actually means.....the bible never says our Soul goes to heaven when we
die. It says "God created Adam, and he was a Soul"
Now because I have admitted to believing in God and religion, my whole
post....no matter how relevant it may have been before will get picked to
death. But sometimes we need to stand up for our beliefs, even if it means
being attacked.

 

A doll is just a doll and religious subjects always get into horrible, horrible arguements. I should know, I get frustrated with them :p
Something could be 'using' a doll, perhaps, but if I put a bunch of plastic/resin/glass together and made it look humanoid doesn't mean it gets a soul.

 

Yumi: You shouldn't use this forum to preach religious idealogy in this way.

All of the things you have said here are not fact- they are your opinion. I don't have the right to tell you what you think is wrong, but neither do you have to right to inflict your personal beliefs on anybody else. It's fine to describe the way you see the world, but to do it in such a dictatorial way is offensive to me.
I am an atheist- not only do I not personally believe in God, I don't accept the possibility of His existence. However, I do not, and would never, tell a Christian or other religious person what to believe, and in return, I would not expect myself to be told what to believe. Please respect the opinions of those around you, especially as many of the things you have written are controversial and fundamentalist at best, and theologically and scientifically unsound at worst. For example, if we were to get into a theological debate, I could tell you that actually Lucifer can claim responsibility for our knowledge, as he enticed Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and therefore humans became "as God".
Anyway, this is highly OT and I aplogise to the Mods for that.

 

That's because debating whether a doll has a soul is ridiculous.
Honestly these types of threads simply keep repeating the same
answers/replies: yes I think my doll is alive! No, your doll isn't &
neither is mine! You said the word Soul and brought up religion..
I'm so upset now!

The last "do our dolls have souls?" debate got completely out of
hand. If I want to believe my doll is "special" and can communicate
with me I'll either keep it a wonderful little secret or try to prove MY
doll is THAT special. I certainly wouldn't need validation that other's
believe the same thing.

edit: sorry but how is yumi "inflicting" anyone with her beliefs any more
than ALL the posters saying THIS is the best doll...or that company stinks..
or yada yada......just because it's religious it's somehow worse than any
other opinion stressed on the forum? When I don't believe something and
deem it only an opinion, which cannot be proved or disproved I don't go
around saying "you can't tell me YOUR opinion because it bothers ME and
detracts from my own beliefs!!"
Don't call me a hypocrite...this is the ONLY form in which I will argue my
own beliefs.....Dolls don't have souls!!!! *waits for this thread to be closed*

But if you really don't believe in God then aren't you getting upset over
nothing but an opinion about air?

 

I think this is an interesting discussion, and I would like to see it continue, but as you said religion is a tricky subject. I enjoy hearing everyone's different points of view, but we obviously need to keep in mind that we don't believe in the same things and that it's alright that we don't believe in the same things. I think if we're going to have this discussion, we should try not to come off like we are attacking other people's beliefs and instead just state why our religion/belief system makes us see things in a different way. Yes I'm probably being horribly oversensitive, but it's a very personal subject and it's easy to feel like your beliefs are being attacked if somebody says something the wrong way.

(Now that I'm done being the sensitivity police,) I like the concept of dreams. I'm in the "dolls come alive when you treat them like they are alive" camp. I have a very active imagination and I like to make up stories and characters, and to me those characters are as real as I am because they are a part of me. It's the same with my dolls; they have the personalities that I see in them, even if it's not the one I originally had planned, and they are "alive" because I am. An extension of myself. Something like that.

As for my religious beliefs, I'm agnostic. This does not mean I am undecided about whether I believe in a God or souls or not, it means that I don't think I can really ever know if they exist (until I die I guess), for I am only a puny human. Basically, "There are more things on Heaven and Earth then are dreamt of in your philisophy, Horatio."

(That is my personal belief (how many times have I said belief now?), it is totally okay if you believe something different as long as you don't try to force me to believe what you believe.) (Politically correct police away!)

 

rkold and Kim have pretty much summarized my views on this.

I will say that I knew a couple that had a test-tube baby. They took their own biological material (the mothers own egg) and once the embryo was viable it was implanted into her womb and she carried the baby and gave birth. To compare that to naming a resin doll and putting a wig on it and eyes in it is a little...off. I find it surprising especially since you state you are a Wiccan and it is my understanding that it is a religion and the embraces and celebrates women (the mother just being one of the many faces of the goddess). So, others with similar religous veiws as your own might feel strongly that it is NOT that same thing. My point is just to show you the other side of the coin, why others may not believe as you do. Regardless, I wouldn't let it bother you that others do not feel the way you do. Everyone is different and has different ways of seeing things.

 

You made a very good point, hopefully it won't be lost.
Stating ones beliefs is not forcing someone into believing
them. It's simply giving their POV.
No different then going into a thread and seeing someone
say THIS is the BEST SCULPT or company EVER.
You could tell me one million times how great it is, but I'm
not going to believe you based on your opinion alone. I'll
do my own research. If hearing the words religion and God
upset people so much, which IMO is sad, then stay clear of
threads titled " religion" & "Soul"!!

edit: people always say religion has no place on this forum..
but there have been plenty of threads discussing it. Wouldn't
the MODS completely block/delete/close them if it were really
viewed as wrong?

 

rkold, I had both to laugh and admit to myself that you are so right . A doll doesn't need constant care.

And from here to the topic: the doll doesn't need constant care says it all. Whether it has a soul, or not - and I think both opinions/beliefs have the right to exist - doesn't interfere with our own plans. We can love the doll, but if we need our time for something else, the doll will wait patiently on its shelf, or in the dollhouse, or in the box. And while it might be possible for a doll to be a vessel for a soul, it might be true as well that not all dolls are intended to be one.

firefly5003, I believe in mind too. And in souls

Kiyakotari, I agree with you that religion, (or faith, or ethics, or even philosophy) is a psychological - or social - tool. Sadly, it is something we often prefer to forget because it makes us feel even less in control. I do not think that it is impossible to believe while knowing that it is one, though. Humans are capable of willingly accepting a dogma - or let's call it an axiom - be it "there is a God", "there is no God", "there is a soul", "only science can prove what exists" etc.

silveraura, the bicycle comparison doesn't prove the mind (as in "brain") aspect wrong, - if I remember what I learned at the university right, the "muscles memory" is actually mostly depending on the cerebellum, which is a part of the brain. Or mind .
By the way, my own religious opinions are not that far from Wiccan, so I can see where you are coming from. I just think that everybody has to make their own choice and that it is as legitimate to believe a doll has a soul as to think it is an inanimate object. There is no absolute truth. Thinking this way, my religion doesn't interfere with my hobby. Don't feel hurt by others saying that the dolls have no soul or are just objects, they do not intend to hurt you with these words.
Also, I don't know the right way to say encouraging words in a language that is foreign for me, but I wish you well and may Her healing hand touch you.

 

In certain religious movements it's frowned upon to idolise objects. Saying a doll has a soul and/or feelings and should be treated like a person would be a no-no within that context. You have all sorts of opinions with and without roots in religion.

 

It's a complete nonissue for me. IMO dolls are objects. They don't have souls. Of course, I'm an atheist so I don't even believe in souls, so none of the arguments about ensoulment particularly matter to me anyway.

I also don't think anyone has a right to tell me how I ought to treat objects that I have purchased. I'm an adult and nobody here is my mother.

 

I have no problem at all with talking about God, souls or religion- in fact I often attend faith-based debates because I enjoy discussing these things and finding out about how people see the world. But I don't enjoy religious viewpoints being shoved down my throat, or religion being presented as fact.
And I very rarely see anyone say "This is the best sculpt ever" without prefacing it with the words "I think". I believe in respecting other people's opinions and giving your own in a respectful manner (unless I'm seriously provoked).

 

I agree with the both of you, souls are not something that man can't make. And what ever personality that our doll's my have exists only within our heads. Anything that we concentrate out energy on is going to give energy back and seems alive to us. In essences it's our passion for something that makes it alive, but that doesn't make it living. I hope that made sense.

 

Sorry, it was the only example I could think of at the moment.
Unfortunately I have seen posts claiming a particular company
or line of dolls to be the best, and without an IMO at the end.

I simply found the comments about test-tube babies and people
in vegetative states rather crude. And a complete lack of knowledge
in regards to what Alive actually means.

Yes. And people feel love and sadness for someone who is dead.
Or sympathy for a stranger. It's our human emotions. Something
dolls neither have nor can they express.

 

This would be pretty much how I see it. I know they're inanimate objects, but they do have more emotional value to me because they are characters that I see as more than merely fictional, because they are alive in my head and I'm capable of feeling empathy or sympathy for their emotions. I'm an atheist who believes that we are a collection of our perceptions, not seeing reality as it is anyways, so I value my imagination. But I don't think I have a soul, and I certainly don't think my dolls do. If you get into quantum physics and such, the mind is a truly odd and wonderful thing, wondrous enough for me without needing any deities dictating anything.

I'm also loving the dream/dreamers idea. Very well put, and it works well with my own world view.

But that's the thing with my particular set of beliefs. Everybody's truth is going to be different. That's going to trickle down to smaller things like how we interact with our dolls, which is always fundamentally going to be an individual and essentially private thing. If people want to treat their dolls like their children, I have no problem with that, just as I'd never look down on somebody who simply displays their dolls. There's no one way to treat a child, a doll, or a can of soup -- well, you're pretty limited on what you can do with the can of soup, but hey.

 

The way I play with a toy is completely unrelated to my faith. Besides, the God I believe in has better things to do than worry about dolls

 

Not to be OT, but my problem with Yumi's post is she/he rather obviously DOES believe in a specific religion. If you believe in the Bible and you believe in Jesus coming back, you are a Christian. You might not be a specific subset sect, but you are a Christian. There is nothing wrong with being a Christian, but her post comes off as acting like this is the only choice if you believe in God.

Personally, I don't really get the obsession with people who think their dolls have "souls" with converting the rest of us to this belief. I've seen a lot of threads wondering how someone can keep their dolls in a box or not have their doll as their bestest friend. I don't really want a doll as my spouse, child, or BFF, I prefer a live person.

 

I see your point rkold. I likely would have avoided this thread if it wasn't
for the feeling that the OP is trying to tell us that ALL DOLLS HAVE SOULS
or SPIRITS. Because that goes against my own religious beliefs.

Feel free to say "MY doll has a Soul!" all you want. But please don't
try to tell me they all do.

It would be nice to hear more from the OP though, because I'm really
curious about her reasons for believing dolls have souls or spirits.
Where do these so called souls come from? Most people who believe
in Souls believe they were people who left their bodies (not my belief)
and then what is the purpose of said soul in doll? Is it there for eternity?
Does it feel pain? Or merely express "emotion"? How can you tell your
doll has a soul? Is it simply a feeling? Thinking your doll "looks so alive!"
isn't a good basis for taking the leap of dolly possession. Which IS what
you're saying.

 

I think this "debate" is very interesting, if only to hear others viewpoints about their dolls. However, as others have said, matters of faith aren't really debatable. (That's why faith is called faith, after all! Either you believe or you do not. End of story.)

However, if people are going to treat this topic as a debate, think it would be reasonable to back up any statements claimed as FACT with evidence. The statement above is not supported by one shred of evidence, and it has no business being stated as fact. There are numerous forums where people can go back and forth ad nauseum about the topic of evolution. A doll forum is not the right place for these statements, however.

 

Wow, this thread kinda exploded. I'm going to try to be as non-dramatic in my response as possible.

I am Christian, and I am also a doll lover. The two are unrelated. Like some people here, I also believe the Bible is the Word of God and is the ultimate authority over my life.
However, I have to admit that sometimes my dolls feel alive to me. But I think the reason is mostly because it is a projection of my own ideas, emotions, and personality onto them. My characters are precious to me, so these dolls become precious to me. My dolls don't actually whisper, or act frugal, or prefer sleeping under the stars.... that is how I imagined them to be like. I feel that my own spirit is within them, in a way that my love and energy and time resides in them. They do not have souls, because they are objects.

A doll is simply a representation of the human form, nothing else.

Edit: This is why I have in my signature the quote "he who dies with the most toys is still dead." It is a constant reminder to me that constantly acquiring "stuff" will never make me truly happy. Only Jesus can fulfill me in that way, and I need to be cautious of empty collecting.