Still trying to figure this out.

Why does the music of PJ Harvey connect with my soul so much?

Speaking of souls, I've been reading this book called "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" by the world's leading expert on language and the mind, Steven Pinker. His studies and conclusions reject these three notions that have developed over the past four hundred years (post-Renaissance/Enlightenment and forward): The Blank Slate (the notion that the mind is a "tabla rasa", a scraped tablet, that is entirely formed and conditioned by the experiences of life), the Noble Savage (that pre-civilized man was a more decent creature before the affects of civilization and [to a greater degree] industrialization/modernization/Westernization), and the Ghost in the Machine (essentially, the fact that we have a soul).

What he says is amazingly convincing and well-thought out. But the idea that we don't have a soul, something part of us that lives on after the body is dead, as has been believed for milllenia by traditional cultures and even by our modern cultures, is a rather depressing and troubling thought for me. But I reject it roundly. Not simply because I've always believed we have souls and just could never imagine thinking otherwise, or even that it destroys everything I believe in terms of my Christian faith, but mostly because I don't see how the belief in an afterlife and a non-material, immortal part of our being--something that has been believed, as I have said, for millenia--could be so easily proven "wrong" by current scientific understanding of how the mind works. So that is my statement.

PJ Harvey, you touch my soul. More importantly, I still believe in Jesus.