When a person sins, does their body sin? Of course, it's a part of the whole person. The body dies, and the wages of sin is death.
When a person sins, does their soul sin? Of course, it's a part of the whole person. The soul dies, and the wages of sin is death.

So when anyone dies, Christian or non-Christian, their soul will die. You do not go to heaven. You do not become an angel. You do not go to a waiting place and hang out with everyone else. You do not experience past memories. You do not float around the world. You do not haunt your house or your grave. You just die.

Ezekiel 18:4
Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the soul who sins shall die.

Also translated as "the person who sins shall die", but that still means you die. If you are a soul, the soul dies. All of you dies.

Ecclesiastes 9:5-6 & 9:10
For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished, and forever they have no more share in all that is done under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

Sheol, or grave, is our common destination. And there is nothing there. We do not think, experience, or even wait.

Psalm 115:17
The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence.

Yet again, the dead do not do anything, even praise the Lord.

Many shy away from the Old Testament, so here is a good New Testament passage.

1 Thessalonians 4:16
For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.

The dead in Christ rise. If they were in heaven, they would not rise, but they would descend. Instead, the dead, even the dead in Christ, are still in the grave/Sheol. See Daniel 12:1-2 for proof that my interpretation is correct.

Believing that your soul immortal is contradictory to scripture. The first temptation is that we shall not die. Then when we were kicked out of the garden, God comments on how we did not eat the tree of life and would not live forever. Believing in our own immortality is idolatry. God promised eternal life with a resurrection, not a blissful existence in a non-physical space.

Txgangsta :  You do realize that the idea of "soul sleep" is a Jehovah's Witnesses and a Seventh Day Adventist concept, both of whom are considered cults or false Christians and also, it is not a biblical concept.

SoL@R :

First, that's an ad hominem. You can't dismiss my argument because heathens also teach it. Did you know Muslims teach that Jesus is existed?

Second, 7th Day Adventist are Trinitarians that believe salvation is by grace through faith in Christ Jesus the crucified. They're not a cult. They put unnecessary emphasis on Saturday as the Sabbath, but that doesn't make them a cult. Upon their founding, yes, they were a cult. They are no longer.

Third, those denominations teach annihilationism. They don't teach what I just posted. I think the soul and body still exist, but they simply exist as dead. Upon resurrection, they are given new life, eternal life, as one, unified person, similar to how we are alive now as one unified person. Jehovah's Witness and 7th Day Adventist require a literal "new creation" because the things existing no longer exist. They also believe that hell is a 2nd cessation of existence, but much more permanent. This is not my view either.

Fourth, this is absolutely a biblical concept. That's why I posted bible verses. I even got a new testament verse in there for people that think the NT has authority over the OT.

Fifth, the belief in the immortality of the soul is not simply a Platonic corruption of the truth, but it is the first temptation in the garden. "You will not surely die..." We'll live forever, conscious forever? No. I claim that we die, and die hard. This is the only real definition of death. "Just my body dies, but I go to heaven" is not death. I am the sinner, and the wages of sin is death, therefore I die. Everything that is considered my personal identity is dead. Body, soul, spirit, consciousness, whatever. It's dead because I, wholly I, am a sinner. Believing opposite is the original temptation.

Sixth, I love you Solar!

SoL@R :

Hey! Respond!

Any body? Bueller? Bueller?

Come on, I challenge the entire tradition of Christian afterlife. This should get everyone's panties in a wad.

SoL@R :

Golly, way to copy paste! Here are the main problems (but there are certainly more issues).

First, we are not souls. If you were a soul and I chopped off your hand, you would tell the court that "I hurt you". Not that I damaged your property, but that I attacked your person. More importantly are the biblical concepts. Sexual immorality includes not only adultery of the heart, but also the acts we do with our bodies. Virginity, such as with Mary, is something to do entirely with the body. If she is "the Virgin Mary", we are saying her physical body is attached to her personal identity. Resurrection is also the most important thing in Christianity. Jesus rising from the grave is the crux of our entire belief. The truth that we all receive new bodies tells us God believes us (personal identity) incomplete without them.

An important verse couplet is 1 Corinthians 3:16 and 6:19. They say, respectively:

Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in your midst?
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;

So I (personal identity) am God's temple, and my body is God's temple. These are equivalent statements! And lets not even start with Genesis...

Second, since I'm not an annihilationist, I do believe that we continue to exist in an unconscious state. The soul is indestructible. The matter that constructs my body does not poof away out of existence, and I don't think the soul does either. I simply believe both die. My current organization, which is an intimate attachment of body and soul, is fractured by the loss of life. To be absent the body and home with the Lord does not imply consciousness. Ask a husband if he would rather go to work or sleep next to his wife. The answer is obvious. 

Third, the thief on the cross needs no punctuation change to create problems for a non-soul-sleeper. Did Jesus go to hell for 3 days, or did he go to paradise with the thief? The answer is easy with soul sleep. Relative to the thief, it's the same day. The thief's next conscious day is Resurrection day, and Jesus will be there with him. Otherwise you have to invent this crazy system of prison/paradise where Jesus and the thief are separated by a gate or something, yet can see each other through it. That's kind ridiculous, and totally not scripture.

Fourth, in Sheol, the spirit is dead. Sheol means grave. Ecclesiastes passages let us know that nothing goes on in Sheol. When it talks about everlasting bliss and everlasting damnation, it is talking post-Resurrection. Resurrection seems to be really important to God. Our souls do not receive the reward or punishment, but our whole being does, including bodies.

Fifth, our bromance is everlasting!

Txgangsta :  Yes, sorry about the copy-paste thing.  I always write my long posts in Notepad or Wordpad first for the fear of a drop in my internet connection, for then I have to start all over again of course.  I then just copy and paste my Notepad post in the forum post window, so that's why my format looks a bit funky.  

Are we reading the same bible?  Did you actually read my post?  C'mon there's solid arguments there!  Get with the system!
Here's a question for you.  Why is the doctrine of soul sleep important to you?  How will my belief in that change or have an effect on my life?
Just curious.

SoL@R :

Why is this important? Well, it's true, and truth is important. But it's also important because it allows Christians to mesh with science and allows us to humble ourselves before our just deaths. It's important in evangelism and our own edification.

The best arguments you made, in my opinion, were "we are souls, not bodies" and 1 Peter 3:19. The rest of them are confusions between simple soul sleep and anihilationism. I already addressed the first one, showing that it creates difficulties to deny our bodies as our selves with many Christian concepts, but also showed where Paul says our bodies are ourselves. I didn't address 1 Peter 3:19... mainly because that's the most difficult one.

So 1 Peter 3:18-20 reads "For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous,that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water."

That's all one giant sentence. I've gone through multiple Greek commentary books and no one touches this passage. It's really important, it's really profound, it really gives lots of metaphysical info and is the only passage describing Jesus while in the grave. So why don't they touch it? It's a giant run-on that no one can make sense of.

Here's my hope. I don't know Greek. I can't find people who know Greek that will even do commentary on this passage. But here's my hope: the word "Christ" here is not nominative, but genitive. In Greek (and Latin) both verbs and nouns are conjugated (although the nouns are called "declensions"). Nominative is like "the dog"; genitive is like "from the dog" or "of dog". If "Christ" is nominative, then it is Christ who proclaims to the spirits in prison, and I have to give up biblical inherency or soul sleep.

However, if "Christ" is genitive, then something else is the noun that proclaimed to the spirits in prison. I hope to argue that "suffered" is nominative. This would make the translation go more like "The suffering of Christ was once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, bringing us to God by being put to death in the flesh but then made alive in spirit, in which it proclaimed to the spirits in prison because they did not formerly obey...."

But I don't know Greek. So I don't know. The fact that the sentence starts with "for Christ" makes me question. So if you know Greek, correct me.