About Souls & Akuma-kun

I have been thinking about souls, and tonight, I had a chance to talk about this, with a person who was raised in France and had studied in a Catholic school for five years. He told me that animals do not have souls, as professor Philips mentioned in the class, and that the laughter is the evidence for someone having a soul, as explained in one of the Simpsons's episodes.
    It is a little bit difficult for me to understand the definition of the soul in the way that is understood by the people who have Christianity background. For me souls are something that are in the animals including human beings. I guess this was the same idea that people in ancient Rome had, because the word for 'soul' in Latin is 'anima' and from this the word 'animal (living creature)' had been derived. However, apparently the concept had been changed with time and the word soul is started to be used to differentiate humans from other creatures.
    It, relatively, makes sense to distinguish human beings and other animals by whether to laugh or not. I have never seen any creatures laugh like humans except apes(Chimps, Other Apes Laugh Like People.). I am impressed how people could notice the difference between them. Also, the person that I have talked told me an interesting story about a debate over whether native Americans have souls or not, during the Age of Exploration (Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1547) - Digital History).
    I assume that for a religion such as Christianity, they needed to categorise humans into a different group to teach people about morals, because, to me, animals do not really have a rational mind to control their behaviour.
   This, soul, is a quite interesting concept, so I would love to study more when I have time.


The top picture is a game package for Akuma-kun which was the originally a comic by Shigeru Mizuki. The boy in the middle with a card is the main character, Akuma-kun. A man next to him who is in a suit, is Mefist II. To my surprise, there is a character called Doctor Faust II. He is the old man with lots of white hair with a green cloak. He is the principal of the Mienai Gakkou (Invisible School).

Akuma-kun has to save the world from bad devils with the helps of the good devils that he calls from the devildom using magic circle.
    I remember the theme song of this animation and believe that I used to watch this, however, the stories seem so new to me and interesting. I would love to watch this again and see what kind of features had been adopted from the original 'Faust'.

Coming up next . . .

OK, I know nobody likes Saturday classes but I just work here, I don't make the rules. To try to make everyone happy and continue with our study of classical English literature, I'd like to show you the two "Simpsons" episodes that deal with selling one's soul. Bart sells his soul to Milhouse Van Houten for $5 (kaching!) while Homer sells his for (what else?) a donut.

I'm looking forward to Saturday's discussion. I think we had a nice one today, don't you?

about "Faust"

I don't know where to start with "Faust" here. Maybe I'll just google "Faust" on the Internet. First comes up Wikipedia (why am I not surprised?) with sublinks to Goethe's Faust and the French opera. The Wikipedia page has two different disambiguation pages, one for "Faust" and the other for "Faustus". But since Faustus is a name of other persons, I'll just link the page about Dr. Faustus here. Anyway, that's how important and influential this story is in world literature. The "Faustian Bargain" (or deal with the Devil) has another Wikipedia entry. It also has an entry in the standard folktale type index used by folklorists. There's even a faust.com page about the legend. The Wikipedia page about Marlowe's play probably has more than you wanted to know about the play, including arguments scholars still have about its religious meaning, and the different ways it can be interpreted. Let me quote a little of that section of the page:

The theological implications of Doctor Faustus have been the subject of considerable debate throughout the last century. Among the most complicated points of contention is whether the play supports or challenges the Calvinist doctrine of absolute predestination, which dominated the lectures and writings of many English scholars in the latter half of the sixteenth century. According to Calvin, predestination meant that God, acting of his own free will, elects some people to be saved and others to be damned — thus, the individual has no control over his own ultimate fate. This doctrine was the source of great controversy because it was seen by the so-called anti-Calvinists to limit man's free will in regard to faith and salvation, and to present a dilemma in terms of theodicy. At the time Doctor Faustus was performed, this doctrine was on the rise in England, and under the direction of Puritan theologians at Cambridge and Oxford had come to be considered the orthodox position of the Church of England.[16] Nevertheless, it remained the source of vigorous and, at times, heated debate between Calvinist scholars, such as William Whitaker and William Perkins, and anti-Calvinists, such as William Barrett and Peter Baro.[17] The dispute between these Cambridge intellectuals had quite nearly reached its zenith by the time Marlowe was a student there in the 1580s, and likely would have influenced him deeply, as it did many of his fellow students.[18]

I'm looking for a good video to post here, but as I said, it's a pity that this "Liz and Dick" vehicle is the only major film version of Marlowe's "Tragical Historie of Dr. Faustus", one of the most influential plays in history. Here's a video of part of a college production (Burton's film was almost a college production, too): Someone posted an entire video of the complete stage play, but I didn't watch through the whole thing. One of the comments reads:

The entire first scene is wasted the acoustics are so bad. The actors shout instead of project their voices. The play is actually more subtle than one would think from this reading.

Tell me what you thought about it, and if you know any other stories influenced by it.