> Religious people claim it's merely a communication device, and the computer is elsewhere.

No, that is a seriously weird and imaginary perversion that you've invented, unless you have some citation to a doctrine. Christians do not consider body organs as "devices" nor do our churches teach doctrine on "external computers", if you refer to the Holy Trinity as such? Are you thinking of Latter-Day Saints mythology, or Scientology?

Your description is quite reductive in many aspects, including temporality and misuse of technical nomenclature. Thanks for telling religious people what we think and claim, though, and thanks for the amazing overgeneralized blanket dismissal.

In fact, humans used to be called "Computers" in terms of their job roles, that is, a human in an office was given math/physics problems to solve, and they'd use tools such as slide rule, paper and pencil to "compute" those problems and solve them.

There was more than one example of a fantasy "panopticon" by which a central observer or observers could watch everything going on, for example in a prison facility, and those observers could report findings to human computers, who would process the data and submit it up to the authorities, for meta-analysis and taking action on new developments or trends.

I believe they are referring to the soul. The soul according to doctrine does not exist inside the body for it can exist after the body's destruction.

Not to put words in the parent’s mouth, but I think they were pointing to the idea of the soul or consciousness, concepts that mean very different things in religious vs. scientific contexts. One sees it as an immaterial essence; the other as an emergent property of the brain.