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Debate: Do Atheist believe they have a soul? (view source)
Revision as of 22:53, September 24, 2008
, 22:53, September 24, 2008no edit summary
No. We are material beings. Mind, spirit, soul are functions of the brain. This isn't much of a debate for a atheist. [[User:MAnderson|MAnderson]] 22:37, 10 July 2008 (EDT)
No. We are material beings. Mind, spirit, soul are functions of the brain. This isn't much of a debate for a atheist. [[User:MAnderson|MAnderson]] 22:37, 10 July 2008 (EDT)
No, I myself do not believe that we have a soul. For me, your consciousness is simply a function of millions of years of chance and random wiring in your brain - picking the good features that made your ancestors more intelligent, leaving the less intelligent ones to set fire to themselves or however stone age man killed himself through his own stupidity. Your ancestors bred, passed on their better intelligence, etc. etc. until one day you were born self-aware. That self-awareness is just the result of random wiring, and when you die, nothing will seperate from your body and go to an afterlife. All that will happen is that all those electrical pulses that accidentally happen to give you self-awareness, along with those that tell your heart to keep beating and your diaphragm to keep pulling at your lungs, will stop firing. Nothing else will change - it'd be just like flicking off a lightswitch.
I've been asked how I can possibly sleep at night, thinking that my existance is bound to be short and, should I die during my sleep, I simply won't exist anymore. This doesn't trouble me because hey, I won't care that I'm dead, because I'll be dead. Yes, I'd really like to keep living, but once I'm dead it really won't bother me. If I had an aftelife to go to, I'd miss everything I left behind on Earth. So as far as I'm concerned, nothing leaves your body when you die - all of your consciousness is still there, in the same way your contacts stay on your phone after you've turned it off. Except you can't turn a human back on again.
Yes, it's depressing, but my conscience tells me that it must be so - I can't lie to myself and believe in heaven or a soul. If Christians are right (out of the countless religions on Earth, if Christianity turns out to be the correct religion) then I'm sure an all-forgiving, benevolent God will see that I've led a life free of major sins and have always striven to do what I believe to be right. Why would he punish me for falling for the traps that, by all rights, he put there for me, like all those pesky fossils?