7. What about Soul? What happens to your Soul when you die?
What is soul? What do you mean by it? Most people are vague about this but usually use the term to mean human personality. Where does human personality come from? There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that it is a property of the brain. If you damage areas of the brain here you can grossly alter someone's personality. When you die what happens to your brain? It rots.... that's pretty serious damage. Starved of oxygen your brain cells die, and the electrical impulses and chemical transmissions between the cells of your brain that are what constitutes your thoughts, your knowledge, your memories, your emotions and your personality cease to exist also. As a 'person' you no longer exist. And there is nothing of your 'soul' left.
Secondly, if you believe in an immortal soul, what is it that is becoming immortal? We have just shown that 'what you are' - your beliefs, personality, feelings etc. - cease to exist after death. Is there some mechanism which carries these complex attributes away to the after-life? Well, what is it? How can one claim that such an amazing event occurs and then not even begin to try and explain how? Furthermore, your 'soul' is not constant during life. Which soul is preserved in eternity? Your soul at 6? 16? 60? Whatever stage your soul is at when you die? What if you die after developing schizophrenia? Is it the pre-schizophrenic soul that becomes eternal or is it the schizophrenic? From one moment to another you are never the same person.
If soul is something deeper than beliefs, personality and feelings, what do you mean? Beliefs, personality and feelings are what make you individual as a person. If you mean that something deeper is preserved then you as an individual are not preserved, it is merely some universal common factor in all people and so it is not 'your' soul but just some general 'life force'. Such a 'life force' is a totally discredited concept, completely negated by the quantum leaps made in the 20th century in the modern sciences of molecular and cellular biology.
And then there are further questions to be answered, many of which are not even considered by those who believe in an afterlife. What does this soul do when it is made eternal? What does it mean to be eternal? Does it get reincarnated? If so, what aspect of a person is reincarnated? A person's beliefs, personality and feelings are affected profoundly by their life experiences. No two people, let alone two people living in different ages, are going to have the same life experiences, so how can you say that they have the same (reincarnated) soul? Or is it just the karma - the relative weights of your good and bad actions - that is brought across into this new life? If you believe that the soul becomes one with God what does that actually mean? How can one believe in such a complex notion, without any evidence, without considering all these questions?
The vast majority of people who believe in such things do so without even the vaguest conception of what they mean. In summary, there is little point in worrying about an afterlife, when there is nothing around to do the 'afterliving'.
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"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives - who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worth of it? There has never been a greater deed - and whoever shall be born after us, for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."
