I don't believe in it as a metaphysical entity, which I think is the common belief, that we "have" a soul that goes somewhere when we die.
Feelings are processes of the human mind but do not always equate to material experience i.e. feeling cold when burning with fever, because a mercury thermometer would disprove that feeling's factual standing.
A belief of non-belief is the standard factually correct statement of being. I don't have to believe in the myriad of spirits, gods, legends and cultural baggages of thousands of tribes/civilisations, they're simply irrelevant to my knowledge and perception. Such is the concept of 'soul' as well.
The concept of creator is culturally bound to Eurasian philosophy. One does not need a creator if you don't concieve existence as a creation. If a soul exists within the Christian concept it can only be immaterial and eternal. Genesis 2:7 shows that the soul is created from no material in contrast to the body. The Bible mentions multiple times that the things that are unseen are eternal.
Science has nothing to say about the human soul. There is nothing in biology that suggests that a soul exists; you don't dissect a brain and see a soul nestling between the pituitary and hypothalamus. There is no problem in biology that can be solved by invoking the existence of a soul as a hypothesis.
All the properties assigned to the soul (consciousness, conscience, memory, character, etc.) are changed by brain injury/disease. This is compelling evidence that everything we think of as "soul" is actually
brain activity (which obviously ceases when you die).
And consciousness seems to be more out of our grasp. There are single cell organisms that seem to thrive with no brain or nervous system to produce activity of consciousness such as a paramecium. It has no brain or nervous system and yet it's still aware of it's environment, hunts, eats, kills, mates, reproduces just like any creature would do to survive.
I think consciousness is like a bottle of water in the ocean. When I die, the bottle breaks, and the water in it is mixed with the rest of the ocean. Without the container, there can be no "I", and you cannot fill a container with the same water twice, so "I" won't be back. But I won't disappear, I'll just go back to the same state as before I was born.
More like Orientalids.
It actually goes back to ancient Hittites. A stone memorial in
Sam'al, Turkey proves people in the region believed in the soul almost 3,000 years ago. It's concrete, textual evidence of ancients believing in the soul outliving the body.
In other surrounding cultures, the normal belief was that the soul remained in the body after death, attached to the bones. This idea of soul transference is an odd one to find in Turkey. That's more in line with beliefs like those from ancient Egypt, but there's no other evidence of a meeting of the cultures.
The three 8th century BCE inscriptions of Kuttamuwa, Hadad, and Panamuwa use the Aramaic cognate of נפש to refer to the dead person who shares in the sacrifices to the gods and who may inhabit the erected stele in the afterlife.
Richard Friedman and Shawna Dolansky offer a
compelling case that there is some conception of afterlife in ancient Israelite religion.
The ancient Hebrew concept may have been influenced by Egyptian concept which regarded the whole living person as
made up of several different physical and spiritual components, some of which (such as the
ka and the
ba) survive the death of the individual. This isn't a dichotomy of body and soul but rather the whole person breaking down at death, with some parts decaying and some parts enduring.
This is different from an immortal soul concept, which views the soul as fully alive without the body, as opposed to the soul being a spiritual residue of a person that now has a deathly existence without physical embodiment.
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