You know, I have no problem with people disagreeing with me or with them explaining why they disagree. But I am truly and heartily sick of people telling me why I think what I think, when they have no idea who I am, what my background is and often cannot even understand what I am trying to say when I explain my reasons.

I realize this is a new person posting (probably in a second language) so I am not picking on him(her) in particular. It just hit me how very irritating and arrogant it is to claim to understand my thought process in such depth.

He was only addressing those that believe in the soul without any logical reason, which you obviously don't apply.

EDIT: Just so we're clear I'm not condoning armchair psychoanalysis and generally find it dismissive.

Where's the comfort in believing in the existence of a soul, when all your memories - of all your living experiences and of everything you know - are removed at death?

You get to live again........but without any memories whatsoever - it's not you that gets to live again.....it's just a living entity inside a new suit. Once you admit that it's not you who gets to live again, then you see that life already has its own version of this very process; genetic reproduction/species survival.

quite interesting how you can not justify the belief in its existence, And still manage to completely discount the possibility that that "living entity" IS the Real You.

let's try a less cumbersome approach, free of all assumptions.

if one can discover that that "living entity" is the Real You while living, then perhaps it can be a step on the stairs that lead to the realization that it may indeed be possible to retain "past life" experience after "death"..
hmmm..

The soul isn't an ideal to be proved it was a word created to explain something. It exists, but some people have a wrong understanding of what the word means. Now if we are talking about the origin of the English word soul, we will run into problem, but if we trace it to its ancient mystic roots, it points to something that exists...but its not the monotheistic definition.


I am able to explain this now, and I think its relevant.

this is more true than what the op said.

Soul is what is when the mind holds no belief, or no reflection, it came 'before' birth and will be there 'after'. But I think to understand it require a breaking down of belief that society conditions in us, and that can't be done in a sentence.

This is a wrong question, I don't know if I can explain why, but you might start to infer it.

I'm pulling this of context maybe but the soul doesn't make you alive in this human sense.

Self awareness doesn't necessarily imply an individual to be self aware, this might be a wrong question too.

For someone to do so it would seem they're holding contradictory views.

We cannot both say X=Y and X≠Y.Unless my universal truth thread, is true, and there is the F Scott Fitz saying about holding to opposing thoughts and not going crazy.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/47...truth-1198569/

This relates to my thread on time travel and futurenomics, I think its clear teleporting and time travel (which i show can be the same thing) change the consciousness and what it is and how it 'work's.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/47...omics-1210566/

The self is illusion.

Soul is there, your denying the Christian or theistic soul, its a word for something that is there.

. Yes but the experiencer is the experience


Boom pancakes!

We are, but just afraid to admit it.
+1

The very first 'I' here is supposed. see my Descartes thread.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/47...artes-1198777/

This is from wrong conditioning.

But maybe if I come from the same view as Neeel then you will re open your inquiry.
Me, Bruce Lee, and Jiddhu Krishnamurti.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/13...ption-1210578/

another wrong question. It only makes sense with false beliefs and assumptions.

Its hard to know whats real in the teachings though because there is a long history of corruption mixed within teachings. Corrupting in the monarchy, corruption through the popes, texts and language etc. I'm just suggesting religious teaching mix some stuff about the soul that is correct and some that is wrong.


Self is the illusion.

and the real you is the soul



I'm glad Neeel is of the same understanding that I am. I tried to show through various threads that we are all getting to the same point and that point cannot be expressed and viewed in its parts. My thread to put this all together was deleted because it didn't fit properly into a category but I think thats ironic because my point was in our society we miss the greater truth by thinking division is the best and only way.

I wonder If my agreeing with Neeel tips this conversation.

Without saying anything about you specifically-- I understand why this can be irritating-- isn't it clear that one big reason that myths about souls and afterlifes persist is because people dislike and fear the alternative of ceasing to exist upon death?

Condemning this as a personal attack doesn't exactly refute the point. Indeed, in a sense it makes it stronger, because it has the air of "thou dost protest too much".

There have been dozens of posts along this line, basically making an arrogant sweeping generalization that includes me. In the meantime I have posted over a thousand times. But I make one statement which you essentially agree with (see bold), and now I "protest too much".

You have got to be kidding.

Concerning refuting it, it cannot be refuted. It speaks to an internal motivation. How can I ever demonstrate what internal motivation is underlying my thought processes?

I can assert that you are an atheist because you wish to be free of any feeling of responsibility for your actions and can adopt any convenient morality to justify behaviors that you actually believe are immoral. But don't argue, lest you protest too much.

This is wrong. I know from personal experience I don't go around consciously fearing death.

My awareness of good and evil started before any imaginary fear of death that atheists like to over credit.

Do you really think babies/kids come into the world afraid of dying. They don't. I would say an idea like that doesn't even cross their minds.

A lot of atheistic reasoning is backwards. If you just study kids you can see atheists made a wrong assumption then applied it backwards.

Were you terrified of dying when you were a kid? I bet not. I don't know of a single person who ever told me as a child that they were afraid of dying.

If people were afraid of dying all the time their fear would paralyze them. Why would a baby even bother learning to walk? He'd fall on his butt once trying and never take another step for fear of dying.

Quote: "Some children, many of them boys, are born without fear or with very little fear."

Another quote: "Fearless children have a difficult time learning moral lessons from punishment. Even if spanked they remain fearless."

http://www.parentingtheatriskchild.c...rlessness.html

No babies are born afraid of nuclear war but it doesn't mean anything to point this out.

The reason some of us atheists think that the fear of permanent death is a contributing factor in religious belief is that one of the most common (if not THE most common) questions from believers is "what's the point of anything if you don't believe in life after death?".

They're still over generalizing.

You can't assume this without testing it.

Since you can't test everybody in the whole world and such a test has probably never been and never will be done why assume it's true?

I think people's awareness of good and evil is far more formative in religious beliefs.

So I'm not going to allow someone else's false assumptions define my beliefs.

You're not even inside the belief system to know what prompts people to believe certain things. Instead you've permitted yourself to break all the natural boundaries to go outside belief systems then ad hoc rationalized it.

And your general point that no-one fears death is totally asinine:

http://www.whatchristianswanttoknow....tudy-and-help/
http://questions.org/attq/if-christi...ey-fear-death/
http://www.christiancourier.com/arti...-fear-of-death
http://www.cbn.com/spirituallife/CBN..._of_death.aspx
http://www.biblehelp.org/feardeath.htm

As I've said many times, and I understand why you hate hearing it, I was a Christian for most of my life.

Quote away and reinforce your generalizations. It's a key tenet of atheism you're reinforcing after all.

People have different attitudes toward dying and they are related to different forms of consciousness and different brain systems and depth of belief.

In Christianity a lot of the more advanced Christians don't fear death as much as less advanced Christians i.e. they produce martyrs, sometimes easily.

You also have to take into consideration involuntary fears.

So stop generalizing if you can't generalize towards the positive.

I already posted above the link showing fearless kids so why do you want to keep insisting on making Christians out as weaklings? You really want to be right more than get the gift of eternal life?

Martyrs aren't weaklings. They're the ones who believe in God's power the most.

The bold is a valid question that has nothing to do with fear. If your awareness ceases at death, then for you after death it is exactly the same as if you never existed. Eventually the last person will die and at that point it will be exactly the same as if no one had ever existed.

Seriously, I feel no fear. This is an intellectual question that has nothing to do with emotion.