Do you believe that we have souls? If so, can you answer why?
To believe that you have a soul is to accept a greater reality, one not bound by materialism. This belief doesn't have to include religion at all. But to accept that you have a soul, in the Atheist community is to be excommunicated.
It's been my experience that we are souls. That we have experience of multiple lives. There is one lesson that I learned in all of this and anyone can do is to don't hold grudges for they last far beyond your current life. You could be holding a grudge against someone right now and you have no memory of it. So learn forgiveness, and move forward.
The the books that I recommend are...
Science and the Afterlife Experience: Evidence for the Immortality of Consciousness
by Christopher David Carter,
At the Hour of Death
by Karlis Osis
You have now been excommunicated
I second the motion.
No we donβt. Our consciousness is just the result of chemical and electrical impulses in our brains. Once the body-and brain-dies, so does consciousness.
I should offer my own words, but Harris is so concise and eloquent on the subject, I had to just quote him. If you haven't read Letter to a Christian Nation yet, stop farting around on this site and go read it now.
"A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. If our concern is about suffering in this universe, it is rather obvious that we should be more concerned about killing flies than about killing three-day-old human embryosβ¦ Many people will argue that the difference between a fly and a three-day-old human embryo is that a three-day-old human embryo is a potential human being. Every cell in your body, given the right manipulations, every cell with a nucleus is now a potential human being. Every time you scratch your nose, youβve committed a holocaust of potential human beingsβ¦ Letβs say we grant it that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. First of all, embryos at this stage can split into identical twins. Is this a case of one soul splitting into two souls? Embryos at this stage can fuse into a chimera. What has happened to the extra human soul in such a case? This is intellectually indefensible, but itβs morally indefensible given that these notions really are prolonging scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings, and because of the respect we accord religious faith, we canβt have this dialogue in the way that we should. I submit to you that if you think the interests of a three-day-old blastocyst trump the interests of a little girl with spinal cord injuries or a person with full-body burns, your moral intuitions have been obscured by religious metaphysics."
-Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation
Are you talking about the missing 21 grams from a dead body? Never was quite sure if that measurement was accurate. It could have unexplained physics like when a room is dark the air in it is more dense. Or what you see is not light but the refraction of an object the light bounces off. You never see light only refraction. If you never see light how can it have a speed? Just like time if it is not measured does it actually exist? Energy has a weight just to weigh it is absurd. So 21 grams could just be the half life of the last drop of energy has changed into some other form. Just a perception in realy.
Yes I have two. One on the bottom of each of the shoes I'm wearing right now. And one of them is holly. See, there is the hole right there. Oh Wait ! I have lots of shoes, and all have soles. But they are their soles, but they are my shoes. Does that count?
No i do not, i believe when im dead im dead...
i'm an sgi-usa.org buddhist we re-incarnate
the judeo-christian definitions are LIMITED and base on the altered /deleted
King James Bible vs the ORIGINAL Aramaic
Jesus went among all 5 creeds INCLUDING Christianity
one doesn't have to be "religious " or "spiritual"
we are humans we are energy
too many common experiences among all the other humans
we are energy
we re-incarnate