WHY THE SOUL CAN'T BE REAL -

This has always been a thing with me, the claim that in the "afterlife" our "souls" will either experience eternal happiness and bliss, or eternal pain and torment. But I see a problem with this thinking beyond the concept of life after death itself.

Consider the following:

Scenario -1 : *You eat a piece of chocolate and experience both a pleasant physical and emotional reaction - the enjoyment of the taste of the chocolate as it melts in your mouth and the contentment you feel as a result of this.

• Scenario - 2: You're a smoker. You're enjoying your favorite brand of cigarette and taking a long, draw to get all the nicotine goodness deep into your lungs. Suddenly you jump in pain as hot ash falls from the tip and sears your balls. Yes, for some reason you're smoking naked. The pleasure has become pain.

The point of this is that emotions and physical responses are entirely the product of a central nervous system, a complex organic system which receives input from our senses, is processed by the brain and is then experienced either physically and/or emotionally by the individual.

The soul is not a complex organic system, it is the spiritual, non-corporeal remnant of the complex organic system that is now sitting in an urn on your widow's mantle. Since the soul has shed its organic shell, there is no way it can experience physical or emotional stimuli of any kind. Ostensibly then, if Hell were real, any souls condemned there would feel no pain and, conversely, any souls in Heaven would experience no joy. The complex organic system that processed those stimuli is dead.

So a soul, if it were real, would be immune to suffering and incapable of emotion. If it reacted with these responses to a given stimuli, it would have to be as a result of it merely remembering what sort of response a given stimuli should generate. Of course memory is also a product of the same complex organic system that is now dead so it wouldn't be capable of that either.

Which means all this shit about a soul is just more religious detritus to be set out on the curb for the garbage truck of reason to haul away.

Arguments like this are why it would be kinda fun to have some theists around to see what their counterpoints would be.

- Sgt. Spanky
Drop and give me 20