Quote:
Originally Posted by trumbly
I don't care if aetheists don't believe, but I don't get is what they believe. Do they simply have no concept of spirit or soul or afterlife?
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I can answer this from my perspective even in light of what I would consider nihilist and atheistic.
I see souls as being little more than an idea invented by early human culture arising as a result of the organism's evolved ability to reason and desire to place consciousness to concept. And the concept in this case is the believers subscribed religion and their subsequent god/s of which span across all geographical lands and times, most of which more or less claim that their particular belief system is mutually exclusive to all others.
Souls to me stand for little more than genetic similarities to parents and what the child by-product will encounter throughout his/her life in terms of experience. For instance, if we could clone Einstein exactly genetically identical to his dead counterpart, he would be, (unless you could recreate ALL his emotional experiences in chronological order)
COMPLETELY different to the theorist of relativity and even be a mere farmer his whole life.
Suffice to say, we inherit genes from our parents, maybe even diseases from cancers to mental disorders, gain a personality from our own individual experiences, both physical and mental, and that is about what a soul, to me, amounts to.
As for the afterlife, I don't see why, as mammals, we should be treated any differently to that of our animal kingdom counterpart. The only reasoning behind this I can fathom is the correlation between evolution of the brain and its chemistry (from serotonin to melatonin and dopamine) and the desperate desire of expectation, even in the face of delusion and fear, that this life cannot be all there is. Yes we are complex organisms in terms of relative consideration to all other species but does this in itself justify a higher purpose? I would say no.
So no, I do not believe that as a race we are anything special at all. We are all just part of Nature's little human experiment that was destined to fail from the get-go of approximately four million years ago.