Do atheists have souls???

Answer 1

It is an intelligent question, because some Christian groups as an example, accept that the soul is acquired or received as a part of an individuals progress in spiritual life. This is not correct, the point being that the symptom of the soul is consciousness, which is present with-in all species of life, from the smallest germ upward. We do not acquire the soul, actually we are the soul, but due to an impure desire to exist separately from the spiritual world, we are temporarily covered by gross and subtle material bodies, the gross body is easily identifiable, the subtle body is constituted of a material mind, intelligence & ego. When the ego is falsily identifying with the gross body and everything associated with it. e.g. I am an American, I am an engineer or I am a manager, etc etc, then it is impossible to perceive the soul or the self. The symptom of the soul is consciousness, to help those who have not not realised the soul, it is to be understood that consciousness in itself, is not material but spiritual, it cannot be emperically demonstrated, but is the most important feature of the living entity, because an absense of consciousness means that the living entity, the soul or self has left, so the body can no longer function. So athiests do not only have souls, but in fact are the soul.

Never was there a time that I did not exist, nor you, nor in the future, shall any of us cease to be. For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. The soul is not slain when the body is slain. Those who are seers of the truth have concluded that of the non-existent (the material body) there is no endurance and of the eternal (the soul) there is no change. (Krishna to Arjuna, Bhagavad Gita Chapter Two) Krishna is the Supreme Personality of Godhead.

For anyone who thinks that consciousness is a product of the brain, this is compared to someone saying that a T.V. set produces a programme, life comes from life, it does not come from matter, when the soul has left the body, all the composite parts of that body are still intact, can you produce consciousness from it? No! This is a "Frankenstein theory", the spirit soul is the original element and is eternal. Eternal means there is no begining and there is no end.

Answer 2

No, and neither do theists.

In the past, people didn't know what to make of the brain. The people who wrote the Bible believe you thought with your heart and that your brain was worthless mushy stuff. Eventually, people figured out that your brain was really useful mushy stuff. Since mushy stuff obviously can't think, there must be a ghost in the machine, right?

Then, people like Ramon y Cajal found out that the brain is made of cells. Long, stringy cells with weird properties, but cells nonetheless. Eventually, two chaps named Hodgkin and Huxley (not *that* Huxley, but a relative) ran a copper wire down the length of a nerve cell of a giant squid, put some stabilizing current through it, and began looking into the electrophysiological properties of nerve cell membranes.

We now know quite a bit about nerve cells, at least at the cellular level. We know why they activate. We know how they activate. We can describe the cellular mechanisms for releasing neurotransmitters to send chemical signals to neighboring cells. We can make images of the ion channels that act as control mechanisms for the whole shebang (and in fact, I do that for a living). We can see that it's all a naturalistic and mechanical/probabalistic process, built on neurophysiology, which is built on chemistry with a dash of engineering, which is built on the laws of physics.

Yet, we still have people saying that there's a ghost in there somewhere. Why is that? At what level does the ghost interact with the ion gradient to excite the cell? Does the ghost add calcium to the synapse when it wants do? How does it do all this? Does it magically make more calcium ions appear?

If the ghost is so smart and can know a system with trillions of synapses well enough to manipulate it just the way it wants, why is the ghost (which is supposed to be the essence of a person) so utterly ignorant of, well, neurophysiology? If souls were real, we'd all be born as neuroscientists!

Answer 3

Souls are the immaterial, intangible and moral centers of the higher animal.

If the soul was able to interact physically with the body, or to view the world, it must have some physical structure and recording mechanism.

The soul cannot be damaged ... there are no reports of people becomes severely disabled after a spirit walk, not even in myths of witches or psychics, therefore the soul cannot be damaged. Its structure is unchangeable, definite, physical, strong and yet light, free to move, completely permeable and mass-free.

An object cannot be mass-free and physical, it cannot react with energy without having energy and mass is just condensed energy. In order to react with the brain it must have mass, but in order to be invisible it must be mass free. In order to be undamagable it needs to be mass free, but in order to see it requires photoreceptors and energy measuring devices which need to interact with the physical world.

Evolution is the next problem for the soul theory. The fact that animals and such evolve through complex statistics and simple biochemical change ... there is no part of evolution from one species to us that requires the addition of a soul along the way.

Answer 4

The usual Christian definition of soul is "something that goes on living after you're dead." So let's go with that.

No, I don't have a soul. And neither have you. Everything living dies and everything dead rots. Death is final. The human spirit (however you define it) is a product of the human brain, which is just as mortal as the rest of our bodies.

For what it's worth, I don't like this any more than you do. But no amount of feeling will change the facts.

Answer 5

If atheists don't have souls, then why does everyone try to save their souls? Christians could shut up and stop preaching if there is nothing to save.

Answer 6

No one does.

Allow me to ask this - who has a soul? Only humans? Do dogs? Cats? Mice? Mosquitoes? Bacterium? Where does it end?? If bacteria has a soul (after all, it is a living creature), then I submit that Heaven is overrun by viruses and bacteria that cause disease, and in that case Im gonna be happy and healthy while Im buring in Hell - after all, the heat would kill any microbes!

Answer 7

No one has a soul.
It's an imaginary thing made up by people too afraid to face the reality of thier own mortality. Nothing more.

Answer 8

No, and neither do you.

(Gen 2:7) And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man BECAME a living soul.

Each person IS a soul, but we do not have souls.

Answer 9

If people had souls they would all have them regardless of beliefs. Although I don't believe anyone has a soul, it would probably be a waste explaining buddhist theory unless it was a one one one conversation.

Answer 10

Perhaps atheists have nothing but a psychological wasteland with thoughts drifting across the empty nothingness like balls of tumbleweed. However, when you meet them, they act as if they have souls, just like religious people.