Athiests - If you do not believe that humans have souls explain emotions.?

Question

If we do not have souls why do we love, hate, hurt, envy, etc. What is the purpose of life if when we die we do not learn anything for what we have felt while we lived?

Answer 1

Ever hear of children? What we learn in our lifetime, we teach to the next generation. Isn't this obvious?

Answer 2

Emotions are processes that begin in a part of your brain called the amygdala - how else could there be drugs that affect how you feel? If your emotions are the same thing as your soul then the bad news is that your soul changes when you take anti-depressants and your 'chemical' soul seems to completely cease to function at death. Alternatively if the soul exists and it survives your death then it must have nothing to do with emotions or feelings because those are strictly a chemical process which ends when the body dies. Evidently the purpose of life is not about learning from what you have felt or experienced - personally I think the purpose of life is living life, what you want to know is what's the "payoff" or who wins? As far as I can tell it's not a game in any sense of the word - nor does anyone get to learn from this and try again, this is life and no one gets out of here alive, so live the best life you can because you only get the one chance.

Answer 3

"Atheists - If you do not believe that humans have souls explain emotions.?"

First, I would just like to say that just because we do not quite understand how emotions and memories work inside the brain, it isn't evidence of a soul. Besides, I don't see how you can even connect the two. After all, animals have feelings and memories, but Christians claim they don't have souls. My dog loves me. She meets me at the door every day, happily wagging her tail. When the entire family is home and sitting in the living room watching a movie, the dog always lays contentedly on my lap. Every single time. She dislikes my younger brother, because he picked on her when she was younger and you could not force her to sit on his lap. No matter how nice he is to her, she wants nothing to do with him. Unless she remembers how he treaded her years ago, when she was little, she wouldn't have this strong of a dislike towards him. She remembers tricks that she has been taught, even if we have not ask her to do any of them in months. Because of these things, she must also have memories. If she didn't there would be no way that she could have a preference for one person over another. The religious need to stop making these amazing claims, when their is absolutely no connection between the items they are speaking about. How many times have I heard a Christian say things like, "Look at how great and mysterious our universe is, to me this is evidence of god." No, this is just evidence that our universe is big and it tells us that we have not had time to learn everything about the world around us. This is the same thing as saying that because we have emotions, we must have a soul. Emotions are evidence that we are complex creatures, but it in no way is evidence of a soul. There is no connection between the two. There is no link there. How can you logically make the jump from one to the other?

Answer 4

Emotions have nothing to do with the concept of a soul. They are evolutionary artifacts, which have survived in humans because of their obvious utility in propagating the species. As for the purpose of life, it is to make more life, and nothing else; people, however, have the ability to choose their own purpose, and mine is to attempt to educate folk from the considerable store of knowledge which I have accumulated over many years. Carl Sagan said: If you want your life to have significance, do something significant.

Answer 5

Love, hate, hurt, and envy are all subjective so the person defines that on his/her own or how they learned it. The purpose of life is pretty simple, to live.

Answer 6

Emotions are the bodies self defence, security and reproduction systems.

Love is to bond us into groups that can work together and defend against aggressors.

Hate is to keep those who might harm us - at bay

Envy is to drive competitiveness and thus self and group improvement.

Hurt is to make us withdraw and reflect so we can function better in our group

Emotions have evolved to become highly complex but are indeed very simple. And there is basically five emotions =

Anger
Fear
Sadness
Happiness
Disgust

They are controlled from the deep brain which all animals with a spine have.

Answer 7

Emotions are merely complicated mental manifestations of electrochemical interactions in the brain. But going into the very detailed "whys" and "hows" is impractical to the point of impossibility at our current level of scientific knowledge.

But I do know this for a fact: they aren't a product of a soul.

Of course, you'll never convince the "goddidit" crew. They only believe what suits them.

Answer 8

Do animals have souls? They can respond to us emotionally. Purpose of life? Where would anyone get the idea that it should have a purpose?

Answer 9

Why do you think that emotions can only be described by postulating the existence of souls?

There is plenty of evidence that our experience of emotions arises from the functioning of our brain and the inputs it receives from our bodies. There is no evidence of the existence of souls.

Answer 10

"Atheism" covers a broad spectrum of belief systems united only by the lack of belief in a god. There are plenty of atheists who believe in the human soul, they just don't believe there's an omnipotent creator and caretaker.

Answer 11

The brain has structures and pathways responsible for emotion. Destroy the amygdala, and you lose the emotional tag on memories.