What's a soul?

[devonin]

Originally Posted by Ledwix

devonin is atheist, so he probably won't believe in a soul, either. I'm still interested in his input, though. edit: confirmed, because he stated that souls are a concept created by humans to explain their superiority to animals.

I fail to see how not believeing in a "soul" necessarily makes me an atheist, it seems to me that you just -told- me what I believed *grin*

Nothing can be 100.000000% proven to be true unless religion is involved.

How does religion being involved enable things to be 100% true? Even if a being that was capable of proving to the world's satisfaction that it was 'God' even in a purely christian sense, that still woudln't make what it said or did 100% true, because there is always the chance that such a being is merely incredibly powerful and capable of fooling us.

Originally Posted by master_of_the_faster

How do you intrepret the idea of souls and religion devonin?

As I said, the 'soul' is an imaginary construction of humans to make them feel that they are superior to animals in a way that, even if animals learned to be intelligent, sentient, walk upright, use tools and speak english, would still enable them to feel they were above animals.

Religion, I feel, is a valuable construct of old cultures as a means of explaining things for which there was no rational or scientific explanation. As time progressed, it stopped being the explainer of all the mysteries of the world, and became a comforter of people who couldn't cope with the idea that the world is full of evil because it is, for no other reason or purpose.

My belief about organised religion is best expressed by Frued, who felt that religion and God was a need by humans to create some powerful father figure to comfort them through their hard times, and while he grants that for many people, it is necessary, he would consider it incredibly immature and infantile to need such a 'father' as a rational reasonable human being.