I do not. When the brain stops working it’s just the end. I wasn’t raised religious and I’ve never ‘felt’ anything spiritual. I respect people who do, but I just don’t - it doesn’t make sense to me.

Not that I’ve a choice but I do feel a sense of calm in the fact that when I die there’s nothing. We’re just a blip in a never ending universe.

I was raised Roman Catholic.

A soul is a concept to make death less scary.

All life is an organic computer. When something dies, the computer is off, never to be rebooted again. That’s ok though.

No. Soul is an imaginary concept for ideas and claims. And people think of different things when they think of it.

We are an inherently physical entity. A vastly complex system that very interestingly enables consciousness to arise from it.

But when you remove the body it lives in there is nothing left of it. Other than the influences it had in its past.

To be honest, I’m not even sure what “soul” is supposed to mean. If your definition of soul is an ethereal consciousness separate from your physical body than I can honestly say that i believe that doesn’t exist. We have plenty of evidence that your consciousness is a function of your brain, we can see this when people experience personality changes as a result of chemical influence or damage to the brain. Someone suffering a stroke can come out of it with changes to their temperment, tastes, even interests. Anyone who’s suffered chemical depression should be familiar with the way their neurochemistry effects their personally, and the effects of drugs on people is well known.

I’ve seen no useful evidence that a soul, based on that definition, does or even can exist. The evidence I do have looks very much like no such thing is happening.

deleted by creator

No.

No

It comes down to how you define “soul”.

Do I believe there’s a consciousness that transcends death or exists separately from our physical existence, no.

But if you start talking of ship of Theseus/transponder incident/mind upload -type mental exercises, then yes, I believe “self” is an evolving pattern and a collection of experiences that could theoretically be replicated in another physical manifestation or even in a completely different medium. You could call that, too, “soul”.

if someone can give me a good definition of what they think a soul is or does, maybe i’ll have a response, but quite often, i find the concept less false, and more just ill-defined.

No. Souls dont exist.

Something I take some comfort in is that regardless of what your soul does upon death in the short term (whether it’s an afterlife of some sort that we don’t understand, a nihilistic void of nothingness, reincarnation as the soul attaches to a newly created body somewhere else in the world… whatever, no one alive truly knows or could ever know), science believes in a sort of reincarnation.

Where eventually as step one, everything that ever was ends up in black holes, and those black holes eventually decay until the universe is nothing but a uniform background of unchanging radiation, referred to as the heat death of the universe (because nothing can really physically change on macroscopic scales anymore, in order to convert energy into new heat).

And then, after ridiculously long time periods, quantum fluctuations cause the machinery of the universe to start back up again, everything re-forms, and eventually our universe ends up back where it started at the beginning of your life.

So it’s possible that you will live again, and again, and again, forever, just with no ability to remember how it went down last time. And an incredibly long wait between lifetimes (though, to be fair, if death is a nihilistic void for each person, that wait is only going to feel like two seconds and bam, you’re right back in the womb).

So if nothing else, at least there’s that.

No. I believe soul is a human construct that is meant to be self defense mechanism to feel like we are special instead of bunch of meat with chemicals.

I slid gently into atheism and my total failure to believe in souls was the way I realized I was in fact an atheist.

I was reading something that was discussing something about souls and I thought, pfft, there’s no such thing as souls.

I think we’re made out of meat. The thing that makes me me is a series of electrical impulses in (mostly?) my brain meat. That’s why I find sports that involve repeated head trauma (football, boxing, etc) viscerally upsetting: by getting concussed a bunch of times you are, in my view, literally risking obliteration of the self.

A soul is at best a description of the electrical and quantum interactions that take place in our brain, a personified phenotype of the sum of these things occurring in our head (and to a degree our eyes, mouth, ears, and skin).

I don’t believe in the soul in the traditional sense as it implies that there is one version of me – is my soul my 9yo self, my 20-something alcoholic self, the self as of this moment, or my Alzheimer’s-ridden self when I die? If it’s supposed to be a “perfect” version of me when I pass, then it’s kind of funny, because my spirit is, in a sense, a version of me that I’ve never actually met and wouldn’t recognize.

Nope. There’s no spiritual anything. The whole universe is kinda magic on its own, why people have the need to make up bullshit is beyond me.

Souls don’t exist, you’re just your body (and brain), try to enjoy the life you have, there will be nothing else afterwards.