By Vexen Crabtree 2004 Oct 17
Souls are unnecessary. Consciousness can come from flesh. God's memory is infinitely perfect and it knows our personality and memories better than we do. God can simply revive and restore our consciousness without the need for souls. To claim God needs souls is to deny God's omnipotency. It doesn't need "souls" to be able to do this; the biological and chemical make-up of our brains is known perfectly to God, its own memory is sufficient. The belief in an all-powerful God is logically incompatible with the belief in necessary souls.
To talk of "souls" is merely to talk of individuals, and to pray for someone's "soul" is an attempt to tell God what to do! God knows who deserves what and why, God doesn't need our prayers, our petty thoughts about what God should do to this-or-that soul are irrelevant and what's more would be patronizing! Souls play no part in Gods scheme, nor can they play any part in our wishes.
Quantum soul, carnal Will power, even life after death and spirits could be explained through (occult) science without the need for a God to exist. God would not be an automatic assumption merely if we found that "spirits" exist.
Magic can be explained through two separate methods both of which do not require either good or evil forces, but natural scientific causes:
Ghosts and communication with the dead can be explained in terms of electromagnetic patterns, Chaos theory and Quantum Physics (aside from the normal explanation of delusion).
We have shown that Gods, if any exist, do not need the existence of "souls" to do what they want with our selves, and also that many of the effects of spirits can be explained through natural science without the need for immaterial souls to exist.
Souls are not a useful or logical belief. I have two pages on the subject:
“The Quantum Soul is derived from Quantum Physics, and is material in essence, even though the effect of it is spiritual. The material aspects of Quantum Soul control the soul itself, there is no "sky hook". Which means that Souls can exist, according to this theory, and no god is required. [...]Most the individual elements of Quantum Consciousness are under dispute. For example most of the supporting maths behind the Interconnectivity of all things is doubted, dubious, with many other theories in circulation that if true do not permit Quantum Souls to exist. But nonetheless, the Quantum Soul theory is presently the best theory of soul that we have.”
The concept of a soul exists in various pagan religions well before they existed in the monotheistic, traditional "world religions". Mainstream religions inherited local pagan concepts of souls from the local, uneducated masses. For example, early Christianity inherited the beliefs of the Roman, pagan masses on 'souls'. Bertrand Russell (1935) outlines briefly the source of the Christian idea of the soul:
“The "soul," as it first appeared in Greek thought, had a religious though not a Christian origin. It seems, so far as Greece was concerned, to have originated in the teachings of the Pythagoreans, who believed in transmigration. [... They] influenced Plato, and Plato influenced the Father of the Church; in this way the doctrine of the soul as something distinct from the body became part of Christian doctrine. [...] It appears from Plato that doctrines very similar to those subsequently taught by Christianity were widely held in his day by the general public rather than by philosophers.”"Religion and Science" by Bertrand Russell, p111-112
In all ancient religions, the soul was the survivng aspect of the self that afforded reincarnation (or "transmigration"); in Hinduism and Buddhism it was the source of life that passed on from one body to be reborn in another, in the samsaric cycle of life; with further incarnations being higher up or lower down in the scale according to a measure of the good (or fruitful) and bad (or deluded) actions performed during life. This concept easily translates into the Christian concept of 'sin' and the idea of the soul thus passed from the pagan-influenced advanced Jews of the first century, and the Roman pagans themselves, into Christianity.
God doesn't need souls in order to control our consciousness, God can revive and restore our consciousness as it sees fit. The existence of immaterial souls is not required to explain any supernatural phenomenon or magical events associated with willpower or even life after death. There are insurmountable problems with the physics of how souls would interact with our bodies. Souls do not exist and have no reason to exist.
Russell, Bertrand
"Religion and Science". 1997 edition with introduction by Michael Ruse. Originally published 1935. Published by Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
By Vexen Crabtree 2004 Oct 17
