Actually,
that’s too strong a statement. It would be more true to say that I, and many
other atheists, do not believe that
there is such a thing as a soul. We can’t say conclusively that there isn’t; it’s just that we haven’t seen
convincing evidence for it yet, so we don’t believe it.
Incidentally,
there are atheists who do believe in
souls. The concept, after all, is not inextricably tied to belief in or worship
of a god. It’s just that I’m not one of those atheists, so please don't think that I'm speaking for them in this post.
Now,
when I say a soul, I’m talking about a magical, immaterial and potentially
immortal component of consciousness/personality that can survive independently
of a living brain and body. That’s the thing that I don’t believe exists.
The
problem is that the word “soul” has acquired a lot of cultural baggage, and a
lot of other definitions. Many, for example, regard the soul as being the seat
of all positive emotions (such as love, nobility, wonder, etc.), with the
physical body driving only negative emotions. Or others regard the soul as
being the seat of emotion altogether, with the physical being incapable of such
things. To people with this kind of dualistic outlook, to not have a soul is to
be capable only of evil and selfishness in the first case, or merely an
automaton – a thing rather than a person – in the second.
So when
an atheist says something like “I don’t believe in souls,” many people don’t
hear “I don’t believe in an immaterial component of consciousness that survives
outside a living body.” They hear “I don’t believe in positive emotions, only
selfishness and evil.” Or they hear “I don’t believe in behaving like I or
anyone else is a person.” A lot of these people, though, would probably say
that atheists have souls, but are
just mistaken about it.
Some
even go a step further than that. Either out of desire to demonize atheists, or
simply an inability to comprehend that it’s possible for people not to believe
in souls, they will twist the simple statement “I don’t believe in souls,” into
something like “I want to destroy the soul so that everyone can be purely
selfish and/or automatons.” These people are a lot more likely to say atheists
have no souls (or that the “atheist ideal” is a “human form without soul,” as I
recently read in an incredibly ignorant article about how us atheists would all
love to be vampires), because what they mean by that is that atheists are bad
people. This is especially true for those looking to demonize us, since to them
and their target constituencies, the accusation of soullessness brings to mind
images of dead-eyed, leering monsters in human form setting out to debauch
themselves and harm everyone else in the process.
But when
an atheist like me says that he doesn’t believe in the existence of a soul, he’s
not saying that he doesn’t believe in the impulses to love, or empathize, or
create, or wonder, or any of the other positive emotions and impulses commonly
ascribed to souls. There is, after all, nothing that logically requires those
impulses to be bound to an immaterial immortal consciousness. Our lived
experience is still a human experience just like everyone else’s and doesn’t
become qualitatively different just because we don’t credit that experience to
the same source.
We just
happen to think that all of those impulses – the good and the bad (and
justifying the use of “good” and “bad” is probably a whole series of posts on
its own) – are all rooted in our material bodies. It’s all inseparably human.
It would
be nice to think that we have a “true” self that is upright and good and will
someday be free to live forever without being dragged down by all the bad parts
of ourselves when we leave our bodies behind. But the reason I don’t believe in
souls is not because I think it would be great cease existing, or because I
really want to cling to the bad in me. It is, quite simply,
because I’m not convinced that that souls exist.
So this
is me, all of me, here in this world
being soulless and human just like anybody else.
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