You Have No Soul
On mental illness of religion and spirituality
If you ever wondered why are human societies imbecilic and absurd, just know that a recent survey of Pew Research Center found that “83% of all U.S. adults believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body.” And I assume that similar numbers would surface, if the survey was conducted on the human population at large.
In addition to complete lack of self-knowledge, this alarming statistic pretty clearly highlights poor education, absence of critical rational thought, and subsequent inability to step out of the confines of inherited cultural dogmas. Despite vast majority of societies being de jure secular, human race is de facto still a slave to mental plagues of religion and spirituality.
Many may (incorrectly) argue that without religion or spirituality human race is left with a moral vacuum ensuing from inevitable nihilism. Thus, they blame the social absurdity on secularization and science, double down and viciously defend all the superstitions of their respective creeds.
Sure, the age of reason, aka the enlightenment period, left a huge void in human understanding of origins of universe as well as our place in it by which it undermined our (illusory) feeling of security. But even if you can, indeed, find some nuggets of wisdom and truth or some helpful pointers in all those untenable traditions in question, even a broken analog clock is correct two times a day.
Hence, those 83% rave against physicalism as such. No doubt, many strains of physicalism indubitably run into obvious dead ends and pretty hard, seemingly unsolvable, problems (qualia, consciousness as an illusion, etc.), but universe at large, and in its entirety, is clearly a physical system.
Matter with mass, energy, also information — all these equivalent forms of phenomena are physical by definition. That is the sole reason no one ever demonstrated anything non-physical. Even our thoughts and perceptions are physical as the readings on various measuring devices attest. Even the empty beliefs in non-physical entities are therefore paradoxically physical.
But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose there is a non-physical soul. Now, show me how to discover it. Give me a step by step tutorial. Try as hard as you can, you won’t be able to. On the other hand, I can give you clear instructions how to know yourself and see that science (and physicalism!) is more or less spot on while all religious and spiritual dogmas are just that — mostly bullshit utterly divorced from reality.
Alas, to know oneself, one has to have the courage and unbending dedication to let go of all those comforting ideological crutches. And that is something very few are willing to commit to, let alone follow through. After all, mere thought of death, the notion of absolute cessation of individuality, is terrifying. Thus, those 83% cling to illusions and associate with those who help them keep it, which naturally translates into all walks of life.
And so, we live in an open air madhouse where the crazy, literally scared witless, turn into hell what could be paradise.
Such a waste.
