Do we have souls?

[onager]

43. I don't believe we have souls either.

Unfortunately, those damn scientific killjoys have already answered your question about the energy being transferred. I'm afraid there's not much comfort in it - our personal energy is transferred by the completely unspiritual act of decomposing. Just like every other animal and plant on earth.

Usual Boring Personal Stuff - I can actually take some comfort in that. Many years ago, at a family reunion, the subject of burial came up. I said I wanted to be cremated. My entire family was horrified...except one cousin-in-law (wife of my cousin).

She's a Crow (Indian, not bird...in case Rick Santorum is reading). And agreed with me, at an age when no adults ever agreed with me. Said she thought it was much better to be burned, to return to the earth and sky, than be put in the ground to rot. Amongst all the Southern Baptists and Pentecostals, she's still one of my favorite relatives.

IMO, many believers confuse their minds with souls. We all have thoughts, dreams and experiences we hate to think will "go to waste" after we die. For years, the woo-woos blathered about the "electrical energy" in our heads and how it could be used to read other minds, do remote viewing, talk to the dead and bend spoons. Supposedly that survived our deaths.

But thanks to those damn scientists again, and their brain research, we know the electrical energy running around our heads is so weak it can barely penetrate our own skulls. Let alone any other skulls. And when our brains die, we are truly dead. Though that doesn't seem to stop most Republicans.

So if I have to connect my death to a work of fiction, I don't think I'll go with the Xian Bible or any other uneducated guess about what happens to us after death.

My chosen work of fiction, dammit, is the movie Blade Runner, and the words of that great theologian Roy Batty:

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."