Reply #3: "atheist" disbelieves the existence of deities [View All]

[leftofthedial]

an atheist may or may not believe in the existence of a "spirit." A belief that people have a "spirit" does not require a belief in a deity.

Personally, I believe that people have brains and other organs. They do thing throughout their lives that have an impact on others and on the world around them, but there is no entity that exists outside or beyond their physical body. When the physical body dies, the memories we have of that person live on, the "residue" of how they lived their life lives on, perhaps their works live on. but the person is gone.

Our language has insufficient vocabulary to describe the consciousness, animation, "life force, connectedness, essence, substance, or whatever else you want to call it, of a person., so we use "spiritual" to mean whatever we want it to mean. The word "soul" has even stronger religious connotations, but it is still a valid word to describe the characteristics of a person that inform their actions and transcend any one particular event in their life.