this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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If you do, then what exactly defines a soul in your view?

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[โ€“] yads 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I'd imagine you're rather unique. I have a hard time imagining atheists believing in something as nebulous as a soul.

EDIT: Please don't downvote OP, if anything this is a more interesting discussion thread than just "No, we're just meat and electricity"

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Atheists by and large don't outright reject the possibility of the unknown. They just don't hang their whole lives on it and make up stories to make it less unnerving to contemplate. The fact is we can't know everything, and our collective knowledge as a species probably barely scratches the surface of reality. But we can rule certain specific use cases out on a logical basis.

Almost anything is possible. Likely? Fuck no. But possible.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No worries about the downvoting. There's no karma display :P

[โ€“] yads 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think low voted comments still get pushed to the bottom though, is that not right?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, I believe that's true on childcomments, but not root comments, as they are sorted by new as default.

But some people choose to sort by top, and some clients probably do that as default. But generally in web UI what I wrote above should be the case :)

[โ€“] azmalent 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tbf I don't see anything weird in being an atheist and believing in souls in the philosophical sense, as a part of consciousness in humans, animals and perhaps advanced AI in the future (but it's a whole different topic) that lets us experience reality rather than being glorified chunks of matter which just exist.

Maybe there's a better term than soul for this, but it has nothing to do with the concept of afterlife.

[โ€“] yads 1 points 1 year ago

I feel like what you're referring to is higher order thought. Do you think that beings might exist in this universe that are beyond our thought process? Would they view us as lacking a "soul" like we would view insects as lacking a soul?