Do you believe in the human soul?

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It's easy to recite "obvious truths" that is in the textbooks and back every opinion with empirical evidence. New Age philosophy gets a bad wrap because it's new. alba, I think you raised a great question, "What happens to the sun when it dies?"

I don't see why valuing truth & being happy should be mutually exclusive. & because consciousness is only physical it doesn't mean that life is pointless, only that the point of your life isn't prescribed by anyone else - you get to decide what the point is. That having an immaterial soul is the only possible situation where a life could have meaning is only a piece of nonsense made up by religions to scare people into trying to make themselves believe it. I mean, just because you accept consciousness has an entirely physical basis doesn't make consciousness any less bizarre & amazing.

Anyway, I hope you find your way out of the dark place you're in.

I'm slightly christian but through logical thinking I came up with a theory that I think proves that there is an afterlife, feel free to pick holes in it because I want to know if it a strong argument or not.

Basically, we exist now, so there is a chance, however small, even if the odds are 1 in almost infinity, that we exist. When we are concious, we have a sense of time, but when we are not concious, for example when we sleep without dreams, time seems to pass instantaneously. When we are dead, if you believe in a soul, you will believe in an afterlife anyway, if you don't, here is the rest of the theory: When we are dead (without a soul) we will have no conciousness, so time will pass instantaneously in our personal experience. Since there is an eternity for this to happen, there is infinite chances for existence to occur again.

So, probability of existence = 1/infinity, amount of chances for this existence to occur = infinity
infinity x 1/infinity = 1 and 1 in probability means a definite chance of something occuring. Therefore the afterlife occurs.

The problem I can see with this theory is that although it might prove that the afterlife occurs, it does not say it what way it will relate to this life. Although it might be more satisfying to believe that when you die you go to heaven and never die again, or, comparing my theory to the buddhist idea of conciousness, that we will grow in enlightenment, I don't think there will ever be any sound proof of this.

This means that while you may have an afterlife, you may not remember this life in it. The question then is, what value does knowing that you will have infinite lives have if at any point in your conciousness you only know about one of them? And that is a question I can't answer, so in conclusion, in my opinion, yes, we do transcend this life and this body, but we might never be able to tell that we do, so if this is the case, it is just as well we only have one life as that we have infinite.

Do you just decide things or do you try to find out?

Actually, the soul aside, considering the caliber of analysis displayed in many threads on this site, I'm starting to disbelieve in the human mind.

I have one personal theory that is somewhat related to this discussion.

basically..

time, as in the past, present and the future does not exist, it is just the minds way of recording what it encounters in our perceivable dimensions. what we know as past, present and future events all exist within their dimensions, time is still and infinite. and then there's the famous infinite possibilities/reality theory.. in short life is infinite in every sense of the word, its just our perceptions that are limited to the specific dimensions, reality and recorded information (memories, thoughts etc) that we call our lives.

like most of my theories this heavily contradicts most of my other theories/ideas though

I like the idea of a soul, but I don't find this way of thinking feasable.

So no, I don't believe in the human soul.