Eternal Insides

Here’s something that I’ve been thinking about for the past couple of days. I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about it. Perhaps just because I’m me and somehow I’m cursed to have stuff like this float through my head.

What I’ve been thinking of is this; do people really have spirits? Is there really some unseen force inside us that makes us who we are, and is possibly immortal?

It seems that no matter where you go on the globe, the vast majority of people everywhere are convinced of the fact that everyone has a spirit or life-force or something that is what actually gives them life. And almost anywhere you go, people have their ideas of what happens to that spirit when a person dies.

What I’m wondering though, is if there is any proof that we even have spirits.

The people who have religious beliefs will point to their belief as the answer to my question. They will say that God says so, or point to the “ascended masters” or something. But I have no religious beliefs and don’t believe in any God, so that argument doesn’t satisfy what I want to know.

Others will point to the mere fact that we are alive. The fact that we are conscious, self-aware, and self-reflective. But why does that mean that we have to have a spirit?

I once heard an evangelist trying to address something like my question here. His response was something to the effect of, “It doesn’t take a genius to know that we all have souls. Take a look at a dog that gets hit by a car. What is the difference between the dog before and after it gets hit? Afterwards, something has left him. His spirit is gone. We all have souls too and unless you repent….”

I really don’t see any evidence though that anything leaves people when they die; I think their bodies just stop functioning. I know that the dishwasher I bought my parents isn’t “alive” but it runs and works and does its job. Someday though, it will cease to function and will die and go to the appliance recycler’s. Does that mean that it had a soul and that it died because that soul left? No. It means that it either wore out or some outside force damaged it to the point that it could no longer function.

Our human bodies are the same way.

Back when I was in Teen Challenge (drug treatment) they used to tell us that humans are three part beings, just as God has three parts (father, son, and holy spirit). They said that people have a physical body, and a soul (the realm of the consciousness and emotions and stuff), and a spirit (the part that relates to God).

Now the physical body is the shell. The physical body exists in the world.

What they called the soul, the emotions and consciousness that we look at as evidence of life, is who we really are. All of this though, everything that we really are, is kept in the thousands of folds of grey flesh in our brains.

Now what about the spirit? Where is the spirit? What does it do? Why aren’t people any more aware of it than just thinking it’s there because that’s what they’ve been told and everyone believes?

Christianity seems to place a lot of emphasis on the heart. Seeking God with all your heart, loving God with all your heart, and asking Jesus into your heart (even though the Bible never once uses that phrase or even suggests that, so I don’t know why people go around telling people they need to “ask Jesus into their heart.”). But what does the heart have to do with anything? Our brain is where our consciousness is, where our will and desires and our emotions are. So does our spirit somehow live inside the little pump in our chest? If that’s true, then heart transplants could be seen as suicide and rape (since someone else’s spirit, if it really resides in someone’s heart, would get put in a different body and the original heart would be destroyed).

I think that ever since the beginning of time, humans have had difficulty coping with the fact that we have expiration dates. I think that people couldn’t grasp the fact that, even though we are “intelligent” and capable of emotions and many other things, that we are just biological entities. In order to deal with the fact that their loved ones were never coming back, I believe people dreamed up the whole “eternal spirit” thing as a coping mechanism.

Most likely I’ve missed some other points that I’ve thought about, but that’s ok.

“This is not my life, this is not my home, this is not me, I hate this!!!”
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