The improbability of deities.

I've been thinking about life and death and the alleged immortal soul today. I've always bounced between really spiritual and atheist like between two walls, and I suppose hovered in mid-air between the two (I guess that makes me agnostic..) But today I'm leaning toward atheist, not in the we'll all be worm food in the end sort of way, but more like I've been thinking about these concepts in a more rational way. Today. This might change tomorrow.

But I just got to thinking, the whole idea that our consciousness goes on after we've died, i.e. our "souls" keep a conscious and functioning state of mind, and thinks and feels and remembers and whatnot, the whole idea of reconciling with your loved ones in some sort of paradise as a reward after the turmoil of life a good seventy-or-so years which is a considerable amount of Time in relation to Eternity, of course. I mean it doesn't make much sense, does it? First of all, the soul. This is, I believe, the term we've invented for that part of the energy that our bodies are made up of that isn't the actual organic shell that decomposes and turns into fertilizer one way or the other, those notorious 21 grams that leaves the body. Let's say those 21 grams are the immortal soul, let's say that is 21 grams of converted energy that leaves the body as it switches off and goes to join the rest, I'm thinking of the world as one big energy field, that makes up the entire Universe, and that's what the afterlife is, becoming one with your maker, i.e. that fundamental source of energy, the starting point and end point, the core, because energy cannot be destroyed, only converted, right?

So that is a form of eternal life, sure. But consciousness and God and Heaven and Hell, those are all man-made concepts and they're not very logical when you think about it, considering we're all part of the same substance, the same energy, and whose to say our thoughts and feelings aren't just the bi-products of different chemical reactions or energetic collisions or something? (I know nothing of science, so I'm just going to leave this here.)

Because our conscious minds, our thoughts, are products of our brains, I don't know exactly how it works, but it's brain activity, electric charges or something, I'll have to look into it, but suffice it to say, and I think we can all agree to this, the brain is what creates our thoughts, right, and when we die, our brains shut off, they stop working, they start to decompose. So how can our immortal soul float to the next life carrying the memories, or characteristics or way of thinking of the previously inhabited body?

So can there be ghosts?

See, this is where we go from me merely brooding and me having a crisis of faith... because I've always believed in ghosts. I've seen and heard and felt ghosts. I've talked to ghosts. Don't I feel like an idiot...

And the whole idea of a loved one that's passed on is still watching over you like some divine second shadow or a guardian angel, it's a very comforting notion, but makes just as little sense as anything else we people believe regardless of our religion's details of the particular thing... but I guess that's the point. Comfort. Isn't that the whole idea of religion anyways? That, and power. Because apparently it's not enough to know that we'll no longer have to worry about this and that and make tough choices and suffer the consequences because we'll forever be one with each other and the Universe. No, it's not enough. Because each one of us want to believe we're special, unique little snowflakes. That we have a complex, one-of-a-kind personality. That we're individuals and in control of our own lives. Because the idea of being controlled by someone else terrifies us (even though that's the whole idea of believing in a God in the first place, to have someone all knowing watching over us and taking care of us so that heavy responsibility is not on our own shoulders -- but at the same time we want that get-out-of-jail free card, even though it's meaningless, just to fool ourselves that we do actually have a say in our own fate, in case we shouldn't like what the Great Divine is cooking up, we can pull out of Free Card and say "No, No, I'm not liking this, I'm going to have to decline on this one..." or something, hence the invention of Free Will -- the human spirit is so contradicting..)

It's like we want our lives to mean more than they do. But isn't it enough to have lived one. To have experienced things in a completely unique way. To have learned certain things. To have felt all sorts of pains and pleasures. To have passed on not just your genes but your wisdoms and love to another person, and if you don't have children, you've passed on something else to someone else that you have met in your life, be it for good or bad. Isn't that enough? Do we have to know that there is a particular cloud with our name on it the minute our hearts stop, figuratively speaking of course.

Maybe there is nothing super about the supernatural, maybe science still has discoveries to make. Maybe the concept of sin is doing anything that sends out negative energy into cosmos and prayer or good deeds or meditation is sending out positive to balance the negative. Maybe Heaven or Paradise or Nirvana is becoming one with the energy that All is made of and Hell is becoming one with a negative part of it. Maybe there's no real mystery to life and all we have to do is learn to take it for what it is...


I want to believe in ghosts in magick though!