If you believe you have a soul, you’re probably not going to like this, but hey, I’m not here to make you happy.
It’s hard to think of a single fiction, other than that of monotheism, that has been as hurtful to the human race as that of the soul.
The notion is patently absurd; that there is some ethereal thing, a vapor or chimeric energy that constitutes the essence of a person. Lacking all evidence and all sense and logic, it is a semantic fiction with no somatic foundation.
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You don’t have a soul; nothing does. You are your body, fleeting as it is, and your consciousness does not live, nor can it subsist, in some supernatural ether; it is a byproduct of a brain that has learned to manipulate language into metaphorical structures. To think otherwise is to demean your body, your very physical (and only) existence, and to confuse a byproduct for the very essence of who you are. You are a body that, if you’re at all fortunate, thinks.
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The invention of the soul is an act of egotism and cowardice. Man recoiling from the notion that he is a passing phenomenon, clutching to an infinitude for which he can lay no rational claim. If you want to grasp at eternity, create. Write a beautiful book, a wonderful song, paint your heart onto a canvas, make for humanity something that will ensure they can feel you long after your body has been claimed by entropy and dust. Even then, it’s only a relative eternity because the human race itself will move past your art, and even the greatest art is not, nor should ever be, eternal. When art is ‘restored,’ it is no longer art but facsimile. This is what happened to the Sistine. The restoration was an abuse, Michelangelo’s figures forever defaced, his expression sabotaged by people desperate to keep it. You clutch too tightly, and you destroy.
The other path to relative longevity is through brutality; a Columbus remembered for his genocide, a Hitler remembered for his racism, a Churchill remembered for his Dresden. It is to place yourself on an altar made up of corpses, cemented by clot. It is horror.
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Religions want you to believe in an eternity, so you can tolerate a reality in which you are humiliated, trampled upon, consigned to the gutter while believing that your next life, which they promise will be immeasurably longer, will be happy and blissful, will be heavenly. But there is no next life; it is a fiction designed to keep you from breaking out of your cage and rebelling against those who have made themselves your masters and condemned you to the slavery of resigned acquiescence.
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The idiocy of souls is also the foundation of the very notion of gender dysphoria, allowing people the delusion of having been born into a wrong body. You cannot be born into a wrong body because there is no you apart from the body. The body is you. You are the body. This semantic nonsense results in more semantic nonsense, with some men claiming they ‘feel’ like a woman.’ If a white man claimed to ‘feel’ like a black man, the supposedly enlightened would take him to the stockades, and yet — if he claims to feel like a woman, he is considered brave and supported. It’s nonsensical. Only a woman knows what a woman feels like. At best, a man can feel like he imagines women must feel. It is a fiction, built on a fundamental delusion of a soul, of a person and personality that is somehow apart from the body, that is other than the body, that exists nowhere but in the vain wishes of individuals too frightened to see that they are both flesh and fleeting.
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It is in the belief that souls exist that both so-called liberals and so-called conservatives finally unite in an unholy matrimony of fantasy.
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Live however you choose, but do not lie to yourself. Do not lay your foundations on quicksand.
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The notion of a soul also paves the path to loneliness, as Hollywood and Hallmark and Disney capitalize on your hope for a ‘soulmate,’ making you believe that, like some elementary particle split in twain, you have some other ‘half’ somewhere, a fictional soul to match your own, a lie that’s made to fit yours, and that the universe has somehow, with anthropomorphic generosity, personality, and purpose, deigned to focus on your happiness, and actively engineers convoluted ways to fulfill it, to make you ‘whole’.
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You have no soulmate because neither you nor your supposed soulmate have souls. People are messy and have to work at fitting together. Batteries are not included, and assembly is required, as are tools. You might need to shave a bit here, sand a bit there, allow that you are not, as they would ridiculously have you believe, already perfect. You’re not.
There is no puzzle piece that perfectly fits yours because you are not a part of a puzzle; you are a living organism, not part of a plan. There are rules, but there is no plan. We’re in an open-world game, and the most we can hope for is emergent gameplay, although even your so-called freedom of choice, your so-called freedom of will, is, at best, questionable.
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We are specks, grains of sand in the desert, and drops in a turbulent ocean.
We are a glimpse, not a stare.
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The belief in souls make you forsake reality for illusion, give up the real in exchange for the false, endure an unjust world while hoping that a fictional afterlife will right real wrongs, thus allowing them to continue, generation after generation, damning yourselves and your children to a world none of us should have to accept. Your belief in a heaven above furnishes and sustains a hell below.
It is not a harmless fantasy; it is a blinder that you wear as you are led to the slaughter. A lie you not only believe but propagate.
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If I could, I would hold you by the shoulders, shake you, remind you of your body. “Wake up!” I would yell, “Wake up!”
