I had an epiphany similar to Mike's once. Mine came to a slightly different conclusion, though.
While researching a particularly bizarre looking diseased insect I found, all of a sudden it hit me that:
There are more than 20,000 different kinds of illnesses, deficiencies, disorders, conditions, and syndromes which make up all the "diseases" which we humans can get. Most of them can kill us.
We can get localized diseases like pink eye, or athlete's foot, or liver disease.
We can get disseminated diseases which start in one place, but spread to other parts, like metastatic cancers or sepsis.
We can get systemic diseases which affect the whole body, like flu, high blood pressure, or Ebola.
They can be caused by our own genes
They can be caused by our own behaviors
They can be caused by tiny creatures, like viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, or even teeny aberrant proteins called prions, which we can eat, drink, sniff, breathe, touch, or otherwise latch onto just by going about our lives.
They can be caused by not so tiny multicellular creatures, like guinea worms, pinworms, hookworms, threadworms, tapeworms, ascaris worms, scabies, lice, tics, mosquitos, flies, or bites or licks or sneezes from other large infected animals.
And there are thousands of different animals that will kill us whenever and wherever they can. Some because they want to eat us, like lions, sharks, polar bears, alligators. Some, just because they don't want us near them, like rhinos, elephants, hippos or cape buffalo. Some, because that is how they defend themselves, like deathstalker scorpions, cone snails, stonefish, black mambas, box jellyfish, and several hundred other kinds of snakes, spiders, fish, insects, or sea creatures.
And, of course, we kill each other all the time. By accident. On purpose. Because we love. Because we hate. Because we want. Because we're afraid. Because we're brave. Because we don't even know we're doing it.
And as soon as we die, our bodies are gobbled up by decomposers. Mammals, birds, insects, invertebrates, bacteria, fungi, enzymes that all work quickly to turn us back into basic elements used by something else to keep on living.
And here's where the epiphany thing happened.
I realized that every single one of the 300,000 different species of plants, 2,000,000ish species of insects, 70,000 different kinds of mollusks, 40,000 types of crustaceans, 30,000 different fishes, 6,000 amphibians, 9000 reptiles, 10,000 birds, and 5500ish mammals ALL have just as many diseases, conditions, deficiencies, disorders and predators as we do.
EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US.
The whole planet is a constant writhing rotting flux of birthing and dying, eating and being eaten, you struggling to grow, and other things struggling to grow on you/in you. Disease, mold, fungus, and rots are the majority of our perfect world.
Most people, when they think about life and death, predators and prey, they think only about lions and antelopes, people gettting born and people dying of old age.
We are blind to the 99.999999999% of the harrowing struggles and life and death battles that are taking place every minute, every second, right in our own homes, our own back yards, every day. Within mere feet from our own front doors, we simply don't notice the thousands of dead ants wiped out by an invading colony, the botrytis rot infesting the grape clusters, the predatory wasps laying eggs in the aphids, killing each one painfully slowly, the 30,000 insects eaten by one toad in a summer, the thousands of little rots, fungi, molds and bacteria struggling to grow, waiting for their perfect moment to take over every blade of grass, every leaf on every tree, the spiders capturing their daily prey, the beetles eating the pillbugs. The grubs eating plant roots. The moles eating grubs. The diseased bees that never make it back home. The ground is littered with insect carcasses, each almost immediately colonized with more bacteria, molds and fungi that quickly break them down into elements which the plants immediately grab and use to grow.
That is how our world works. Plants capture energy from the sun, and use elements from the soil, and every other living thing on the planet takes their energy from other living things. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed from one thing to another.
This is why I'm pretty sure there are no souls or spirits. Because these things would have to have energy. And if they had energy, not only could we measure it, but there would be hundreds and thousands of diseases, conditions, molds, fungi, bacteria and predators that fed on that energy. And we would be able to measure them, too.
If there was life after death, there would be disease and death after death, too. There is nothing alive that cannot die. There is nothing alive that cannot get sick. There is nothing alive that cannot be killed.
THAT is the beautiful, magical, chaotic and mathematically precise world we live in.
So I've decided to try to enjoy every moment of life I've got. Because there are millions of animals, insects, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, cell mutations, and enzymes conspiring to kill me so they can live on. And once I'm dead, they will eat every cell, break down every molecule. Those molecules used by more plants, more insects, more animals..
I will simply become them.
In order to believe in life after death, you have to deliberately ignore the reality of life.
