Thanks for the support Quarky. As a "believer" I have certainly thrown myself in with the sharks haven't I? Even a purely naturalistic world view would do better to assume agnosticism rather than atheism. Atheism presumes proof against a negative-the very thing atheists tell us they are no obliged to provide as you cannot disprove a negative. With the admittance that they cannot disprove what they deny, how then can they be so dogmatic in their insistance there is no "ghost in the machine?" There are smart people who post here but even smart people can make assertions they are not prepared to give evidence for. I say evidence and not PROOF. There's a difference.
You're just creating a straw man dummy of atheism here and generalizing a vast population of people. You seem solely interested only in those arguments that allow you to make your indistinct and suggestive semblances of a point.
One wonders what the point is of a soul or mind other than allowing an organism or entity to navigate via frame of reference. What makes it so automatically important, other than being able to decide things are important, and why can simple physical damage and chemical stimulation alter the self to a point unrecognizable to the "original" self? I don't think some people realize how specific brain damage can be,....
The only excuse I've seen, which still is founded on the idea that awareness is just so important it has to transcend everything we can know and verify, is that the human body is merely a receiver for some signal, and yet all that seems to crumble when one can literally wipe out knowledge of abstract thinking and partial identity, even if it's just a matter of a faulty receiver or signal, there should be expected a partial remainder of the identity, rather than a new or detrimentally altered one.
Personally, as a child I thought it just seemed a little too good to be true that we're so important we have invisible energy bodies. Where do you draw the line? What has a soul and what does not? Technically, where does one thing even begin and one thing end when you get down to the level of particles?
The idea of a soul works when you think of the identity as a real tangible solid thing, but in reality the mind and self are disturbingly not a singular identity, but a series of loops and changing perceptions in constant flux. A temporary construct of materials that will once again dissemble, and yet there's some permanent record of the real you somewhere? I think this is an issue of mistaking importance with simple descriptions. Meaning and all that.
