Good post Skepticologist. One of the most coherent responses I have seen. The following is a good quote from a deist (Thomas Paine) pertaining to his views on a human soul and afterlife.
I trouble not myself about the manner of future existence. I content myself with believing, even to positive conviction, that the power that gave me existence is able to continue it, in any form and manner he pleases, either with or without this body; and it appears more probable to me that I shall continue to exist hereafter than that I should have had existence, as I now have, before that existence began.
– Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part I, Recapitulation
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"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me".
Isaac Newton 1643-1727 |