(Personal Truth)

The question is simple. What is a "soul"?

I would never call myself strongly religious but still I find myself wondering often what if anything a soul is. Is to believe in a soul, to also believe in God? If so I'm torn because as much as I love the idea that their may be a higher being watching over us and that there is a heaven to go to after death, the fact remains that I cant bring myself to fully believe in any of it, or to fully deny all of it for that matter. Sometimes I feel like religion is just a "tool" made up thousands of years ago to give peasants a reason to slave away for their masters, because to work hard for their masters would mean salvation after death, and a happy worker is by far a more productive one. Possibly what started out as a way of making people work harder just became reality for the generations to follow. There will never be a way to prove or disprove the existence of God cause to find out if there is one or not you loose any opportunity to tell the world the truth.

A soul most people describe like an essence of one-self.

But what really makes us who we are, what makes this essence? A series of experiences in our life that starts at birth, I would say. And all these things together make up to me a "soul". But this soul I speak of is not an energy within as much as it is a bunch of information saved in our minds and collected over a lifetime. When the body ceases to live how truly can these experiences go onto another plane of existence when they are trapped within this machine that we call a body. How can there be anything but oblivion after death I ask myself. The only answers that those who believe in God fully have for me is that I should just have faith.

Faith is a wonderful thing, and I'm happy for those all who have an undying faith. But to have faith I think is a way to hide ones fears about what MIGHT happen after death, its too scary a thought for most to believe even for a moment that when life ends, its ends forever. So the faithful live their lives and work hard everyday just as they did thousands of years ago without question. And why not do so, if they are right then they will be in heaven after they die, if I'm right then they will not realize that they were wrong anyway cause oblivion is nothing, and nothing is in no truer form, death of ones essence.

To question things like this doesn’t mean I don’t believe in a God, but it does mean I am not afraid to question the existence of one....