Is This Thing Called a Soul Just a Fairy Tale

What is a soul exactly? Well, accourding to dictionary.com a soul is:

The principle of life, feeling, thought, and action in humans, regarded as a distinct entity seperate from the body, and commonly held to be seperate in existence from the body; the spiritual part of humans as distinct from the physcial part.

Many people throughout history have pondered if this supposed energy is real. Its very likely that it's safe to say at least one person throughout all off human existence has died because of their belief for or against the strange thing, and I'm dedicating this discussion to them.


Does the energy that we refer to as a soul really exist?
It's a question that's been asked too many times to remember, and there is supprising information that could change your outlook on life after death.

I guarantee people are laughing sayin, "of course souls don't exist", and I guarantee you there are people saying, "absolutely."

I was shocked and amazed when I recently learned a that a "soul," whatever it is, actually does exist and it has been physically proven that when a person dies, during a split second, something, possibly the mythical "SOUL." In fact, numerous scientists have recently published studies where they charted people's weight with scales measuring in grams before, during, and after death.

All the studies that I've seen come to the same conclusion, weather they were trying to prove or disprove. Something unknown exited out of the top of the skull at some point between the person's time living and when they were declared dead.

The most famous study I've read,(google it), was carried out by Dr. Duncan MacDougall in which he found 6 terminally ill people and recorded a very distinctive loss of weight(he guessed to be 3/4 an ounce) between life and death in all 6 people. The exact weight loss is not known in his experiments because he was working with inferior technology than we have now. Luckily because science has advanced so much, we can now perform this study and get a difinitive outcome(which we have done).

Modern scientists have come to a conclusion that at or around the precise moment when people died, we absolutely do lose a small amount of weight. This study has been performed repeatedly and those who actually examine the result have an answer. Something that weighs about 21 grams on average does leave our heads when we die. One professor even caught a snapshot it leaving on an infrared camera. I saw the picture on T.V. a year or so back but I couldn't find it.

Anyways something leaves our head the moment we die. I'm not saying that without a doubt, you have a spirit that goes to heaven or hell. Just merely pointing out the fact that something weighing around 21 grams, (give or take a few) has been shown to exit the skull of humans who have been studied. Is it without a doubt your soul? I don't know. But I think just the fact that something has been shown to leave out of our skulls and not our backside deserves more research.



Mod Edit: All Caps Removed from title

[edit on 3-5-2008 by worldwatcher]

I'll worry about my soul when I'm dead, right now I'm going to enjoy being alive just in case.

I've read that, "The ultimate in optimism is believing that there is no life after death." and quite frankly, I've never been that big of an optimist. I don't want to be an atheist who finds himself standing in front of the pearly gates.

I believe dearly in the creator of all things and therefore I believe we each have a soul. Religion is a load of crap but don't get me started on that, it's a different argument.

I don't need scientific proof that there is a soul, it's enough for me to simply believe. It keeps me humble.

I could, but I also would rather not talk about religion in this post.
ACTUALLY PLEASE NOBODY BRING UP YOU'RE FAITH OR NONFAITH, BECAUSE I WANT TO KEEP THIS DISCUSSION ON THE SCIENTIFIC ASPECT OF WHAT WE CALL A SOUL.

I was pretty stunned when heard scientists had measured the weight of something leaving the head at the moment a man died. But not suprised, I sense that something is inside my body that won't stay with it when it dies. Human nature makes me hope there is life after death. What else could leave your skull and be seen on heat sensing video camera but not make an exit wound?

I'm not so sure about what many refer to as a "soul". But I do believe there is something that makes us unique. I'm not very old, but I have never come across any two individuals that were truly "alike"....even twins exhibited some differences.

I think there's some "spark" that defines "us".....more than a "ghost in the machine"....and useless without the physical manifestation of our physical bodies.

"I'm not so sure about what many refer to as a "soul". But I do believe there is something that makes us unique. I'm not very old, but I have never come across any two individuals that were truly "alike"....even twins exhibited some differences.

Yeah, in my mind, I can't imagine any one person having the same beliefs and acting and looking just like me.

Maybe that's because god knew we would get annoyed of the other person coppying us and start tweakin' out.

I can say with a fair amount of confidence that noone who's living right now really understands what the soul is and that's why I would like to hear more studies done on this. We could try to trap the exiting 21 grams of whatever it is, but I don't think we'll have that technology for some time.
Well I'd like to make a guess of what our soul does.
My thoughts all point to the soul being a sort of transportation device used to move you're spirit (or energy) wherever we go when we die. Energy doesn't go away...It's recycled so where does our energy (possibly our soul) go to?

Who knows
All I know is that thoughts pop into my head because of something other than my brain.

In addition... Patrick Swayze has cancer.
Is this an attempt by god to raise our spirits in time of economic crisis?

Most Likely.....and I thought today couldn't get any better.


(sorry, back to the soul)

(I''m sorry Patrick, if you read this I hope to god you survive so I don't have to feel bad while I make jokes about you)

reply to post by sumperson


That wasn't funny at all! I'm sure you would laugh at that joke if it were you in Patrick's situation? I seen and read all the soul stuff too and it does raise questions. One is why can't our soul leave at anytime and go places? Why do we have to die for our energy to escape? 21 grams is not much weight but could it be air leaving our skull? There's alot of pressure in our bodies, does it leave through the skull when we die. I see alot of autopsies being performed and I don't see blood spraying out after the body is dead. Cut a main artery when alive and blood goes everywhere. Cut one when dead and nothing but blood oozing out slowly. I guess the answer to the soul will only be answered after death.

reply to post by Solarskye

That wasn't funny at all! I'm sure you would laugh at that joke if it were you in Patrick's situation? I seen and read all the soul stuff too and it does raise questions. One is why can't our soul leave at anytime and go places? Why do we have to die for our energy to escape? 21 grams is not much weight but could it be air leaving our skull? There's alot of pressure in our bodies, does it leave through the skull when we die. I see alot of autopsies being performed and I don't see blood spraying out after the body is dead. Cut a main artery when alive and blood goes everywhere. Cut one when dead and nothing but blood oozing out slowly. I guess the answer to the soul will only be answered after death.

You are asking the right questions Solarskye. I'll answer them as best I can.

Q:You ask why can't our soul leave our body at anytime and fly around, and also why can't our energy escape.

A:You and me are probably in the same boat when it comes to knowledge of a "soul". You just stated a belief that you don't think our "souls" can leave our bodies. So let me ask you, what if you where raised thinking that our souls get restless at night and go to dreamworld, and say you are taught that a "soul" is made from energy your entire childhood.

What I mean that we as humans can learn. Picture yourself as a black hole. Now imagine that you don't suck space and light into yourself, but instead ideas, thoughts and experiences. We collect data from the second we're born to the instant we die.

I believe to know our purpose in life and fully understand it, we would need to either know every thought that has ever been thought by every being that has ever existed, and understand the full meaning of it all, I do think people understand that total knowledge isn't possible in this world.

We have an imagination, so we can dream about a concept like heaven. But the concept of heaven that we all think of is just one common idea that countless souls have liked, it's just an Idea thats convenient for us. We wouldn't have any clue what life on earth was like if we were born on the opposite end of the universe to a race a strange race of beings. Knowledge is the only fact. Believing in heaven makes us feel good, and that is the only reason it exists.

Human intelligence makes me want a soul to exist. Because without wanting a soul to exist I would lose my longing to learn, I wouldn't care to survive. What would be the point.

But here's the catch... human intelligence is just human intelligence created by us, for us to survive.

Just as you can learn to understand human intelligence, I think we can only trully know all if we fully understand intelligence by itself. Inteligence is something.

my consience and my biased oppinions know for sure. Intelligence is something that is loved, embraced, and necessary for me in this life. I couldn't have these thoughts without it.

I don't suppose that any human knows or ever will know the exact reason we're here on earth, or how we got here. I don't think people god sends people to us so we can understand, so they can tell us that something exists after this life. We don't need. Anyway you think about it. It confuses us because we aren't it.


This is my big send off. We, referring to every single organism that has ever existed in the history are all designed with things in common, we all have the instinct to survive which leads me to believe that some mass of energy has always existed. And if the energy that gives us instinct has existed for eternity, then it's an infinite amount of energy. Energy is a word we created and assigned to the thing that gives us life. Religions call it God.

God is energy. Energy creates life. I'm not quite sure but I think that means our soul God is life. Its a circle.

So the soul is a material object?

You're implying that the soul, which some call spiritual essence and the thing that makes us human, is material. If it has weight, it must be made of matter.

The concept of the soul as a material object flies in the face of all religious teaching. Some would regard it as heretical.

Well, a fig for heresy. But you are either mistaken or fibbing when you say

Modern scientists have come to a conclusion that at or around the precise moment when people died, we absolutely do lose a small amount of weight.

If you can show me one scientific, peer-reviewed study that supports this claim, I will immediately make over to you my 21-gramme mterial soul.

As for the hapless sawbones who started off this fairytale in the first place,

It would take a great deal of credulity to conclude that MacDougall's experiments demonstrated anything about post-mortem weight loss, much less the quantifiable existence of the human soul. For one thing, his results were far from consistent, varying widely across his half-dozen test cases... Snopes

He only weighed six people, discarded two results because they didnt agree with his ideas, and published completely different figures for each of the remaining four cases.

reply to post by Astyanax

So the soul is a material object?

It depends on if you believe you have a soul, I can't see my soul, and by your comments I doubt you can see yours either, but I am living... and if I'm made of atoms just like a rock, then how did we get intelligence?

I think that dismissing that we have a soul wouldn't be fair to anyone especially yourself, if you are honest and say I DON'T KNOW but It sounds extremely unlikely then you continue the learning process.

I would also like to make clear that I never stated that scientists proved "a soul" exists, just that something (possible what people call the soul?) causes people to lose around 21 grams of weight. There are always going to be believers and nonbeleivers.

If you can show me one scientific, peer-reviewed study that supports this claim, I will immediately make over to you my 21-gramme mterial soul.

Haha...... lucky for you my friend. I've had zero luck finding one and I've been looking for hours. But that doesn't change the fact that souls could exist. You can say no way and end it at that.... or you could say.....maybe....research then analyze and debate.
(I'm not saying you should research because I think you could be wrong, but because you may be right and come up with something to stun us all)

He only weighed six people, discarded two results because they didnt agree with his ideas, and published completely different figures for each of the remaining four cases.

-Yes, I realize Dr. Duncan MacDougall was not the most credible source and I acknowledged that here.

The most famous study I've read,(google it), was carried out by Dr. Duncan MacDougall in which he found 6 terminally ill people and recorded a very distinctive loss of weight(he guessed to be 3/4 an ounce) between life and death in all 6 people. The exact weight loss is not known in his experiments because he was working with inferior technology

But simply because the man did a study with old early 20th century medical equiptment doesn't disprove the existence of the soul.

I don't even care really if it does or doesn't exist. But whenever a man came up with the theory that a soul existing inside of all of us, they were simply creating a word to explain why we have thoughts.

Please, throw your opinions out the window, and think of the first Homo Sapien to ever wonder to himself, "why can I think? How did I develop thought?"

The very first ancestor of all us humans to ponder this question didn't know the answer, he was dumb. This first human wasn't very intelligent at all. We can all agree on that. It was presented with problems...if it didn't know what to do, too bad, it couldn't ask for help from the other neanderthals or early humans.

This examination of early man explains that we have instincts like all animals, we just assign them sounds, like "mothers intuition". Due to the fact that the earliest man's brain was dull, It couldn't even imagine about a divine creator. To spread the theory of god and religion people had to evolve for a long time, we needed languages, alphabets.

The first man was too dumb to imagine our image of god. Wouldn't that mean that god would send it to hell because it didn't worship him.
Whatever created us wouldn't care we did something bad.

But Is the fact that man evolved and developed thoughts proof that we have a soul? No.

Do we have some lifeforce that enables us to live and think and feel human emotions? Your alive right now thinking, you tell me.

I think it's possible..

reply to post by sumperson


That Dr. MacDougall experiment is regarded as pointless, as his sample size was too small, and he couldn't accurately weigh people's weight using his instrumentation. Six people. That's all - six people. And the experiment took place 100 years ago

There is no scientific evidence for the "soul", most likely due to the fact the energy in our brain is constantly being re-supplied by our dietary intake, and is in fact a chain reaction. Once we die, the chain reaction stops, and the energy in our brain is used up and not replenished.

There is no such thing as an individual soul really, we are all connected. Good bad indifferent.
This is why when remembering past lives it is possible to see anothers past to fit your own growth or needs, hence everyone at one point was Cleopatra or George Washington or anyone famous. That has changed and it is more 'popular' to think ones self more simple.
We are light beings, one source. It is my job to be antar this time and to use her experience for the advancement of the whole as she experiences her enlightenment.

Oh and the concept of the individual soul is just more evidence stacking up that we are separate, that is the ultimate goal of the old world order as well as the new, divide and conquer.

[edit on 6-3-2008 by antar]

reply to post by antar

There is no such thing as an individual soul really, we are all connected. Good bad indifferent.

I agree with your concept that we're all somehow connected to each other, strenghth in numbers is true in this world so our logic states that it must exist elsewhere, right? Also we all have something in common with each other that I think eternaly unites us. We're all the same species, which basically means we all have the same creator, weather god, or evolution.

hence everyone at one point was Cleopatra or George Washington or anyone famous.

I think that's possible and you can even prove it with belief. If you believe the theory of the Multiverse its possible.

That has changed and it is more 'popular' to think ones self more simple.

If you mean we have (forgotten our purpose in life due to our increased arrogance) then I know where you're comming from. But I don't think we forgot anything, we just want more than life here, so we make up reasons for it...(like saying, I can't wait til' I die, heavens gonna be bliss.)

Oh and the concept of the individual soul is just more evidence stacking up that we are separate, that is the ultimate goal of the old world order as well as the new, divide and conquer.

Ok that may be true, but it would mean we retained this ability from it's original owner. Then I would have to say that having this belief in turn means that our creator coundn't be... a perfect being. It would have to be an organism just like us, with all our emotions, if not more. It would only be able to create us based on what it thinks is the best way to live life.

We don't need a god to exist everybody. In fact the made up belief in a god only exists because we're lazy. It's human nature that causes us to create a belief in something higher, because we think we're the smartest.
If you wanna take the easy way out, you can latch on to a false eternity that wouldn't exist had you not made it up. But if you wanna be different, you can say science doesn't suggest you're belief is right, i'll accept that I don't know and leave it up to fate.

reply to post by antar


Past lives? Got any evidence to support the phenomenon being even the slightest bit real?

Originally posted by Astyanax
So the soul is a material object?

You're implying that the soul, which some call spiritual essence and the thing that makes us human, is material. If it has weight, it must be made of matter.

The concept of the soul as a material object flies in the face of all religious teaching. Some would regard it as heretical.

First of all, the soul and the spirit are not the same thing. Soul Vs. Spirit

Chew on that for a while.

Soul? It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

I'd be interested to know how scientists proved the existence of the soul. What detector did they use? A divining rod? A ball peen hammer? The entrails of a dove?

reply to post by Lilitu


I'd be interested in how a scientist detected an abstract Christian concept, too Maybe he had a Godometer.

Originally posted by dave420
reply to post by Lilitu

 

I'd be interested in how a scientist detected an abstract Christian concept, too

Maybe he had a Godometer.

More likely he had something like this. Test it out at the church league pig roast. You'll detect lots of soul!

reply to post by SpeakerofTruth

First of all, the soul and the spirit are not the same thing.

Ho, and moreover, hum.

A pixie and a leprechaun aren't the same thing either.

I'd be interested in how a scientist detected an abstract Christian concept, too

Maybe he had a Godometer.

I really don't want to go into faith, but it's part of life so I would like to let you in on a little secret dave420, the belief in a human soul is not an abstract christian concept. Christianity adopted the concept just as most religions do when they are created, If you decide to follow christianity, your soul changes. It just adds one detail: sin.

I cannot sin because I don't even believe in the word, I know it exists as a concept, but only because men imagined it, as a way to gain control over others.

MacDougall had equiptment that was plain crap and I even stated it myself that his results were all over the place, but he tried. Most scientists would never attempt to prove or disprove the soul because they trust science, spirituality doesn't need study in most of thier eyes, because its a personal belief.

But we shouldn't say, well... his scale obviously wasn't accurate...he had no proof. I've learned plenty in public school, but I was never given any information on how much a soul weighs, we couldn't even talk about a soul because people throw the idea in with religion and spirituality.

But if you think that he was just an old scientist with flawed ideas, back it up with proof, difinitive proof. If you can then good ups... but I think it's logically possible so I looked for a modern day study that would either prove or disprove. And I found this studdy conducted in 2002 by a team of scientists at the Occam Center for Multiple Entities in Palo Alto, California.

Source:
www.avantnews.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=340

STUDY SUGGESTS SOUL SALE OBESITY PANACEA

"Our study, performed over 100 years later, was far more extensive and exposed both certain accuracies and certain fallacies in MacDougall's earlier findings."

In MacDougall's early atempt to measure the human soul's weight in 1907 he estimated that whatever the soul was, it weighed 21 grams. In the study done in 2002, scientist and spokesperson for the center, Dr. Wilson Umbra stated this....

The human soul does not possess a fixed mass, as faultily proposed by Dr. MacDougall, but rather varies proportionally to body weight. The soul was also found to weigh considerably more than earlier thought.

I little farther and he says this....

The Occam Center tested over 450 terminally ill volunteers over the course of the three-year study. Each of the volunteers was positioned on a highly accurate scale, with his or her weight recorded ten times per second prior to and following departure from the earthly plane.

Dr. MacDougall's results, while admirable, were several orders of magnitude off the mark. Our findings show a soul-to-body-mass ratio of nearly 15 percent. In other words, a 200 pound person is lugging around excess weight, in the form of his or her soul, of almost 30 pounds."

They came up with the theory that if, somehow, we were able to extract souls from our bodies without dying. (if possible)this states we could some day, we can possibly trade our soul for a nicer body.
(possibly one day, accourding to this study, we might have the option to actually sell our souls)