Originally Posted by Oneironaut
I'm an atheist. Since I make God out to be a fairy tale, does that mean he is one?
What evidence do you have for any of that? When you get down to the bottom of it, you shouldn't believe in anything unless there is sufficient evidence to believe in it. Otherwise you are just engaging in wishful thinking.
What evidence do you have for this?
What evidence do you have for the existence of souls?
I think we have to look at reality for what it is. I know gods and souls sound like neat ideas, but that doesn't make them true. We don't know where the universe came from. We just don't. And there's nothing to suggest that there's a "God" interfering with our planet. Everything down here seems to operate completely predictably according to the laws of physics.
As for our "souls", we have already found them. They are our brains. Like it or not, all our thoughts, our emotions, our loves and hates are just chemicals and neurons in our brains. When some of those brain cells are destroyed, we lose some of our thinking capabilities and our personalities. When a lot of those brain cells are destroyed, we lose a lot of our thinking capabilities and our personalities. When all of them are destroyed (i.e. when we die), we lose all of our thinking capabilities and our personalities. It's not necessarily the most comforting explanation, but it is the correct one. We have to realize that so we can make the most of the few decades we have on this precious planet.