Many people talk about the soul, what it is, where it is, where it comes from and where it goes. Voltaire wrote an essay sparkling with wit on the subject, proving that, in fact the soul cannot exist, since that would mean God is not all powerful and is reduced to tricks to animate matter when he has the power to infuse it directly. 

Voltaire did not believe souls exist, but he still could not shake the superstition that God does. Well, even a genius is locked in his times and the general thinking of those times. But, despite his irrefutable arguments that souls cannot and do not exist, contrarians continue to insist they do, though they can never convince even themselves why souls are necessary, how an immaterial substance, a zero, a nothingness, can control matter, whether in an animal, a vegetable, or a human being, and why souls are not considered to exist in every living thing no matter how small or large or of what nature, or even agree on whether the soul enters the body when conception takes place or after, and from where it comes, nor can they agree on where it goes, if anywhere, on death of the body, nor what this means for the person or animal, fish, insect or tree which had been occupied by this soul.

Their counter-argument is simply, God is all powerful, and decided these things called souls are necessary to animate and motivate life, but only human life, the other beings of the universe being quite capable of living happily without souls. But then Voltaire and others ask again, so why can’t we? Their reply, only humans have the necessary intelligence to require souls as we need them to make moral choices of what is good or bad, wrong or right, forgetting, or not wanting to know, that many animals are as intelligent as we, that different peoples have very different ideas of what is right or wrong, of what a good life is, what is moral and what is not, so that it seems their various gods have injected into them various souls to match the requirements of the time and place and the culture concerned, or that, if there is a single God, then it has no idea what it is doing and guides humanity by whim and caprice.

But however all this may be, they can never explain how the soul itself is animated and motivated, or even what this nothingness is or how a nothing can be a something. One assumes that the soul also has to be controlled by some means, otherwise, if God directly infuses them with his presence, the question arises once again, why does he not do that directly with us? This circle goes round and round and no one is any the wiser.

Nevertheless, the question has to be considered; does the soul have a soul, and does that soul have a soul and so on, to infinity, never seeming to reach an end, until, finally, we reach God, until the soul of souls becomes God and then, yes, the question becomes, does God have a soul, and if so, as it seems it must, from where does it come and what is its nature?

Or we are faced with the fact that God does not need a soul, since the devout claim God is self-motivating, self-willed, self-controlled; in which case we must ask, well, if we are made in the image of God, if we are ourselves are regarded as little gods, replicas of the bigger one, then we must have the same powers as this God, that we are Gods then, are we not and therefore do not need a soul: an absurd conclusion, being Gods, but one that the believers in fantasies force upon us with their own logic. In fact, the Gnostic Gospels state that we are gods in very clear terms.

In the Gospel of St. James, Jesus tells his listeners that if they want to be him, they must follow the way, and when asked what is the way, responds with the very Taoist statement, that the way that can be explained is not the way. I am the way, he says, and if you follow the way, follow me, then you too will become me, Jesus, will become a God. In which case I do not see the need for a heaven or a paradise, an invention of priests to fool and bamboozle the unthinking.

One can see how this type of thinking has led us to the precipice we are on, a world being destroyed by superstition, by ignorance, by belief in things which aren’t there, basing our lives and civilisation on these false beliefs, one of the most important being the belief of many that the soul lives on after us, so that death and destruction are not seen as the end but a beginning, with the result that these fanatics of the soul are leading us closer and closer to the edge of extinction, which would perhaps not be so bad if it were only ourselves, but we are condemning all know life to extinction. And where will the souls of all these beings be then, but lost, wandering in space and time, alone, without purpose, until God orders them to enter life in other places which need them. So round we go on the never-ending circle of absurdities that Reason, that feeble light of humanity flickering in the darkness, has never been able to break.