The Soul Delusion

The Soul Delusion reveals how traditional religious perspectives on the soul mislead people into false hope, terrifies them with fear of eternal torture, and leads to specious claims about supernatural forces. It concludes with a rousing account of the delights of being “soul-free.”

The case against the soul—and why life is better without one.
The soul, like the Christian notion of the devil, has increasingly become contested, even for traditional believers. Considered objectively, the soul is a strange notion, one entirely at odds with everything we know about how the world actually works. And yet belief in the soul persists, among both the religiously inclined and non-believers.

The Soul Delusion is a wake-up call, encouraging readers to think critically about something widely taken for granted. Evolutionary biologist David P. Barash takes a deep dive into the nature of the soul by reviewing the diverse and often conflicting notions of what the soul is supposed to be and revealing practical problems deriving from such delusive beliefs: how the soul-certain agitate against early and mid-stage abortions because of their insistence that an embryo has a soul, and thus, must be “saved”, even at the risk of the mother’s health, for instance, and how soul-belief has provided marching orders for cruelty toward animals because of the claim that only we have souls and therefore animals don’t deserve protection.

The Soul Delusion also aims to liberate people from fear of hell and free them to enjoy what poet Mary Oliver called “your wild and precious life.” It challenges the assumption that a soul is needed for people to live moral lives, while exposing the misleading nature of supposed near death experiences. It also illuminates how being soul-free opens us to an appreciation of our wonderful lives in the real, the here-and-now, and the prospect of a future without souls.

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