Eternal Souls

I thought I’d start with something I’m particularly conflicted over: souls.

Just about any religion out there requires some understanding of eternal life, the two most popular concepts being 1) an eternal consequence for how well or not you lived your mortal life (like Heaven/Hell as in Christianity), and 2) continuous death and rebirth into new physical bodies until ultimate enlightenment is reached when all the knowledge throughout one’s lives is compiled together (like karmic reincarnation as in Hinduism).

But how did we come to believe we had souls?
And are we the only ones, or do other living things have souls as well?
Is ANYTHING that’s living also in possession of an eternal soul; where (and how) do we draw the line?

There are – in my opinion – otherwise irreconcilable events in my past that lead me to believe in ghosts. But I also believe that by feeding off of media, controversy, and the gullible masses that people like “ghost hunters,” “mediums,” and “psychics,” who claim that they can contact or communicate with the dead give belief in ghosts a bad name. I believe that some can, but I believe that people who have actually developed their sensitivity to such things well beyond the ability of the Average Joe don’t manipulate people on cable television, or seek any personal profit from such work. And just to be clear, my experiences did not involve a “human” ghost. Someone once explained to me that we “know” we have a soul because we are more than just the sum of our parts. You can take apart a human being, itty bitty piece by itty bitty piece, and put them back together just the way they were, and through mechanical and electrical assistance you may even be able to get their lungs to breathe and their heart to beat again, but they will not still be human: we – apart from our bodies – are conscious, thinking, opinionated personalities, each one different from the rest. Even twins (or triplets, or quads, etc.) – and even clones in the case of other species – that are biologically identical not only have different fingerprints and iris patterns, but also different personalities. THAT is what makes us us – our personalized subjective life experience. So, that’s what a soul is, right? It transcends the physical limits of the materialistic dimensions and exists separate from our bodies and our physical senses. It’s what makes us truly “alive.” So perhaps that is where we draw the line: primates and other intellectually-advanced species that have evolved far enough in the right direction to have developed a sense of consciousness would thus have a soul: the non-material manifestation of the highly-personal, un-duplicable subjective life experience.

But this is where I’m conflicted: in my ever-growing spiritual journey, I have come to a personal realization that I cannot continue being intellectually honest with myself AND believe in the concept of an eternal soul. Now, I was raised Catholic, but not strictly so. I don’t think my parents and I have stepped foot in a church together since I was out of elementary school, and Christmas and Easter were always about Santa and the Easter Bunny rather than Jesus (even after I figured it all out). In this sense I was blessed (oh, the irony!) with the ability to freely explore different spiritual concepts, once I was aware of them. And as my father has always been a very logical and science-based thinker (apart – perhaps – from his deistic views on God), I was raised with the indispensable power of critical thinking. Now, it’s taken me 22 years to get here, but using such reasoning skills I have rationalized that the consciousness that we experience as humans is a direct effect of our enormous collection of interconnected, networking nerve cells that we call a brain. Following this, I concluded that our highly advanced and consciousness-supporting brain is one of many biological advancements our species has made over aeons of evolutionary trial and error, which means at one time, we (rather, our long forgotten taxonomic ancestor) had no brain, and had no consciousness.

So riddle me this...
If we have no soul, how are there ghosts?
Or, if we have souls, did we acquire them through evolution the same as we acquired consciousness and abstract thought?
And I still never really covered why we started thinking we had one in the first place...

Bonus question(s): How does memory fit into all this? Is it part of what makes up our soul? What about long-term vs. short-term?