Now that I have shared my fears with you, maybe some of you would be interested in some of the counter arguments for popular atheist debunking. Since these arguments are from me, they don’t convince myself a lot, but maybe you would like to hear them.

1.      We are just our brains and this is proven by brain damage. Brain damage can impair your emotional responses, or eliminate them, or eliminate memory, even render you back to the state of a baby.

Answer: Who says that our soul is the same as our intellect? Who says that our memory is permanent, at least permanent at each moment in this life and also throughout the afterlive or potential after-this-lives? How is this a counter argument to a soul or an afterlife? If we assume reincarnation, for example, memory wiping is even planned (and, I assume, memory recovery).

Emotions are not the soul. Some people can even tell themselves that they are not feeling “right”. Sometimes, only the others around them can tell. But how can they say “this is not the right person”? What makes them say so? Only what they are used to? Surely they have assumption what is the “right” person that should be in front of them and what exactly is wrong with the sick person? How can they think that the universe, or spirit world, forgets what the "right" person is then if they can tell? Also, the brain itself is proven to try to repair itself into the “original” status. Why if there is no correct pattern to revert to? Obviously there is a pattern that is correct for a person. Of course, not all damage can be repaired in this life – but the brain always tries.

Other statement to this argument: How can we know how a person experiences their consciousness from the inside? We can only judge behaviour and communication, not the qualia of a person from the inside.

Other statement to this argument: I notice that, particular with this argument, the debunkers use the same technique that they don’t like to see in religious people – they ignore evidence that supports a soul and present only the evidence that fits their arguments (i.e. brain repair pattern is never, ever mentioned).

2.      If there is an afterlife, it would be boring, who wants to live forever?

Answer: Is this life boring? Of course, the golden city might get dull, but who says the afterlife consists only of one “place”? And is not forever not existing just as boring, only you cannot judge ?

3.      Religions contradict each other and some ideas are plain childish.

Answer: True. So is science, if looked at throughout the last 2000 years. This does not prove anything. The spiritual world/afterlife, if we assume it exists, could be (and I think it is) a very complex world where we have little understanding about the whole. Therefore, it would be only natural that knowledge is fragmentary – yet. Who knows what we may know in 10.000 years?

4.      Near death experiences sometimes have clear hallucinatory elements, also they differ substantially from person to person and culture to culture.

Answer: True. So does life differ immensely from person to person. Just cross-examine three witnesses to a single car accident. That does not mean the car accident never happened. Also, who says that NDEs must be only spiritual or only physical? Why can not some physical, sickness-related elements play into some NDEs? The brain is still there in your last moments and you can have hallucinations, that does not mean everything about an NDE is a hallucination – on the contrary, these accounts often are remarkably coherent for someone with a flatlined brain and no heartbeat.

Lots of love to you all

Christiane