I don't necessarily deny the existence of a god, but until somebody can show me some concrete evidence of there being one (which probably isn't going to happen)...I'm sure not going to be "converted" anytime soon. The whole concept of souls, religion, and God was just was a lot of stuff thought up by ancient man, who at the time, didn't have enough scientific evidence to show what really went on in the world.
Re-incarnation is a topic that isn't very believable to me, either. How is one's soul supposed to travel from one body to the next...yet none of us ever say anything about our past life? If I had the same soul as the person before me, why doesn't that soul say tell me in some way that it's seen other bodies? Why doesn't it take control of my hands right now as I type this? Why isn't it telling me "No, it's all true! You're just a stupid jaded teenager saying things that you think are right!"
Is it maybe because I have the soul that's inhabited a whole bunch of non-believers over time? Is it because the soul, God, and all the other religious stuff just wants to keep itself separated from humanity, and watches over us instead? They just let the people who have faith in God and spirituality believe what they want, and then when they die, they let them in on the secret? What happens after we die, anyway?
There have been stories of people being miraculously cured from a fatal disease in the hospital just from praying (and intensive medical care--oops, we'll forget about that). And then, of course, there are people who still pass away no matter how much praying they do. There are people who claim to have had out-of-body experiences--they were the same spirit as Napoleon, or Martin Luther King Jr, or Colonel Sanders. Yet these people have nothing to back that up, other than a faint notion that it might be true, judging from a dream they had, for example. Or maybe they're just a bunch of money-crazy people who want to get some instant gratification by saying they created the special recipe for crispy fried chicken.
Some people believe--as the paper we read states--that your soul just pops out of your body when you bite the dust, flies away to a far off land. From there, apparently, it watches over the world for a little while, waiting for a baby to be born so it can pop back into there and inhabit a new body. Others believe that your spirit (different from the soul, for the soul's the one that travels from body to body) goes into the sky and plays Foozeball with Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon in "heaven". And others believe both, even though the two beliefs contradict each other--one says you go to somebody else, the other says you go to the clouds.
Which is it? Does whatever a certain person believe happen for them alone? Does God grant the person's soul--train of thought, belief, whatever controls their body at the time-- whatever path it believes in? Is faith really the only thing that matters--it just depends on what you believe in? If you believe in Ba and Khu, does this become a reality? It all just seems too good to be true.
Religion, to me, is just a primitive thing that millions of people still believe in around the world. People back in ancient times saw a volcano erupt, and they assumed it was God on a bad day. And people believed that, of course, because what else was there to believe? How could they counter that statement by talking about molten rocks and gas pressure inside the earth? Now if somebody tried to say that the same volcano erupted for the earlier reason, people would just laugh their heads off at them.
And as for the afterlife...well, of COURSE somebody would want to believe that. They didn't want to pretend to deny the existence of that--they were so primitive, and so afraid of death, then what could hurt with a little belief in having somewhere else to go when you die?
Now maybe I'm just taking too much of this at face value--physical value, if you might-- and arguing that "Just because it's not there, it can't exist"...and there are a bunch of people who insist that it's the opposite of those thoughts. They say that it doesn't have to be there to exist. It's more of a spiritual, mental kind of reality--something certain people understand and believe in, and certain people don't. But until I find something religious that really clicks with me in my life, I'm still going to be a non-believer.