The Soul Delusion
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- $30.99
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The concept of the soul is a "crackpot" idea ripe for debunking, according to this strident treatise from University of Washington psychology professor Barash (The Survival Game). Its popularity, the author suggests, derives from a number of factors: the soul assuages the fear of death by suggesting a part of the self is immortal; it keeps populations "on the straight-and-narrow" by wielding fears of eternal damnation (Barash calls such threats "the cosmic stick" of organized religions); and panders to humans' egoistic self-perception as special. Still, the concept of the soul is riddled with downsides, Barash contends, including the corresponding fear of hell, its negation of modern science, and its detracting from the value of one's "wild and precious life." The belief also lacks any practical grounding, according to Barash, who notes that science has failed to conclusively identify a moment of "ensoulment" within the life cycle. While the author builds a robust scientific case, he too casually dismisses religious notions of the soul, which he shoehorns into a single chapter that skims across thousands of years' worth of history. The result is an intermittently thought-provoking but ultimately incomplete rebuttal of a foundational spiritual concept.
