On Souls, Brains, and Persons

Neither brains nor souls reflect, intend, deliberate, analyze, think, rank, choose, and act. Persons do. Brains are not atheists. Persons are. Souls are not theists. Persons are.

If your worldview keeps you from distinguishing persons from brains and souls, you ought to think about revising your worldview. If your model clashes with undeniable facts -- facts you cannot deny without self-contradiction -- you might want to take a new look at your model.

"A myth is, of course, not a fairy story," Gilbert Ryle wrote in The Concept of Mind. "It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them."

When atheists deny plain facts instead of providing naturalist explanations for those facts, they discredit the cause of secularism.

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