The spiritual delusion

My central objection to the idea of man as a "spiritual being" is the very concept of a "soul" -- the concept that there is some supernatural spark inside us that makes us human, that there is something going on inside the human brain other than massively complex computational processes in the synapses. It is this delusion that leads so many humans to imagine that we are something other than (or, as many of us like to have it, something "more than") animals. It is from this one central delusion that so many of our other errors, inanities, and misunderstandings flow.

People who have spent decades studying the behavior of chimpanzees in the wild report that love, friendship, conviviality, and compassion exist among them very much in the same way as among human beings. Unless one wants to argue that the chimpanzee is also a "spiritual being" (and I can hardly think of a more implausible guise for a "spiritual being" to assume), this shows that these pleasant qualities are an integral part of the animal nature which we share with our cousin species, and need no "spiritual" pretensions to explain them.

The same applies to what might be called the other side of the behavioral balance sheet. If we have no souls, neither are we "fallen". Chimpanzees have also been observed to commit murder and rape, to display greed and cruelty and violent intolerance of strangers, to engage in complex struggles for dominance within their social groups, and to wage genocidal "war" against rival communities of their own species. Human behavior does not need the concept of "sin" to explain it any more than it needs the concept of spirituality -- good and bad, it is rooted in our genes, as natural as the physical flesh and blood itself.