(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born.
If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body;--and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains,--then certes the soul does not inhabit there.
After all Death is a Symbol that there was Life.
Research challenges the materialistic understanding of death, according to which biological death represents the final end of existence and of all conscious activity.
But you're dead,' said Harry. 'Oh, yes,' said Dumbledore matter-of-factly. 'Then... am I dead too?' 'Ah,' said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. 'That is the question, isn't it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.
Had I no other proof of the immortality of the soul than the oppression of the just and the triumph of the wicked in this world, this alone would prevent my having the least doubt of it. So shocking a discord amidst a general harmony of things would make me naturally look for a cause; I should say to myself we do not cease to exist with this life; everything reassumes its order after death.
I believe that there is a fundamental mystery in my existence, transcending any biological account of the development of my body (including my brain) with its genetic inheritance and its evolutionary origin. ... I cannot believe that this wonderful gift of a conscious existence has no further future, no possibility of another existence under some other unimaginable conditions.
I don't believe in the afterlife.
I have never seen what to me seemed an atom of proof that there is a future life. And yet-I am inclined to expect one.
For I never have seen, and never shall see, that the cessation of the evidence of existence is necessarily evidence of the cessation of existence.
