Material girl, spiritual boy

Materialism is not intrinsic to humanity and is often associated with intellectualism and rationalistic scientifically oriented personality. Human experience and history shows religious behaviour starting from the Stone Age which demonstrates, among other things, that the traditional Marxist criticism of religion as secondary learned attribute in humans is incorrect. Of course, the broad range of world religions and ideas associated with immortality, transcendent worlds, divinities and spirits and powers that are not matter is immense.

Human religiosity is investigated intensively in various discipline under the umbrella of Science of Religion. These studies use many methods from psychology and sociology to modern chemistry and neural studies of brains and so on. There is no general assumption about the reality of transcendent, no ontology, but rather a hard-nosed practical approach to studying what can be studied using the given methods.


Material girl
Materialistic philosophy sees everything as a play of matter and energy. Also life is a phenomenon produced by this game. Using the classic tripartite structure of mind developed by Sigmund Freud we can say that in materialistic view not only body but also the spiritual aspects of humanity are, in fact, only forms of matter and energy. The raw engine of hormone driven Id, the mental processes of an Ego showing personality traits and also the moral and ethical role of Super-ego in a living organism with higher intelligence and its mental reflections in the world of belief systems and make-believe are all at the end matter.

In death, it is dust to dust as the organism disintegrates and its elements return to nature and all the mental activity, feeling, spiritual ideas, love and hatred ends. The person is no more and there is no hope for ever seen him again, as the widow of Carl Sagan said.


Spiritual boy
Ancient Greeks new materialistic philosophies of which Leucippus and Democritus are great examples. Such natural philosophies were not dominant, however, and the Athenians in fact executed Socrates blaming him of Atheism. Good Greeks were believers in the socially accepted religions that also covered some rather mystic Egyptian and Indian stuff mixed with prehistoric Eleusian traditions.

The intellectual Hellenic mind considered that there is both a spiritual reality and a material reality. Plato presented a spectacular thinking model about the Ideal world where things are what they really are, pure and unchanging and uncorrupted.

But not getting to the heights and depths of Plato's philosophy, ordinary Greeks understood that the spiritual human soul is a prisoner in the material body. The material world was also imperfect, unethical and in many ways evil so that the body was really seen as a prison.

At death the eternal soul separates from the corrupt material body that rots away and the soul that is the invisible reality of the human travels to its real home.

This ancient Hellenic idea is very influential and can be seen in many forms also in the Western culture today.

All kind of ghost whisperers include the idea of an invisible and immortal element that dwells in the human body and separates from it at death.

The spirit is not matter and cannot easily be studied by scientific means. Attempts have been made, for example by measuring the weight of the person who is dying and seeing did the soul have some mass, after all.

Very clearly we see this soul living in the house of body in ancient Egyptian religion where it was imperative, however, that the body will be preserved also after death as the dwelling place for the soul of the deceased that would come to the place of funeral to consume the sacrificed food and drink and enjoy the beauty of earthly gold and jewels, as it did during the life time.