Have you seen stuff? It gets everywhere. 
But not before they’re done with their abuse of popular scientific theories:
Why is there God rather than No God?
God out of nothing.
Is absence of God inherently unstable?
God abhors a vacuum.
The Unified G-Theory.
Fuck you Hitchens! Not so great now, are you?!
Not necessarily - perhaps they just didn’t hear you. TAP TAP TAP Is this thing on?
Communication takes place when one person’s mind encodes some information/message in some form, which conveys it to the recipient, whose mind is able to decode that information/message hopefully into a something vaguely resembling what the encoder intended. If the recipient is unable to receive or decode the message for whatever reason --the microphone wasn’t on, the speaker was mumbling, mówca mówił w innym języku, the speaker was trying to use the term “God” to mean “a maybe-sentient telepathic force” and everyone else understood the term to mean “Thor”-- then communication will partially or entirely fail.
There is no evidence whatsoever that there is any supplemental connection that conveys meaning above and beyond the encoded/decoded messages. If there was such a connection then this thread probably wouldn’t be five pages long.
Good words. Why not. 
Like sand. It gets everywhere. And it is Star Wars day today.
I’m not saying people don’t have their own separate independent experiences. It’s just that at some point all of our individual experiences get shared with one another (a great many of them anyway) which becomes the sum total of human experience. We humans are actually pretty sophisticated in our language sharing abilities, and with books, movies and whatnot, a great deal of our human experience gets passed on from one generation to the next. Now that observation proves neither God nor Life, but it is pretty cool when you think about it.
No, they do not. The vast majority of people’s experiences effect an extremely small proportion of the Earth’s population.
you seem to find a lot of things “pretty cool” in this thread. Got anything to say directly about your unsupported proposition that “God” and “Life” are synonymous, now that people have given reasons why it doesn’t fly?
I disagree that there is some supernatural mechanism that shares “a great many” of our personal experiences with other humans - if that were happening then it seems basically inevitable that some small percentage of this knowledge would have found its way into my brain and forced me to be aware of everybody’s underwear sizes from all of history. (Yeah, I’d get the underwear sizes. That’s how things generally go for me.)
Because I have not been crammed full of underwear size knowledge, I can safely conclude that there’s not a supernatural firehose piping the sum total of human knowledge back into individual people.
Which is not to say that all human knowledge vanishes with death; as you note humanity has developed various cultural habits of retaining various kinds of accumulated knowledge, both passing them along directly via speaking to others or indirectly by writing stuff down. There’s nothing supernatural about this, though, and the only things retained are the encoded and transferred messages of communication. By all available evidence, no part of a person’s actual mind or personal identity persists after death. (Common sense supports this opinion as well - dead people rot. They just break down into generic unremarkable particles and in any individual sense just vanish.)
But in any case that’s what reality does - I’m actually curious about your mythos. Despite all the prior posts I still don’t understand it. Let me explain, and ask for clarification.
As best I can tell you posit that humans all have souls or something which are composed of some sort of metaphysical matter - a substance which is not destroyed on death. (These souls are presumably stored in the appendix; people who have their appendixes removed are demons.) This substance records and retains something of human experience, and is capable of sharing these recorded experiences with others. It can do this while everybody’s still alive, even, through telepathy/connectedness/wireless internet/whatever (ie: just telepathy), but also comes loose when people die to glom onto other soulstuff and transmit the recorded experiences directly. You call this soul substance, or at least the collected set of all such soul substance, capital-L-“Life”, or “God”.
This is what I’ve gotten from your posts. Am I close so far?
In any case, questions.
- You posit that having your Life/God/Soul part removed removes your life (by the identity property of puns, it seems), and thus if you had your soul removed would be immediately fatal. But does soul-stuff do anything for you beyond that? Is it an integral part of consciousness? Emotions? Memories? Sensations? Does your optic nerve require it to function? And of course the flipside of this is, how much work is left for the brain to handle? Does a person need a brain? Could it be charitably donated to the zombie food bank?
TL;DR: Is the soul your mind, or not?
- Putting aside what Life does for you while it’s inside of you, does Life do anything else? Does it store knowledge independent of the knowledge stored in the minds all the individual people? (Like historical underwear sizes?) Does it have feelings independent of individual people’s minds? Does it have a mind independent of other people’s minds? Is the collective pile of soulstuff have a conscious mind of its own? Is it an actual singular entity of its own?
TL;DR: Is there a God?
You seem to have a fixation on proving someone wrong. Why? What does it matter if their beliefs are different from yours? I’m pretty comfortable with my beliefs, which I’ve described to some extent here, whether anyone else shares them or not. And, like I said, if you want to find out more about this God=Life hypothesis, check out Neale Donald Walsch. Why? Because it’s pretty cool, that’s why.
You ask great questions. Short answer: I don’t know. Longer answer: let me think about it and get back to you.
Sure, no hurry. I like a well-thought out answer almost as much as I rambling!
Look at the header image at the top of the page. Note the line below the large “THE STRAIGHT DOPE.” This site attracts people interested in doing that.
It’s easier to lure people into beartraps with honey than vinegar, though.
Did I say that out loud? Whoops! 
If what you want to do is ask questions you find interesting, eventually you will have to get used to the fact that the answer to some of those questions will be “No”.
What is the purpose of this thread, again?
Those things do not appear on my phone. I’m using Tapatalk. Which illustrates once again why we can’t assume someone else’s experience is the same as our own.
No problem.
I’ll just assume you’re asking seriously.
This thread is witnessing.
Maybe I’m just an asshole, but I was under the impression that the social contract regarding witnessing is the witnesser gets to propose whatever ideas they want - and everybody else gets to respond however they like, up to and including debating it, refuting it, and blowing giant holes in it with a double-barreled shotgun (bland acceptance of the witnesser’s ideas is uncommon at best, in these parts). And because the witnesser basically asked for it, ripping into their ideas like this is somehow not threadshitting. The only thing that’s actually disallowed is personal insults - and usually shredding the person’s idea isn’t considered a personal insult.
I’d say it’s good clean fun for all, except that as often as not the witnessers themselves are unaware of how the game is played here and are surprised to find themselves getting ripped into.
For myself I’m entertained by strange ideas, as long as they’re not boring - and to me this weird soul/god/telepathy business is not yet boring. I’ll not be convinced, obviously, but I’m having fun drawing explanations of this odd concept of him and seeing how well his ideas adapt to having their logical flaws pointed out. I do hope he doesn’t expect to convert me or anything (and I’ve tried to make it very clear nothing like that will happen), but as long as he’s enjoying the discussion (which he seemingly is) I don’t even feel like I’m tweaking the guy.
I shared an excerpt from a book by Neale Donald Walsch that posits the possibility that God and Life are one and the same. I’m looking at the characteristics of both abstract nouns, God and Life, to see what they might have in common that could make that hypothesis true. Some would rather dissect the semantics of the words themselves, which is fine, though not what I was hoping for. Each person comes at the theory with their own perspective.
While I am quite happy to regard the God of my upbringing as obvious mythology (not that there’s anything wrong with that), I am not quite ready to abandon the concept of God entirely. I believe God needs to be redefined to match with what I now believe. And this is my attempt to do that. You don’t have to believe the same way I do, but if you have read anything else by NDW, I’d be interested to hear what you think about his philosophy.
The guy does not feel tweaked. Not yet anyway. 