1. There is no body inside your body.

Despite what we read in The Book of Mormon about the Brother of Jared’s experience with Jesus, there is no credible evidence beyond personal belief that you are a human-shaped, full-sized, spirit body inside of a human-shaped, full-sized temporal body, like a ghost dressed in a flesh and bone suit. It may feel that way sometimes, but it also feels like the Earth is standing still in space and we know that it’s not.

I think we can know beyond a reasonable doubt that there are no spirit bodies inside of our bodies because surgeons throughout modern medical history have cut open live human bodies in all kinds of ways with no consideration at all for the spirit body supposedly living in there, tinkered around inside, and then stiched them back up and brought them to a full recovery. No evidence of spirit body damage, no evidence of spirit body spillage or leakage, and really no room at all in there for a full-sized spirit body to be living. Is there a spirit body shaped hollow inside each of us? No. What’s inside a human body other than the insides of a human body? There is no space inside your body for another full-sized version of you. Where would it go? The human body is too full of its own insides to accomodate a second version of itself like some kind of Russian nesting doll.

And by the way, what happens to the spirit body limbs of amputees? If I had to get my arm amputated, would my spirit arm get amputated too and I’d get it back in the resurrection as well? Or would I need to somehow fold it like a chicken wing, nice and snug next to my temporal torso? If I had to get both arms amputed, maybe I’d be like a spirit body in a temporal body straitjacket.

A faithful believer might reason that the spirit body must somehow be fused with the temporal body in such a way as to be undetectable until death, but to that I would say, maybe so, but isn’t it undetectable after death as well? Although people have claimed to see spirit bodies of the departed, these bodies never seem to make it from the inner space of subjective reality to the outer space of objective reality long enough for any disinterested outsiders to confirm that they are really there. How long should something go undetected in our shared objective reality before we admit that it doesn’t exist in our shared objective reality?

And how can a spiritual form that is so weak or so hidden as to be undetectable by modern science, have sufficient size, shape, and power to control a temporal form as large and as solid (and detectable) as the human body? I don’t think that Joseph Smith knew about things like particle accelerators (such as The Large Hadron Collider) when he wrote Doctrine and Covenants 131:7-8.

Faithful believers might reason that although there may be no scientific proof that they have spirit bodies, they believe they have them nonetheless because they can feel it, they know what they feel, and so they are confident that someday they will be vindicated in their belief. Well, I don’t feel it (anymore), and I know what I feel, so I too am confident that someday I will be vindicated in my belief. I’m also confident that if you slowly sawed off my left leg without anesthesia, that before I passed out I would only feel the saw going through one left leg and not two, because there is no body inside my body. Any spirit body that is strong enough to move my temporal body around, should feel the saw in addition to its temporal body feeling it. And if I can’t feel each of them individually because the spirit body and the temporal body are one, then there is no difference between them, and if there is no difference between them then aren’t they the same thing?

2. You can’t control your feelings.

It may feel like you can sometimes, but, SURPRISE! The feeling of being in control of your feelings is just another feeling. And aren’t feelings the effects of what has already happened? And if the feeling of being in control of your feelings is just another feeling, then in order to control your feelings it seems that you would need to control the effects of what has alread happened with the effect of what has already happened, a sort of double impossiblity. In order to feel your feelings, including the feeling of being the feeler of those feelings, that which produces those feelings must first occur. And besides, knowing what we all know about human nature, don’t you think if people could control their feelings that they would spend a lot more time feeling good and a lot less time feeling bad? Aren’t feelings actually like the weather in many ways? Many may feel in control when they obtain and use an umbrella and keep smiling through the rain, but no one controls when the rain stops.

3. You can’t change yourself.

This one doesn’t feel right at first to many people, especially those who are more achievement oriented. But what do I mean by “yourself?” I mean that feeling that you have (and I believe it’s a subjective reality that is an objective illusion) of being the subject of your own experiences, located inside of “your” body. And if that self is what you feel yourself to be, then that is the you that can’t change yourself, because “you” in that sense of the word is an illusion, and by an illusion I mean just a feeling, and feelings only exist to their subjects subjectively, and do not exist out in objective reality. And although an illusion may be able to cause change to some degree, an illusion cannot change itself. I found the following statement in my notes from about a year ago, so I am quoting myself here:

“I am not the scientist in the experiment of my life,  rather “I” am the continually updating result of the ongoing experiment, a result which changes and which can be changed, but which cannot change itself.”