If you travel around the world in an airplane and take a good look you will be able to confirm that there are no longitudinal lines or latitudinal lines marked on the globe. Nor are there lines marked on the ground indicating borders between states and countries, although one can find certain features such as a river or a wall along some borderlines.

My point is: these lines, shown on all maps, and believed in by people everywhere, do not exist! (except as a mental concept)

Scientists and politicians and police and military people take these lines for granted, use them to figure out important stuff, and act as though they are real. Perhaps they are real then, in some sense...but they are not physical. There is no verifiable physical evidence proving their existence.

So...why does the scientific mind demand physical evidence for something like the soul or the afterlife or God? If science cannot find physical evidence for a line of longitude or some other mental concept they find useful then they should bloody well shut up and stop moaning about there being no physical evidence for the soul or for God. The soul, if it exists, is not physical BY DEFINITION. Neither is longitude. One's as good as the other, if you ask me.

Ideas are not physical, but that does not mean they are necessarily not real. They are a form of energy, and energy is real. An idea is very real, because it affects people's consciousness and behaviour. An idea has power, and it springs from a sense of meaning, and imparts a further sense of meaning.

How about I leave you to be happy with your lines of longitude and you leave me to be happy with my belief in the soul?