Soul 

“the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal.”

I have trouble with this word, with how it is used.  “Keep body and soul together.”  You mean not dead?  “She had a big soul.”  They come in different sizes?  The definition contains two practical impossibilities—immateriality and immortality.  Dogs have souls?

It is one of those terms that has grown so large in this lazy language environment as to have no shape at all.  Soul food.  Lonely soul.  It is a grey word, both pretentious and cheap. It has been put to some shitty uses.  A couple of priestly cults got into using it in their scam, claiming that—for a price—they could save your soul from a miserable afterlife they invented.  Good money, insuring something that doesn’t exist against illusory harm.  No returning customers complained.  Step right up for paradise.

Why does the brain allow itself to be mysterious?  Allow this fantasy of body/soul separation?  What is gained by the dichotomy?  This tumor of an organ above the rest, wired for survival, does it fool itself into wondering if death can be skipped over?  All evidence to the contrary.  Thought is immaterial.  Could it be immortal, too?  But how could thought survive without a brain to think it?  On another plane, of course, as soul.  There is comfort in this fantasy, not bodily comfort, of another type.

So, soul is born.  As real as an imaginary friend.  If only it had remained so simple, so personal.  The next thing you know, everybody, every animate thing (& why stop there?) has a soul.  Is it an essence?  Some sort of quality?  Spirit?  What is that?  It can be whatever you project into it.  It could be a ghost.  It might end up tortured, feeling (physical?) pain forever.  Maybe it is Mom waiting for you in heaven.  There is even an All Souls Day (confused as Halloween) when everyone gets to play. 

Soul is a vaguery for good reason, because soul does not exist.  There is no such thing.  A spiritual placebo, an empty catchall of lazy language.  Whenever it is used, a better, more focused and appropriate term is available.  Many languages have no word for it at all, no concept of it.  We are not isolate corpus and spiritus.  We are just one.  We die as one.  Get over soul.  Integrate yourself.