Welcome to the forum Jordan!

Oh cool, questions. 

I don't know what "prime reality" is. The universe and everything in it is real. There might be other things that are real, but I don't know anything about them.

I'm not sure what that means. Reality might be as we perceive it or it might not be. I live like it is.

Wikipedia: "A human is a member of a species of bipedal primates in the family Hominidae." 

Nothing. The person died. He's gone.

We have brains; we can collect and retain information from our environments.

There is no absolute right or wrong, but we have our instincts and logic.

We can certainly learn from our history, but I'm not sure what "meaning" is. Events have causes, but they don't have "meaning."

No.  The word "spiritual" lacks a universe of discourse, and literally refers to nothing.

They're silly.

I understand the emotion behind these sentiments, but emotional conviction isn't a very good measure of empirical accuracy.

Our concern for other humans is not unique in the animal kingdom.  Most intelligent social animals have protective, nurturing, and compassionate feelings towards their own.  Our ability to form second-order thoughts -- that is, thinking about ourselves thinking -- is apparently unique among animals, and so we are able to reflect upon our feelings of compassion for our fellow man, but this seems like a relatively insignificant distinction.

The nutshell explanation for prosocial behavior is that it is the best way for social systems to work.  Collective effort between animals is more effective than individual effort.  A single hyena cannot kill a bison, but ten hyena can do it with relative ease.  Emotions are natural selection's way of getting animals to do what works.  When a mother bird sees a cat climbing the tree towards her nest and unprotected chick, she experiences a basic emotional reaction, and abandons whatever she's doing to go harrass the cat and try to keep it away from her nest.  As humans' brains became more and more complex, our emotions became more complex as well.  Even so, we still have the same basic prosocial traits as other animals.  Protect our tribe.  Be good to those who are good to us.

If you look at social animals from the bottom... say, ants... to the top, humans, you will see that for the most part, cooperation and protecting one's own group are pretty much universal, and it isn't that difficult to see human empathy as a complex version of the same thing.

No, there is no credible evidence for anything paranormal that I'm aware of.  

"Soul" is a nonsense word.  It doesn't actually refer to anything, and is forced to borrow from the natural to describe the supernatural.

To be more precise, what most people think of as a soul is a misplaced attempt to give physical (superphysical?) form to something that is properly regarded as a concept.  We humans notice that a brain is not the same as a personality, or logic, or fantasy.  For most of the few billion years life has been evolving, there has been no need for thinking about what such things "are."  It's only been in the past few hundred thousand years that one species' brain got complex enough to think about thinking.  (Perhaps some other extinct members of Homo also did this, but we'll probably never know for sure.)  The fact is, evolution simply didn't prepare us for thinking about concepts.  All of our pre-human existence, anything that mattered was a "thing."  That rock is useful for cracking nuts or skulls.  It's only been in the past few thousand years that we've started thinking about what, exactly, a "personality" is.  It's only been in the past hundred years that we've had enough knowledge to say how a brain functions, and what electrochemical processes cause various emotional states.

Before we knew what a personality was, our caveman brains quite naturally assumed that there must be a "thing" that went into humans to give them their "them-ness."  The concept of a "soul" as a real "thing" came from this uninformed guesswork.  Today, we realize that a person's personality is the result of staggeringly complex electrochemical processes which begin with DNA.  There is no magic invisible pixie dust.  Just ordinary chemical processes.

I've written an extensive answer to this question.  

Read it HERE.

Turns out I've written about this, too.

Read it HERE.

Well, to be precise, "history" is the recounting of past events from a particular perspective.  There is no such thing as "objective history" in the strictest sense, for every historical story is a narrative.  For humans, history began somewhere between six and ten thousand years ago, and is only continuous in the sense that we can pretty much prove that there was never a point at which all humans disappeared from the earth for a time.  There are considerable gaps in our knowledge of specific events which definitely happened, and quite a few cultures that we know little or nothing about.  It's also probable that there are as-yet-undiscovered societies.

I also believe there will be an end to human history.  It will come when humans are no longer on earth.  I don't know whether humans will go extinct or evolve into other (another?) species.  In either case, when there are no more Homo sapiens on earth, human history will end.

Are we destined for something?  Depends on how you use the word.  Is there a magic outside force that has intelligence and purpose for humans, and is manipulating them towards an end?  It seems so unlikely as to be considered impossible.  However, I think it's fair to use "fate" to describe the inevitability of human nature.  We are "destined" to always be social animals, and to mate sexually, and to raise our young rather than leave them on their own at infancy.  It is our fate to live once and die.  Some things will be, and there's nothing humans can do to prevent or alter them.

I know this world exists. I don't know about anything else. 

Haha, I would ask them how they know that.

Eh...you have "a sense" isn't a very good reason.

I would explain it using natural selection and our evolution as a social animal. Do you accept the theory of evolution?  

Not really. The best evidence I've seen is from is from a show called Ghost Hunters on Sci-fi (one of only a few legitimate ghost hunting shows on television). 

Assuming you define soul as whatever it is that makes me an individual, then yes. It's just our brains. There have been cases where people's personalities have changed, lost control of limbs, etc., after suffering brain damage. Also, people can sometimes be resuscitated when their heart stops. However, if their brain dies, it's all over. If we have some kind of "spirit," I can't fathom what purpose they serve.

It's possible that we can't. I don't think we can be 100% sure of anything other than that we think and we exist. 

Yes....maybe.

I think morality is a human concept. In nature, nothing is right or wrong; it just is. 

Maybe there was a beginning. Maybe there wasn't. I don't know.

I think events in the universe are probably determined, but I don't think it's destined, in the sense that it's not unavoidable.

No problem. 

Hey guys, thanks for your responses, i appreciate it. I'll respond when i have time.... 18 credits was a dumb idea...

1. Well, as long as you mean what we can detect, or could possibly detect, and not literally what we can see.  There will probably always be things we cannot detect, but that does not make them supernatural.

2. You can still make an argument for that, but why bother...it isn't productive and it doesn't make anyone any happier.

3. Our brains are complex enough we can analyze our own thought process, which makes us feel superior to animals that cannot.  But it is just biology.  Feeling like you are something more than an animal does not make it real.

4. There is no soul, in the usual use of the word.  People think there is something that makes them, "them".  Something outside the physical...but the problem is you can physically or chemically change a person into a totally different being.  If I chop out a piece of your brain, "you" will be gone, and never return.  Similarly, I can give you chemicals that make you angry, happy, sad, we can use chemical and psychology to make you forget your dearest memories, etc.  I think if "you" were something non-physical, that would not be possible.  Since I can show that your conscious thought/emotions/memory are a product of chemistry, and electricity, what part of you is non-physical?

5. Well, we can test to show that our beliefs are consistent anyway, for what that is worth.  The only "truth" though is what we can predict with relative certainty.

6. Yes, but certain behaviors are detrimental to any society.  Murder, if unchecked, would destroy a human population so it has consistent rules associated with it that tend to cross national borders.  Morality is also governed by a type of evolution, so it does tend to progress/regress.  Discussions about secular morality deserve their own discussion though, for the most complete explanations.

7. History just is.  We are just a byproduct of the way matter aligned in our solar system.  I imagine eventually human history will end, just because we are unlikely to get off this planet before something destroys us, but in the right circumstance I suppose it could go on forever, or at least until that which we define as time ends, like if the universe collapses.  But if we survive even another ten thousand years we might not be "human" anyway, much less millions, billions and trillions of years into the future.

(Edit: Geeze, I'm not copying you Hamby/Butter, I responded before I read your posts!)