The Weight of My Soul

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I picked up this crime thriller by Mark Billingham from the British Council Library the other day. For all my love for the literary "greats," I go to sleep every day with the exploits of gory, psychotic, Dexter-esque cops and killers.

In any case, something in this book I'm reading set me off on the usual tangent into myself. There's this gay pathologist with various piercings on his body who's the very-straight-and-almost-copy-book-macho cop protagonist's best friend. Over a post-mortem, he tells his friend the cop that an adult dead body weighs about 16-21 grams (3/4 ounce) less than the person did immediately before he or she died.

Or so a Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts came to believe after conducting experiments on 4 tuberculosis patients, one terminal diabetes patient and one man who was dying of undiagnosed causes in 1906. The good doctor, a religious man, thought the lost weight, sudden and substantial and inexplicable, was that of the soul. This was confirmed when his experiments on dogs showed no weight loss when he killed them for the sake of science—only humans have souls, you see.

My research shows that Dr. MacDougall’s findings were published in American Medicine in April 1907 in a paper pompously entitled "The Soul: Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of The Existence of Such Substance."

The pathologist in Mark Billingham’s book explained it as the release of the residual air from the lungs at the moment of death.

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Most religious philosophies juxtapose “body” against “soul.”

The body is material, the soul spiritual.
The body is effervescent, the soul eternal.
The body consumes and is therefore ultimately consumed; the soul is energy and therefore essential.
A body without a soul is dead; a shell to be discarded. A soul without a body is free, has gained nirvana, merged with the essence of the godhead—the param-atman—and has therefore reached its ultimate goal.

For religious philosophies, thus, the body burdens the soul while the soul “enlightens” the body.

One of the reasons I can’t subscribe to religions (and the eminent Dr. MacDougall) is my lack of faith in the absolute certainty of their beliefs.

If my body “contains” my soul within its limits (and therefore its limitations), does it not affect the “shape” and “scope” of my soul as long as it is within my body?
Does not the soul get imprinted with the experiences of the body?
Don’t the body’s properties affect the chemistry or the character of the soul?

I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that my soul must also show some scratches from the life that has been etched into my body. Otherwise, how is it my soul and not yours or a tree’s or an ant’s?

If my soul is essential energy, unaffected by the “cage” it must inhabit, how does it reap the benefits of the good my body does or get punished for the sins it commits?

If all souls are one and inseparable from each other, how is the body I inhabit today a result of my soul’s karma and a part of its purification process?

Does the body or the soul commit the acts that will be rewarded or punished?

If it is the soul that is responsible for my karma on earth, why is my body incarcerated, whipped, tortured, maimed and killed?

If it is the body, why an afterlife? Why heaven or hell?