....continued
//But if you believe in a soul and therefore existence without the body, how can this be explained within the context of atheism?//
But why should we automatically assume that belief in a God is a factor at all? This is what I don't understand. Believers claim to know the answers but they don't, so theism is irrelevant. If we want to discover what's really happening here, we must acknowledge that and look at the question realistically. As a non-believer, it would suit my purpose very well to simply ignore or refute such claims, or to declare that each and every report is bunkum, or justifiable in biochemical or neurophysiological terms, but I don't do that because I am honest enough to concede that people do experience the inexplicable - and experience has taught me that some incidences do, in fact, affect our physical world. Neither do I claim to have all the answers, but I can only imagine that the soul consists of accumulated energy generated by our thoughts, experiences and emotions throughout our lives. Since we know that energy cannot be destroyed, it follows that after death that energy must still exist - hence new 'souls' are being created continually. Just a theory, of course, but since I don't believe that anything is 'supernatural', it's the best explanation I can offer.