Today is Ask An Atheist Day.

[longship]

28. Or, when you die, you won't know anything any longer.

Just tweaking your brain a bit.

The brain is what the brain does... Including consciousness.
Including a sense of self.
Including a sense of being in ones body.
Including sensing ones extremities as ones own.
Etc.

How can we know this?

Because there are neurological pathologies which inhibit all of these things. When the brain breaks down in these domains, the person experiences these effects.

Neurologists can even temporarily impose these effects on any healthy person. And lo and behold, when they do that the precise effects are experienced by the subjects. This can be done with drugs, or with something like transcranial magnetic stimulation. These tests are reliable and repeatable.

There is no magic involved. The brain is what the brain does. Consciousness is an emergent property of the mechanism of the 100 billion neurons and the many orders of magnitude more neural connections between them. The human brain is the most complex thing we know of in the universe. All behavior emerges from this mind boggling complexity.

All beliefs, all biases, all love, hate, feelings, learning, and everything else stems from our brains. So too does religion. It's just another emergent property. Not of the universe, but an emergent construction of our remarkable brain.

Think on it for a while. Exercise the most important organ in your body.