According to Peter Heinegg, mortalism is "the belief that the soul -- or spark of life, or animating principle, or whatever -- dies with the body. . . ." (Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life, Prometheus, 2003, p. 9). That anyone should be a mortalist does not surprise me, but it does surprise me that anyone should consider it an "obvious fact" that death is the "irrevocable end" of a person. But this is what Heinegg holds: "Everybody knows that the soul dies with the body, but nobody likes to admit it." (11)
If everybody knows this, then everybody believes it. But the suicide bomber doesn't believe it as his behavior attests. So it is not the case that everybody knows that the soul dies with the body.
If it were the case, radical Islam would not pose the terrible threat it poses. The commies of the Evil Empire, good materialists that they were, could be threatened with nuclear annihililation should they wax aggressive in their scheme of world domination. Not so the Islamists.
The argument Heinegg gives for his mortalism is a non sequitur, as I already demonstrated.
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