In this way your Christianity was always rather animistic. Rivers, mountains, stick insects — for you they were all imbued with some kind of spirit. God’s essence. “To varying degrees,” you’d concede. It seems the existence of souls is the one thing the faithful can all seem to agree on. The exact specifics vary, of course. Traditionally, the Abrahamic faiths believe the soul club is rather exclusive, open to one mammal alone. Thomas of Aquinas suggested animals had souls but only human souls were eternal. Like Aristotle, the Hindus and Jains believe both plants and animals possess them. Granted, the Sanskrit word ātman in Hinduism is perhaps better understood as Self; the self from which all perception flows. But make no mistake, this self is immortal. In the Bhagavad Gita Lord Krishna says of the ātman, “There is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever — existing and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.” The Buddhist doctrine of anatta translates to “no self” or “no soul,” but this simply denies that one’s essence remains a fixed state — there is still an essence which is believed to move beyond the confines of a body into an afterlife (in fact into many). Because this essence remains continually in flux, changing moment to moment with every thought and action, the person into which this essence is reborn is neither entirely different from, nor entirely the same as, the deceased person it passed from, but the two are continuous. Just as our selves are continuous from seven years ago though we are no longer that exact same person. Much like Plutarch’s assertion that one cannot step into the same river twice for “it scatters and again comes together, and approaches and recedes.” New water always flows through.

At the end of the day, a shared belief in an essential and immortal you, whose destiny is determined by the actions taken in this life, feels like a far more profound commonality than the comparatively superficial deviations of dogma and custom that separate faiths. The non-belief in a soul and an afterlife, on the other hand, is something altogether different. Insurmountable. It feels like the religious of the world are at a party arguing over what colour party hat they should be wearing, while the atheists are at their own party next door dancing to Madonna.

Mom, I’m afraid we are at two fundamentally different parties.