What a spirit can do, matter can do. In the past, when people wanted to believe in some 'magical' phenomenon, they first postulated that there exist something called 'spirit' that simply does it 'in ways that no man can understand'. 'Spirit' is an 'explain-it-all, God-between-the-gaps' joker card. But this mindset has to change! Rather than (non)thinking of s 'spirit' to do it in ways you can't understand, brainstorm some form of matter state that can do similar thing! I use to think that there is no known and seen matter that can even remortly mimick such 'magics' as resurrection etc. So I only posited some unseen type of matter. But I was totally mistaken! There is a form of matter that can do all it takes for something once alife but now dead to resurect! It is called 'nitinol'!
If you hammer a nitinol metal into a face, then hold the shape in place and heat it to a high temperature, then cool it. Then guess what? You have created something that has some immortality! Now destroy the thing you have made by crunch the nitinol to something shapeless . So you may now think you have killed the original structure completely and there is no hope of ever attaining it except to painstakingly recreate it. But you are totally mistaken! All you need to do is deep it in hot water and voila! It returns to the original complex shape!! Now this is 'magic'! By this amazing behaviour nitinol illustrates several things I have been struggling to say in a single sweep! One of them is the meaninglessness of concepts such as 'magic'. If we ever see magic happening, it there and then cease being 'magic'! We humans confuse 'habit' with 'understanding', that is why we posit 'spirits' to do what matter 'cannot do'. We see matter in day to day and we confuse thus habitual perception with 'understanding'!
But now if 'dead molecules' can, at least in principle, remember where they were and return exactly to that place, isn't this all it takes for a corpse to resurrect! Sure, it is all it takes! Thus nitinol proves that matter is capable of immortality! Specifically, rather than thinking of a 'soul' (i.e. something 'beyond understanding'), just think of a type of matter that can resiliently snap back to its original form given the right condition, and we arive at theory of resurrection and immortality that is capable of being illustrated and thus easier to believe!
Remember that the original idea of immortality, such as in the bible, was thought to be via resurrection. To the bible, matter was transmutable into something that looks totally different, and that such will happen during resurection. But then somewhere human amused himself that he now understand matter and that according to the 'understanding', matter is inert and incapable of such fleats! But modern knowledge have shown in several case that this is not the case! So we need to go back to the idea of imortality with matter, i.e. not necesarily via a soul.
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But my reasoning is why should we stop there? Why should we not think of another thing done to matter and voila! It transmuts to a full blown spirit, capable of percolating through walls, reiki, telepathy, immortality etc!
Then the several questions, e.g. life after death changes from the hard, existential questions to the piece of cake type behavioral questions.
The existential one is roblematic. If, for instance, people during Descartes time wanted some metal with some memory, as if it were a living thing, then speculated that there is something that exist, that is totally different from both nickel and titanium, of course they would be disappointed!! You now know that rather, they should brainstorm some unknown behaviours rather than unknown entities.
The advantage of behavior is that even if one doesn't 'exist' at one point in time, it can easily come about! Nitinol did not exist during Descartes times, for instance. But non existent things can never be created! So if we think of 'souls' etc as more of behaviours than entities, it has this added advantage
The 'immaterial' betrays an understanding of matter and spirit that, in reality, is ubsent. Thus we think of a notion of 'matter' that we eroneously think that we understand it in and out yet actually we don't. Descartes could use the word 'matter'. He could predict light corpuscles but he could neither predict 'wave-particle duality' nor nitinol! Similarly, Einstein could use 'matter', could predict BEC but we could not predict nitinol! So what does the concept 'matter' help us to understand? The answer is absolutely nothing!!! Yet this creats an illution of understanding to the point that saying 'immaterial' betray some feeling of understanding. This is a grave error!!
There is nothing called 'material' that both a stone and a diamond have in common, so that an aura, if similarly seen lacks 'the material'. If there is something that the stone and the wood has in common, then it is such properties as 'shape', 'color' etc. 'Material' is a nail in vacuum. An hallmark of our lack of understanding of just what it is that we see. Consequently 'the immaterial' is meaningless! It negates what we don't understand in an attempt to substantiate what is beyond our understanding!!