On Saturday, November 3, 2018 at 3:04:08 AM UTC-6, Paul Schlyter wrote:

But a tentative hypothesis could be that the "spirit", I.e. our
consciousness, is the organisation of matter, which is what makes us
alive, and also conscious. We see that organisation matters a lot in
other cases. The difference between a book containing a great novel
from a very similar book (same size, same binding, same paper
quality, same number of pages, same amount of ink on the pages)
containing random gibberish is only the organisation of the ink
pattern on the pages. And the difference between a computer running
many useful programs from an identical computer waiting to have an OS
installed is the organisation of bit values in its memory. In these
cases the organisation itself has no mass, which is compatible with
the idea that the spirit also has no mass.

Apparently, it is true that information has no mass, but all of our
understanding of information is that it must reside in some form of
matter. Hence, it is not unreasonable to expect that "spirit" has
some kind of mass.

However, the claim that the human spirit somehow survives the
physical death of the body, to go on living forever in heaven or hell
(Christianity, Judaism, Islam), or to be transferred to another body
(Hinduism, Buddhism), is highly doubtful.

Why is that "doubtful"? Where is your evidence for this? You have none,
of course, so you "doubt" in a vacuum.

There is also a strange asymmetry in the claims by Christianity, Judaism,
Islam: they claim that the human spirit lives on in eternity after death,
but not that it already has existed in eternity before birth. Why this
asymmetry? Presumably because it reflects human fear: what happened
before birth is in the past and already has happened so we need not worry
about that.

Yes, this bothered me once upon a time. This is another point that divides
present-day Christianity from the early form. There is one passage in the
Bible that hints of life before birth:

"Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?"
-- John 9:2

Jesus answered that neither was the case, but he didn't deny that it was
POSSIBLE to sin before birth. And then there's this:

"Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest
forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet
unto the nations." -- jeremiah 1:5

It is fashionable today to treat this merely as an example of the
foreknowledge of God, but it's just as logical that Jeremiah's spirit DID
exist before he was born.

Jesus claimed that He existed before his birth, so why not us? The Lord
demanded of Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid
and "all the sons of God shouted for joy." It is also fashionable to
explain these as angels, but John uses "sons of God" to refer to us:

"Beloved, now are we the sons of God" -- 1 John 3:2

But what happens after death is in the future

Not for those who have had near-death experiences :-)

and we humans worry so much about the future

That's because we will spend the rest of our lives there :-)

that whole professions can profit well on that worry (e.g. financial
forecasters, astrologers, and several others).

AGW advocates, ...

Hinduism and Buddhism has more symmetry in their claims since they
say that our current incarnation is not the first one, we have many
earlier incarnation. However the claim that the spirit transfers to
other bodies but still maintains some identity is still highly
doubtful.

"Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother."
-- Khalil Gibran