So my Grandma and my Dad were talking spirituality things, and I was in the room and ended up being drawn into the conversation (it started out as a conversation on family history, and only morphed into that stuff later). I pretty much manage to stay out of the conversation until right at the very end, when I get asked pretty directly what my opinion of all of it is. Now me, I'm basically a straight atheist. My world is one of meat and nerves and electric pulses, no spooky "spark of life" or "reincarnation" stuff going on; and when I'm asked pretty directly what I think of it I'm not going to lie and say that I believe in something I don't, which sparks all sorts of the usual back protests of "you can't trust everything you find online" and similar. I mean I won't try to force my beliefs on anyone, you want to believe that and I'm not going to force my beliefs on you, but if you come out and ask me what I think and why I think that I'm not going to undermine my own reasoning either.
Probably the worst part of the whole thing was when my Grandma espoused an opinion and I stated that I didn't believe in it because of a great variety of sources, at least a few of which are done by people much more knowledgeable about this kind of stuff than me, and that I could pull them up right now if they really wanted me to. My dad responded with some version of "You're destroying her story without replacing them with anything!". Well yeah, that's because:
1) The idea that people lose weight at death
is total bunk, so much so that Snopes even has a page on it. (Yes, a physician tried to weigh it back in the late 1800's, his results were 2 inconclusives, 1 drop (and nothing more), 2 drops that then increased over time, and 1 drop that then later reversed itself before reoccuring. He then went on to attempt to photograph the soul leaving the body with X-rays, because X-ray's are "in reality a shadow picture" and "the soul substance gives off a light resembling that of the interstellar ether". And that's on top of the fact that it used to be believed that after death the body actually
gained weight, thus the phrase "dead weight".)
2) I'm not replacing them because there
isn't anything to replace them with in my worldview. That whole "aethist - one without any invisible means of support" thing? Yeah; that's me. I can't replace any beliefs I reject because it's the very beliefs as a whole that I'm rejecting, not the specifics of said beliefs.
So yeah, lots of suck going around after that conversation ended.