The eternal spirit. . .

Imagine a universe where there is life, and that life ends. What sort of a universe would that be like? A very strange place. First, life would have to have arisen randomly. An impossibility in itself. Randomly I say because a purposeful universe would be directed by intelligence, or God if you will, and God is not capable of creating life that ends.

Animals? Their souls must return to that vast subclass of life that loses its identity when it becomes nonphysical.

The thing that remembers going to the light, but then returns, in near-death experiences? That's not the spirit. That's the soul. Soul is the emotional body, elemental, a sort of ethereal feeling clay that becomes impressed with a shape for a time, which it may retain, but is not a real identity.

We don't have eternal souls. We have eternal spirits.