You are a ghost pushing a skeleton wrapped in a meat-bag of mostly water on top of a molten ball of iron covered in a thin crust of rock supporting a film of interesting chemistry. Your existence is not even a blip on the radar of your home planet much less the rest of the universe.

That is terrifying.

You are a living creature who will be born, live and die. That means that you have a very short, (in the west mostly predefined) time of existence to make a mark on your family, community, and world. The connections you make with other creatures can change whole nations. One man standing alone is cannon fodder; 30 men standing together on the right fulcrum at the right time can bend the moral path of the entire human race. You will live forever in the thoughts of the people you help, you raise and lift up to be better than when you found them.

That is a bit less terrifying.

The problem I have with believing in immortality and an afterlife is that it encourages you to do nothing now, in the one existence we can prove exists. I've known people who have not fought bill collectors, or evictions etc because it was "god's plan" for them to live a shitty life. Most religions, especially the Abrahamic ones, teach suffering as a virtue, that living in squalor and filth is something noble almost. Blessed are the poor and meek and that nonsense. The thing that finally drove me away from faith and religion is that those same books and moral teaching also tell you that doing good works, feeding the poor, treating the sick etc are the paths to salvation. People in the churches I grew up in were so worried about what comes after, and how they were going to be judged that they forgot to, you know, live now and make a life for themselves and their families.

I say that to get into a discussion on souls: Does a soul exist? And my answer to that is yes, it does... in a fashion. Your brain is a massive electrical interconnected network of chemical signals in a ball of fat and gristle. Damage that ball of fat enough and you can get a massive change in your personality, likes and dislikes etc. Take that same brain and raise it differently from birth and you get a whole different person as an adult. This set of physical interconnects in your head, formed by your birth and upbringing is a physical thing that can be measured, recorded... and altered if we so choose. Because it is a physical thing, it exists. We call this the 'soul.' So does this mean we are just animals and we can do whatever we want to do? No. Something is different in our heads than say crows, or cattle, etc. But we are awfully close to chimps and the greater apes than most of us want to admit. At what point does the brain and its network cease to be just a brain and then become a nexus of thought? Dogs are smart, do they have souls? Well, sort of. Their brains work the same way yours does: it has neurons, a frontal cortex, brain stem, spinal column binocular vision etc. By the physical definition of what I call a 'soul' dogs have souls. So do mice, rats, goats, lizards, alligators, etc. The word 'soul' in the common context does not apply to those creatures because we humans are a narcissistic lot and want to think we are special, so what we commonly call a 'soul' is reserved for us, and us alone.

That brings up another question, doesn't it: What makes us different? Is it language? Art? Poetry? Weapons? Reality TV shows? The physical answer is that we have a big frontal cortex, wrapped around an ape brain, wrapped around a primitive mammalian brain, covering a reptilian brain sitting on a tiny little regulatory chunk of brain left over from when we swam in the oceans a few hundred million years ago. Somewhere, sometime, about 50,000 years ago the number of neurons and brain pathways in our heads got high enough that we became sentient and could do things like remember hunting patters, draw pictures to remember things, and most importantly, pass data along to a new generation. There is even a name for it: The Great Leap Forward

So because we are physical beings with physical bodies and a brain based in physics and chemistry, we can now ask and answer your question. We know quite a bit about black holes, up to the point of the event horizon. At this point, nothing comes out to give us data to analyze. But we do know what happens a few meters away from that point, and it is not pleasant to things made of physical stuff. The energy in the magnetic fields would rip your body apart into its component atoms, the hyper radiation would vaporize anything left, and you would be long long gone before that happened, even if you flew right at the heart of the beast at a hyper velocity.