The Ripening
Animals remain in their instinctive patterns of behaviour for generation after generation.
We humans, however, are aware of a task from our maker, to understand and develop the world we live in using all its resources: materials, organisms and our own talents.
Animal development is sharply distinguished from human by their lack of true language, that is, of symbolic signification with unlimited generative capacity. They only evolve by random trial followed by mimicry; man has the capacity to project novel thoughts, to invent.
The results of such distinctively human activity are sometimes called culture, and the human Task is sometimes called the cultural mandate, but we prefer to call it the developmental mandate to show that we are talking about all distinctively human activity, not just one area.
Our task of continuous improvement begins with our selves but does not end there: it also includes human society and the world, of which we are part and of which we are stewards.
Our task requires collaboration, in which each of us has a duty to contribute, enriching our shared life in all possible ways, helping human society to ripen, and the world with it.
(Otherworldalism) "Our true life and task lie at least partly elsewhere, in the spiritual realm, which has no intrinsic connection to the visible world. Spirituality, the cultivation of that realm, is helped by at least some degree of detachment from the visible world." (This view is shared by classical Buddhism, Puranic Hinduism, Platonism, Kabbalah and some other forms of Hellenistic Judaicism, Sufi Moslems and some Christians.)
Otherworldalism believes that alongside the visible world is an otherworld, an invisible, immaterial "spiritual" (or "religious") world. It supposes that the true life of (at least some) humans lies (at least partly) in an immaterial "true self", detachable from the human body but temporarily attached to it, capable of experiencing the otherworld through contemplation. This unit is sometimes called in English a "soul" or "spirit", though each of these words is also used in other senses.
To Judaicists and Christians the answer is simply that this belief was imported from Hellenism (and ultimately from further East) and conflicts with both Tanakh and New Covenant Book.
More broadly, perhaps the most effective response to this belief is that its adherents are never consistent.
For instance Buddhists, having declared in the first three "Noble Truths" that intention as such is the source of the problem, urge us in the fourth to adopt "right intentions". Having declared life itself to be suffering, they proceed to urge us to live well, that is, to act rightly in the world. They constantly smuggle into their discourse doctrines contrary to their declared ones.
Similarly, Puranists claim to seek moksha (escape) but also affirm dharma, artha and kama (virtues to practise in the world).
And likewise for all the others. Life itself rejects this doctrine, and nobody consistently acts on it.