Here are my problems with reincarnation

Great Debates
1

There is a religious belief that souls reincarnate and that there is a purpose of life, to learn lessons and grow as spirits. However, I have some criticisms of that theory and if anyone has any rebuttals I’d be interested in hearing about them. This isn’t meant as a pit thread, I am actually just curious.

  1. Throughout human history the population was small. The human race now has 7 billion people, but we only hit 1 billion around 1800. We were only around 4 billion back in the 1970s. During 1AD the population was about 250 million, and stabalized at about 500 million for most of the last millenium. Around 10,000 BC the human population was supposedly 1 million or less.

So where are all the souls coming from (this is an old criticism of the theory, I’d heard George Carlin say it once)? There were 1 million humans in 10,000 BC, then 250 million in 1AD, then 1 billion in 1800, now 7 billion.

In the course of 12,000 years we have grown from 1 million to 7 billion people. In the course of 80 years (from 1930 to today) we have grown from 2 billion to 7 billion people.

Why did all these new opportunities for spiritual growth come at the same time that medicine and agriculture advanced enough to support more humans?

  1. At what point in our evolution did we start having souls and spiritual growth? Homo sapiens evolved from earlier primates, which evolved from earlier mammals, which evolved from reptiles, which evolved from fish, which evolved from flatworms,which evolved from eukaryotes, which evolved from prokaryotes, which probably evolved from self contained replicators or metabolic cycles. At which point did the concept of spiritual growth enter the picture? Why did it enter at that point? It had to enter in the final 99.999% of our evolution. Homo sapiens are 200,000 years old, life is 3.8 billion years old.

  2. If life is about learning lessons and spiritual growth, why? What is the point of the growth in the sense of why are we changing forms? Most of human history was full of diseases that killed most children under 6 years of age. What spiritual growth did a child who died in 2 weeks or died at age 4 from malaria gain? Before germ theory it is easy to say billions of humans died before age 6 due to poor nutrition, poor hygiene, poor sanitation and other issues like that, issues we have largely conquered.

If life is about learning lessons, why did so many billions of people die at an age before their minds could possibly have the ability to experience and learn anything? And why didn’t at least one person on the other side give us information on germ theory? As it stands now about 95% of children (roughly that number) grow up to reach adulthood. However in human history that number was far lower. I believe Adam Smith once said he met a woman who had 10 children and all died, but that was not uncommon.

  1. When reviewing or remembering past lifes, people tend to remember lives in accordance with their current culture. ie, they remember being in Europe, or being in Israel during Jesus’s time.

Why doesn’t anyone remember being a hunter gatherer in a small tribe in Africa 40,000 years ago? Or being part of a small group in Russia 12,000 years ago? People only remember events listed in recorded history, and usually recorded history with a European/American slant (ie historical europe, Jesus’s time, etc).

Also keep in mind Jesus was likely just a metaphor for astrological phenomena, and not a real person. So anyone who claims to have met or know about Jesus’s physical life is likely not telling the truth.

  1. Homo sapiens make up a tiny part of life on this planet. There are roughly 1 quintillion insects on earth, so 10^18 vs about 10^10 humans. So insects outnumber us 100,000,000:1. If this planet is about our growth, why are we such a small part of it? Not only that, but viruses supposedly make up the bulk of biodiversity on life. Why would that be the case if the purpose of life revolves around us? We are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of biodiversity on this planet. What about the insects? Why are they here since they outnumber us 100 million to 1?

Does anyone have any good recommendations on religion approached from an evolutionary psychology standpoint? I know Darwin’s cathedral is supposedly good. Someone else here recommended another book to me, but I forgot what it was.

2

No answers to your questions about reincarnation . I am an atheist and don’t believe in reincarnation as taught by particular religions. However I am truly intrigued by the research of Ian Stevenson a Canadian psychiatrist who conducted extensive and seemingly thorough field research which seemed to indicate the existence of past lives. Of course Stevenson’s research doesn’t indicate that reincarnation is universal. It could happen only in a few exceptional cases which would sidestep the problems that you mention.

As to your last question try Robert Wright’s the Moral Animal which has some thought provoking discussion of the implications of evolutionary psychology for religion in one of the later chapters. He has written a new book on religion though I don’t know if it has any discussion from the Ev psych point of view.

3

Atheist here, so I don’t believe in reincarnation either - but there is an appealing suggestion of how population growth affects reincarnation in the movie Before Sunrise:

OK, well this was my thought: 50,000 years ago, there are not even a million people on the planet. 10,000 years ago, there’s, like, two million people on the planet. Now there’s between five and six billion people on the planet, right? Now, if we all have our own, like, individual, unique soul, right, where do they all come from? You know, are modern souls only a fraction of the original souls? 'Cause if they are, that represents a 5,000 to 1 split of each soul in the last 50,000 years, which is, like, a blip in the Earth’s time. You know, so at best we’re like these tiny fractions of people, you know, walking…I mean, is that why we’re so scattered? You know, is that why we’re all so specialized?

4

The best argument I’ve heard for it, is you don’t really have a “soul” in like the free spirity sorta way, but more of just energy. Your molecules are given life by your energy that is then given bigger life by cells and so forth up to your brain. So basically whatever energy source that’s fueling your brain cells in their specific pattern since you’ve been born- that’s basically considered your soul. Your neuronal patterns are what makes you- you. So whatever energy source that fuels that and keeps that whole thing running- that’s your Soul.

If you go with that definition, since at the basic level all it is is Energy and in this universe we go with the Theory that Energy is neither created nor destroyed- that’s reincarnation. It’s just energy being transferred. That which is your “soul” will eventually go from your body into the earth around you, it’ll go into the atoms around you, and into the universe to once again fuel another reaction.

So basically that’s about it. It was an interesting idea, and I liked it, but there’s not really much in the way of cites or beliefs sorta thing for it. So it’s just an interesting idea. I liked it.
Basically heaven is just superpositioning of electrons or electrons reaching a higher energy state and whatever lies still yet undiscovered in the quantum physics realms and it’s applications to biology. Weird, but nifty to think about whenever the thought strikes.

S’all i got.

5

According to my wife, a Buddhist, even rocks have souls, never mind viruses.

But in general she would say that you have oversimplified the whole thing. I tried reading the books, but I got hopelessly confused, either because I am too stupid or because the books seem to be translated word-for-word from Chinese, and don’t make any sense.

So maybe in a past life you used to be a grain of sand. Which in turn used to be a water droplet.

Buddhism doesn’t seem to be any more amenable to rational inquiry than my native Catholicism. If anything they seem to be even more eager to tell you that you are not ready to ask questions yet, unless you read 50,000 pages of literature. And if you ask questions they can’t answer after that, you have to read 50,000 more pages. It is a process more of less of tilling the mental soil, before the seeds of wisdom can be planted.

I called BS on it a long time ago.

6

Christian here who does not believe in reincarnation but I do have some possible answers.

The souls have always been there, a human is “ensouled” at conception. A great many souls are never born as humans – failure to implant in urethras wall, spontaneous abortion, miscarriage due to accident of mother, etc. Also a great many children died when they were children. So, for some reason the Deity or Deities felt/knew that most of the souls which had lived such short human lives (hours only in the case of zygote that didn’t implant) were ready to have a longer existence.

The world, for humans at least, has gotten much better. Most of the human race is not involved only in subsistence farming now. So, the human race has improved – there is more joy – we have learned something (whatever it is that we keep reincarnating for) nasty brutish and short does not describe the vast majorities of peoples lives now. The things learned are not leaned on the human mind level – where would that put plants and animals (see below)? The things the soul learns are learned at the soul level. So it does not matter if you or I do not understand what we are learning – our soul does and will take that knowledge to the next life it experiences.

When in evolution did humans get souls – why are humans the only ones needing souls? The transmigration of the soul through various plants and animals into humans is not an unknown concept for many of the religions that believe in reincarnation. So for several billion years the souls were learning enough to become human – going through being prokaryotes to eukaryotes to flatworms etc on to humans.

For point 4 I have no answer since I do not believe in reincarnation.

7

One thing you have to realise, if you are talking about the Tibetan Buddhist concept of reincarnation, there is not a 1:1 relationship of souls to past lifes since your identity as an individual is actually an illusion. Eg there is no “you” to be reincarnated, “you” don’t exist except as an illusion created by your mind and by society.

Tibetan buddhism believes that exceptional people with very strong identities can leave such a stong imprint on reality that their “illusion” is powerful enough to be largely incarnated again in a single person. The Dalai Lama is one such individual. Most people however are more scattered, and the pattern that makes up their identity is diffused across many future beings.

No cite, just from my own readings of Tibetan buddhism… I call myself a non-practising agnostic buddhist… so I may or may not believe the above.

8

My understanding as per Jewish tradition/kabbalah:

  1. Not everyone gets reincarnated. There’s some sort of system, but I haven’t studied up on it and can’t give you the details. Some people just go to the afterlife and stay there, some are reborn, some are fresh souls just starting out.

  2. Some time around when homo erectus became homo sapiens, one of those humanoid animals was given a soul, and thus became what we would know as a human being. Tradition says he was called Adam :). It was a binary transition- humans with souls versus animals with- well, souls of a sort, but not the same as the human type.

  3. Again, I’m not sure of the specifics of why some people get reborn- the answer is probably somewhere in the works of the Arizal- but my understanding is that people have a specific mission in life. If they don’t fulfill that particular task, they get sent back to try again.
    Sometimes, they get reborn for someone else’s sake. In the case of the children you mentioned, maybe their purpose was to inspire their parents to create a foundation for SIDS research. Okay, that’s not a very subtle example, but the people we meet have an impact on our lives. Who knows what a few years of a child’s company can do?
    Sometimes they get reborn as a minor punishment. Someone is almost eligible for paradise, but they have a few stains on their soul. They might live a short while, until they have accumulated whatever atonement they need.

I realize what I’m saying might be confusing, but I’m not very good at writing down philosophy. If you don’t get it, just tell me and I’ll try to say it better.

  1. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever thought about that before. I’m going to have to go ask some rabbis.

Also, I think most scholars say that Jesus probably did exist, in the sense that there really was a first-century Jew named Yeshua who ticked off the Romans.

  1. I think (I’ll have to check my sources) that a person is supposed to be inspired because “All this was created for me, just so I could do my purpose in life”. On the other hand, if a person is starting to get arrogant, he should reflect on how he’s just a teeny tiny speck in the cosmos, and there’s no call for a swelled head.

I’m having a bit of trouble with this one, because it’s one of those questions that bothers some people and not others. My natural instinct is to answer, “Why not?”, but that probably wouldn’t be very helpful for you.

9

Somewhere there is a soul breeding ranch, where souls fuck like bunnies.

That is why we humans have become so much more promiscuous, because our souls have been forced into being sluts.

10

Maybe slightly lower related life forms such as apes and monkeys. Who cares, really.

As for lessons supposedly learned and forgotten in between lives, that’s all based on a whole lot of unwarranted assumptions and beliefs that things shouldn’t go to waste.

It’s highly unlikely that there’s anyone to judge you in any hypothetical after life. The universe can usually be relied on to maintain a strict neutrality in all things.

11

I’m a Buddhist, and this is my take on it. For a very straightforward book about the concept of death as it relates to reincarnation, try, ‘‘No Death, No Fear’’ by Thich Nhat Hahn.

From the book:

I might characterize your understanding of reincarnation as a wave becoming another wave when it dies. I posit that reincarnation is best understood as waves always being water. When a wave ‘‘dies,’’ it doesn’t really die, because it’s still water. The only thing that changes is how the water has manifest itself at that particular time. In Buddhism, there is no death because there is no notion of an individual to die.

That is just one interpretation, of course.

12

This is a challenge for a strict Judaeo-Christian idea of souls, perhaps, but not a very strong one against reincarnation - as far a I understood it, the whole point is that it isn’t just humans that have souls.

13

One explication of reincarnation — the one you are working from — is the notion that You, a single solitary individual, are the explicit reincarnation of some other single solitary individual who

a) was you, in a way that other people were NOT you;
b) lived before you;
c) and you grow spiritually via learning from those experiences

That is the traditional mainstream-media portrayal of reincarnation. But think of it this way instead, just for the heck of it:

You, one single solitary individual, are one incarnation of that which was also incarnated as

a) everyone who came before you, not just some of them
b) everyone who is alive NOW, also; and
c) you grow spiritually from understanding that “under the hood”, so to speak, we are the same entity having all these different ‘lifetimes’ as experiences.

This is a less conventional description but you’ll find sufficient support for it if you look for it. The whole “I am the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette” shtick is not the important core of the idea; the shared identity and oneness of all, and of transcending isolated single solitary existence as one’s sole sense of self, is more central to the religions from which the notion of reincarnation sprung.

14

While I don’t believe in reincarnation, if I did, none of your reasons would argue me out of it.

The objections are only a problem if you believe that everybody’s a reincarnation of someone else—that nobody’s here for the first time. Presumably, “new souls” could have been created, for the earliest humans and for some of those living today.

This isn’t an argument against reincarnation but an argument against the notion that “life is about learning lessons”—or at least the version of that notion in which every human life is specifically designed for an educational purpose. A belief in reincarnation would, if anything, make this idea more plausible, since a person who only lived a couple of months would get more chances to learn whatever they were “supposed” to learn.

A person who believes in reincarnation might say that, the further back a past life was, the harder it is to remember. Or they might say that “remembered” lives are bogus (just as someone who doesn’t believe in reincarnation might say), and that people don’t have access to past lives during their current ones.

Vurple duppy-gleep?

I don’t see the relevance. Really, I don’t. Why should there be any correlation between numbers and importance?

15

I too am an atheist who doesn’t find these objections compelling.

Maybe there were more bugs or bacterium or blades of grass back then. Heck, maybe every time anything dies, something else somewhere is born in precisely the same moment, so that the total number of organisms always remains exactly constant. Hey, it could happen.

Building from that, presumably the increased number of people around nowadays is symptomatic of there being more souls who are spiritually developed enough not to be born as bacterium.

I’ve never heard of reincarnation being limited to humans - so presumably there have been souls kicking around as long as there’s been life. What about before there was life? Maybe before then the Oneness that is One hadn’t budded yet.

Dude, if we can expect you to learn something as a bacterium, being a baby who lives to age 6 must be a development bonanza. And what are we supposed to learn? If I’m to make a wild guess, why not patience? Or maybe tolerance of boredom?

Meh, logically most of people’s past lives must have been spent as bacterium or incects (there’s been lots and lots of them in the world) so most of their past-life memories wouldn’t make enough sense to a human to be recognized as past life memories.

Who said the purpose of life was about us? We’re just supposed to be the top of the reincarnation/enlightenment latter, aside from and just below wombats. The reason why most critters are bacterium would then presumably be because most souls are total losers. That idiot you work under? Yeah, even worse than him.

Atheism.

16

I don’t believe in reincarnation, but, who says that souls must be subject to the constraints of time? If you can have a magical system where people get moved from body to body (or body to rock to water, or whatever), why can’t those people skip around the time continuum just as well? If I can come back as a frog or the next Pope, why I can’t I come back as a medieval peasant or a plant that supplies nesting material for dinosaurs?

17

Well, an article in the September magazine issue of FOCUS - a BBC publication dealing with Science, Technology and the Future - says that according to a 2002 estimation by the Population Reference Bureau, 106 billion is the number of people who have ever lived.

Maybe someone would like to check their figures?

18

I believe in the material reincarnation of matter, but not the transmigration of souls, & certainly not the survival of a unique individual as a new organism with continuity of memory.

The variety of Hindu thought I find sympathetic sees spirit like matter in that way. The animus is re-used, but piecemeal.

19

The gist I have gotten from much study of the subject is that reincarnation is a an option, sort of like choosing to re-enroll in college for another term or go for a masters degree or enlist in the Peace Corps or not.

Once you are at the level of a “human”, you don’t go back, but you may have experienced lives as other life life forms prior.

There are a great number of souls in the Universe, and some choose to be born/reborn in the physical realm (where advancement is said to be accelerated) or exist in the non-material realm (their home-base). Earth is not the only venue for physical life; some choose lives on other planets or in other dimensions.

Earth is considered an especially great “class” to take lately, with all the crisis and opportunity for growth going on, so many more souls are choosing to incarnate here. And of course, the availability of bodies depends on physical factors which allow for larger population. From what I’ve read, souls are lining up to get in, wanting to be on the front lines for the amazing challenges and opportunities to be had on Earth now. Like a line at Disneyland for an esp. awesome ride. :smiley: We wouldn’t say, gee, where’d all these people come from all of a sudden if we knew that there was a world outside of Disneyland.

And there is also the element of the soul being much larger than our limited comprehension of one life/personality; the oversoul, the idea that one soul splits into many distinct lives, can experience simultanious lives…in fact, the idea that time and space are illusions and a soul’s “lives” are actually happening at once across time and space is something I’ve come across.

Essentially, there are a virtually unlimited number of souls in existence, and some NEVER incarnate, some do so many times, some only once. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, not the other way around. Some, like Jesus or Buddha or Mohamed or Krishna, chose to reincarnate to teach, not as students…the Great Avatars who willingly gave up the comfort of the spiritual realm to brave the hazzards of Earthly life to serve others.

I accept reincarnation as real, jmo, (energy never dies, it just changes forms and to have only one life and then blink out is a waste the Universe would never tolerate, imo) and find the passage from the Bible where Jesus speaks of it telling: He asked his disciples, upon coming into a new town, “Who do the people say I am” ( You’ve been out consorting with the locals, what’s the word on the street?) They replied that the people were saying he was “Elijah come again” (the reincarnation of a long dead prophet). Did Jesus deny this? Or take the chance to debunk the concept of reincarnation in general? No. Quite the contrary. He said, “Verily, I say unto you, ye must be born again to enter the kingdom of Heaven.”

As for why so many die young, the consensus seems to be that they came to learn something they needed to, make up for past wrongs against others here, and/or provide a needed lesson to others (by using their life and death to drive home certain points about injustice/inequity…as during plagues or famines or wars that serve to raise public consciousness and change history)

The idea is that we have a master plan, often unknown to us here, and the worth of being here is that we are TESTED in a way we couldn’t be if we retained our full awareness of the whys and hows. We come here to test ourselves, to see if we can live a life lacking full awareness and “pass”. What good is a test if the book is open and the answers are at hand? So we choose to forget and see how we do under pressure.

There is a writer who “channels” an entity called Emmanuel…I don’t vouch for the veracity of the spiritual connection, but I do appreciate some of “his” comments…he speaks of how souls go off to be born on Earth and then come back all exhausted and shamefaced, and those waiting say, “Oh, back already? Only 75 yrs this time? How’d it go?” And how the most common reaction to death is the soul waking up at “home” and laughing because they can’t believe they ever forgot their true nature and were ever worried. And how dying is like taking off an uncomfortable shoe. :slight_smile:

20

If there is something after this life then reincarnation makes more sense to me than having one shot to get it right. We progress through an intricate weave of cause and effect crossing paths with others and working things out.
I like the waves and water analogy. I’ve also heard one involving drops of water entering the ocean. We are separate individuals but at the same time we are connected and part of a greater whole. The Bible also uses the analogy of cells of the same body. A skin cell may be different from a muscle cell, from a blood cell, from a brain cell, but in our essence we are the same.

I don’t have a problem with the population issue. If everything exists or existed on some other energy or spiritual level before the blip that is earth’s history then it’s easy to imagine that some leave the greater whole to enter the world of duality as individuals at different moments.

I have no idea how or when the consciousness might express itself as souls.

I think whatever learning or growth we get from life’s experiences might be interactive and interconnected. Nothing that happens usually happens to one individual even suffering and death. So, perhaps a baby is not intended to learn something from an illness at 8 months old that leads to death but certainly those around that baby have an opportunity to learn.

I can imagine that all things are interconnected in a way we have yet to fathom. As we assert ourselves as individuals and try to live as if we’re separate we face the consequences of those choices.

It might be interesting to note that reincarnation was taught by early Christians and some note that the Bible still makes references to it.