My impression of the Buddhist and Dharmic versions of reincarnation is that the whole point is that you lose your identity entirely and your essence– whatever that may be said to be– is recycled. Of course that’s entirely contradicted by people claiming to remember past lives, plus I’m extremely unclear on what a soul may be said to be if you take away identity and memory.
I think most theologians would say that’s a gross oversimplification of Christianity.
My late wife had an unusual set of beliefs: she was a devout Christian and yet believed in reincarnation. Her justification was that she was sure that people would get any number of chances to “get it right”. She said that her fondest wish was to be done with this world and get off the wheel. To the extent I’m sure of anything about religion and the afterlife, I think she succeeded.
One of my sisters, after an elderly friend died on the same day that one of her other friends had a baby, declared that when one dies, another is born as if cause and effect. She didn’t have an answer about the increasing population because that doesn’t fit with her fanciful life view.
As far as everyone’s past life being someone famous - from the movie Bull Durham:
Crash Davis: how come nobody ever says they were Joe Schmo?
Annie Savoy: [still laughing] Because it doesn’t work that way, you fool!
H. Beam Piper actually brought it up in one of his Paratime stories. In that timeline reincarnation was a proven scientific fact, which had various social effects. But then somebody found a way to bring out the memory of past lives and suddenly people all over started trying to claim that various things and positions that they had in a past life legally should be returned to them. Mind, the legal aspect was quickly overshadowed an escalation to violence.
As for myself, I’ve always regarded reincarnation as effectively the same as having no afterlife at all. I am my memories; if “I” don’t recall them in “my” new life, as far as I’m concerned that’s not me at all. No more than if I was eaten by a bear I’d consider the bear absorbing my nutrients to mean I lived on as a bear.
It could be that the growing human population is balanced by the declining animal population. A lot of people are former animals.
But if you bring animals into the system, you have to look at the big picture.
There are about 8,000,000,000 people in the world. But there are about 500,000,000,000,000,000 beetles. So beetles outnumber humans by a ratio of over sixty million to one. And beetles have substantially short lifespans than humans, so they cycle through reincarnations quicker.
Statistically, most reincarnations involve a beetle being reincarnated as a new beetle.
I’ve seen jokes/memes about that before; the theme being that the human population goes up, the animal population goes down by necessity to provide souls for the humans. Since more and more humans are reincarnated animals, we become progressively more stupid and barbaric.
So babies get their souls delivered from a just deceased soul mate the very moment they pass through the birth canal? That would either have implications for those contrieved abortion debates or has not been thought through. But I have the impression you don’t really agree with your sister anyway.
One of the problems I have with reincarnation (and with souls post mortem in general, like in hell and paradise) is dementia. How come that after becoming progressively more and more stupid they die and become clever again? Were did the cleverness hide during those miserable last years of their previous life? The words stupid and clever are meant as simplifications of a general idea, of course.
You know, that’s actually a good point. These New People are, if you consider the whole point of the reincarnation cycle as a means of refining souls via experience, some of the best Animal souls out there, but also some of the worst Human souls. This could explain so much of the last century, when human populations exploded far above what we ever had before.
I mean, what happens when a new Human baby is born, but there’s no Animal soul available that meets the current threshold of moving up the reincarnation ladder? Well, like any bureaucracy, if no candidate meets your criteria, you lower the criteria. We start getting second-rate Animal souls put in Human bodies, and everything gets worse.
When I was about 13, my best friend insisted the girl he had a crush on was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe because she was born on the same day Monroe died. He became so obnoxious about it, I spent considerable time in the library researching who died on my friend’s birthday: Adolf Eichmann. I never told him.
Spider Robinson wrote a story, Rubber Soul where it turned out that cryogenically freezing someone counted as “death” and when you defrosted them there’d be a new person in there.
I think the counter-argument is that a person’s soul and their intelligence are two different things. Mental abilities can decline in old age, just as physical abilities can. But a soul is a separate thing that remains undiminished.
Of course, this argument assumes that a soul exists in the first place.
I have the impression that you have never seen a terminally ill alzheimer patient: the “soul”, even assuming that such a thing exists, is extremely diminished. When I wrote that the words stupid and clever are meant as simplifications of a general idea I thought it was clear I was not talking about being smart, but I did not express myself as clearly as I thought, it seems. Terminal dementia takes away your humanity, soul, spirit, geist, call it what you will. How it comes back in the next reincarnation is a mistery to me. That is why I don’t believe in reincarnation. Or in souls, except as metaphores.
