Theory of reincarnation - credible or not and why?

Great Debates
1

That’s the question. What is the credibility of the theory of reincarnation? My take is that it appears valid. That is the only theory that IMO somewhat satisfactorily explains why people have so much divergence in the quality of their lives, why some are born poor and others rich, why some have to toil very just to make ends meet while others get to spend a life of comfort and luxury with minimum input, why some suffer pain and agony and others live healthy lives.

Reincarnation helps in removing God as the cause or the one responsible for the suffering of his own creation which makes sense if God is to be considered benevolent. It seems logical to believe then, that God created this universe, but does not interfere with it anynmore. What happens to a person and to the mankind as a whole is a result of their karma.

It is also interesting to note the significance of cyclic events that occur in nature, example of which are the earth’s rotation, the planets orbiting around the sun, the solar system orbiting in its galaxy and even the galaxy being in orbit. If so much in nature follows a cycle, why not life? ISn’t reincarnation another cycle.

2

It’s certainly valid if one accepts the existance of the soul as something different to, and seperable from, the physical body.

Many would disagree with that thesis, of course. :slight_smile:

3

The concept of “soul” exists in all the major religions of this world. It is not concept in contradiction to any of the philosophies. Am I wrong in this understanding?

4

You’re making an assumption that there’s a relationship between prosperity and moral worth; that if good or bad things happen to a person, that person must have done something to deserve it, either in this life or a past life.

What’s unsatisfactory about the idea that good things or bad things sometimes happen to someone by chance?

5

Depends on how one defines soul - The Buddhist and Islamic conceptualization of the “soul”, for example, may be quite different from one another.

6

Well, many of our atheist and materialist friends deny the existence of mind, let alone the soul, so it’s definitely in contradiction to some materialist philosophies. And, of course, reincarnation is, on the face of it, opposed to the conventional doctrines of the Abrahamic religions - although another current thread is attempting to reconcile the two.

7

What is the self?

It is said that “this life is all” and that you (like everyone else) are going to die, and when you do, that’s it. If your self is your individual self, and you have never known a valid sense of we, (let alone anything more inclusive), then no, there’s no cosmic justice and yes, you’re going to die.

It is also said, in various ways both poetic and prosaic, that

• you and I are the same, or are expressions of the same, and that our separateness is not a separateness of different beings, but of different lives that the same being experiences; or

• all spiritual growth is about transcending the merely individual and “thinking globally” (and caring globally) even as you continue to live and act locally; or

• everyone is God in disguise, and our lives are like books being read by a voracious reader; when God finishes one book God puts it back on the shelf and starts another, and all of the books get read in due course; or

• while you were taught that the universe started with the Big Bang some 12-15 billion years ago and a subsequent chain of cause-and-effect resulted in stars settling out, planets cooling, life originating and evolving on many of them, and you as an individual being born to one species thereof, the truth of the matter is that some 12-15 billion years ago, the Big Bang originated from no prior cause, and is the only event to have ever occurred (everything in time and space that can be distinguished from it is distinguished as a result of an artificial distinction, a slice that our minds make). One event without prior cause, and you are part of it; or

• you are a child of God, you were created in God’s own image, as was everyone else, and so each of us is a local manifestation of God, the same underlying self engaged locally and momentarily at being individual; or

• you will be reincarnated into a future that your current acts helped create; the holy are not raised to heaven and the wicked sent to hell, so much as all of us will stay here and keep doing it and doing it until we get it right, and in the mean time will suffer the consequences of our collective actions; or

• what goes around, comes around; or

• I am that I am; I am That Which Is and there is no other.
The truth of these things doesn’t erase the useful truth of being an individual (be rather hard to function if you lost your grasp on that!) but rather parallels it.
None of it means you were Henry VIII in some previous life in some sense in which I was not, IMHO, (and indeed, reincarnation-beliefs are as subject to babytalk oversimplifications as much as anything pertaining to God), but there you have it.

8

Even ignoring the implausibilty of souls, reincarnation strikes me as pointless. If I had a “former life”, I inherited no memories or skills from it. Reincarnated or not, that hypothetical former self is dead; annihilated in all the ways that matter.

9

No. All I am trying to say is that the reason some people are happy and other’s aren’t is because of their “karma” in the previous life.

I would put is as - what happens to one in this life is determined by his actions. But the fact that one is “born” a certain way is on account of actions of the past life.

I am not talking of good or bad things happening to people. My questions relates to finding an explanation about why some people are healthy and happy and others are deprived.

Again, the purpose is only to try and find an explanation to the one of the biggest arguments atheists have - why is there suffering in this world when we are taught that God is omnipotent and benevolent? Why does He allow suffering when he is the one that is supposed to be making our life better?

Reincarnation theorizes that God, even if He exists, is not controlling us. The suffering we have in our lives is not because God can prevent it but isn’t. Rather it is because God is not an actor in the scenario at all and what happens to me in each life is because of my own actions. Whether I remember my past life or not is not of relevance.

I would only like to explore why most people continue to adhere to the Abrahmanic faiths when there is a better explanation for existence.

10

I don’t think it is credible for a few reasons.

  1. Most conceptions ended in early death. In this thread it was found that even with competent nutrition and prenatal care about 30% of conceptions do not make it to a full term healthy birth. In the olden days it was probably closer to 40-50% with no prenatal care and bad nutrition. Combine that with the fact that through much of human history only about 50% of kids made it to the age of 6 and you have the fact that only 1/4th of conceptions actually lead to a child being born and growing up. There isn’t much karma to work out if you die when you are in the womb or die at age 3.

  2. The population keeps growing. About 9.5% of all humans that have ever lived currently are alive today (50 billionish have lived, 6 billion are alive now). There are as many people in Indonesia (240 million) as there were on the entire planet when Jesus was born (about 250 million).

http://www.geocities.com/dtmcbride/reference/population-world.html

So souls are coming out of nowhere to make up this population deficit.

  1. Good and evil are social constructs. You may say ‘what causes pain is evil’ but even that is a social construct as people who victimize evil people (someone who harasses a child molester for example) is not really considered to be an evil person by society at large even though they are causing pain. Someone who flies over Northern Iraq and drops chemical weapons on the Kurds inherits negative Karma but a farmer who flies over a field and sprays pesticide (pesticide and chemical weapons are almost identical chemically) to kill the bugs does not. Who is to say which is worse, because good and evil are constantly changing. In 200 years and in some cultures killing an insect is no different than killing a human. There is no universal system of good and evil. Good and evil are largely dependent on our social and individual identities which are largely cultural.

  2. Nobody remembers their past lives. How can you make amends for something you don’t understand? If I did something in 1559 I don’t remember it.

  3. The level of effort required to survive has consistenly gone down the last 100+ years. Someone born today in a poor household has it better than someone born into a rich household 100 years ago. The same will apply 100 years from now when the world’s population is around 11 billion. Toil and suffering as a whole are going down globally and will continue to do so. Many diseases have been conquered, half of the world’s governments are liberal democracies, gross human rights abuses that were common 50-100 years ago in places like China, Japan, the USSR, Turkey or Germany (to name a few) are now constrained to a handful of small third world countries.

  4. If God created the potential for suffering God cannot be benevolent. It doesn’t matter if God doesn’t force us to suffer. If He made it possible, he isn’t benevolent.

In my view there is no spiritual or higher reason for chance occurences like suffering or birth. Some people are born to poor parents just because they were born to poor parents. A child born to poor parents in 2059 will be much better off than a child born to upper class parents in 1986.

11

“Random shit happens randomly” fits the available evidence better than any of the alternatives.

12

I used to believe in reincarnation when I was in my teens and to a lesser degree my early 20s. One reason was the “why do bad things happen to good people?” query that it seemed to answer better than the conventional heaven/hell Protestant line, and another was the “evidence”. I “remembered” things that had never happened, had vivid dreams set in other times, was fascinated with Tudor England and WW2 Germany and the Herodian dynasty and the age of the robber barons, etc., and felt I must have been somehow a part, and then of course all the countless books on people (some famous, such as Glenn Ford, Taylor Caldwell, Teri Moore, etc.) who recalled past lives in the nth detail under hypnosis.

Learning that the hypnosis evidence was, in so many words, a lot of crap was a hard lesson in skepticism. There’s a pervasive myth that I was actually even taught in school that “people don’t lie under hypnosis”. Flat out not true: people are highly suggestible under hypnosis [if they’re under it at all] and with just a little prodding can remember in detail things that can be clearly demonstrated never to have happened. (Prime examples are people who have “recovered” memories of childhood sexual abuse that were later proven to be completely false).

Also, in addition to the fact that “nobody was ever a peasant in a past life” as many have pointed out, I couldn’t help but notice that the more a particular era had been written about in popular/romance novels or filmed for the screen, the more people who seemed to remember having lived in those times. There were lots of people who could “remember” living in the antebellum south (always on plantations, of course), Elizabethan England, generic Middle Age settings, Rome and above all ancient Egypt, but hardly anybody recalled living in a rice patty in the Mekong delta or 18th century Prague or 12th century Finland or Great Zimbabwe, times and places that very rarely appear in popular culture.

So my view is “Maybe it does or doesn’t exist, but there’s no hard evidence for it”. To be honest, I can’t think of what would constitute hard evidence for it, though many pseudoscientific New Age “quantum physics for people who haven’t had science since 8th grade and want to believe something really cool has been proven by it” type books claim to have found it.

13

Sure, but why do we need an explanation about why some people are healthy and happy and others are deprived? If somebody is born to rich parents, for example, why do we have to assume he led a moral life in a previous life?

14

Coincidentally I bought Looking for Carroll Beckwith for a few bucks at a sale yesterday.

Publishers Weekly say:

This tale is improbable in more ways than one: Indianapolis police homicide commander Snow offers a dryly nonplused account of his discovery of his “past life” as 19th-century portrait painter Carroll Beckwith. Snow participated in (and taped) a therapeutic “recovered memory” session as a lark, and, once hypnotized, was jolted by a series of clear images and recollections that seemed even then strangely plausible, despite his cop’s hard-nosed, empirical perspective. Later, when he walked into a New Orleans gallery at random and confronted a painting that had appeared to him in his vision, he determined to put his detective’s investigative skills to work and research congruencies between his “memories” and the artist’s life. Surprisingly, the evidence that he painstakingly assembled through retrieving Beckwith’s journals and work from obscurity seemed fully to confirm that Snow’s “recollections” were authentic. Snow relates all this ruefully, hardly eager to be perceived as “New Age.” His crisp, unpretentious prose and descriptive skill go a long way in convincing one to follow his unorthodox journey. His researched account of Beckwith’s lost life is impressive: Snow is remarkably sensitive to aesthetic concerns and has unearthed the compelling tale of an artist who was forced to rely on portraiture for support, and whose fast fade seemed foreordained, even as friends like John Singer Sargent found fame. Snow has the courage of his convictions: though his detective wife urged him to curtail his quest to avoid career risk, his book is provocative.

15

There’s no need of any theory to explain that. People are born poor…because their parents were poor. That’s enough of an explanation. Some live a live of luxury because they were lucky, or smart, or clever crooks, or hard working, or born rich, etc…

Look at the world like it is, all the explanations are there for all to see. Maybe it’s not satisfactory to you because it’s unjust (or at least very far from being always just) , but searching for a nice arbitrary theory that makes this feeling of lack of justice go away is just hidding from the reality. It smells of “I don’t want to live in an unjust world, so please find something, anything, any concept, regardless how arbitrary that would make me feel better”.

The world is unjust, people are often poor, wronged, disabled, etc, etc, etc… by no fault of their own, while evil bastards live a long life of pleasure and luxury. That’s the way it is.

16

Assuming that karma has something to do with what good or evil things you did in your previous life, you’re indeed assuming that prosperity (at leats at birth) is a result of morality (past morality, in this case) as ** Captain amazing ** said.

It’s not any better. Ok, actually I think that it’s somewhat better, because these religions are IMO full of holes and contradictions hence still IMO logically completely unbelievable. At least, just saying “reincarnation” isn’t inconsistent. But there’s still zero reason to believe that such a thing happens.

And even if reincarnation existed, why would you assume that somehow it would be just? Why good people couldn’t be reincarnated as children of congolese beggars and Hitler as Bill Gates? That’s a second completely arbitrary assumption you’re making besides the existence of reincarnation itself apparently because you would want bad things like suffering and good things like prosperity to be deserved.

17

Because he either doesn’t exist, isn’t omnipotent or isn’t benevolent. Those are all explanations.

It is relevant. As I said, even if I had a former life, nothing of that former self survives in a detectable, meaningful form. You can’t punish or reward something that’s gone. It would be like executing me for mass murder because some of my atoms were once part of Stalin.

As an atheistic materialist I can say the same thing; IMHO the answer is, they were raised that way.

Also, how is it “better” ? Certainly not morally; karma is a wonderful excuse for utter ruthlessness. After all, your victims deserve what happens to them - due to crimes in a former life. You don’t need to feel compassion for anyone; if someone is poor or sick or crippled, it’s their fault.

18

I also remember the mention of a study where they tried to implant fake memories made in advance (of mundane events, like getting lost as a child). Successfully. I don’t have a cite, I actually read it on this board.

19

That’s why I don’t like much belief in reincarnation, in its modern, westernized, simplified version (that got away with all the religious and cultural bagage attached to this belief in its traditionnal forms) . At best, it’s an easy “feel good” theory, at worst an excuse for feeling unconcerned.

20

I’m quite interested in the maths of reincarnation, given certain facts and scientific explanations. The universe (ie. time itself) is 13.7 Billion years old. Life is only a few billion years old. Multicellular life is only hundreds of millions of years old.

Let’s imagine all of these souls waiting those billions of years to be born new the first time, into whatever first has one. These few souls then begin their ascent/descent of the hierarchy (bad jellyfish, become a flatworm! Good jellyfish, become a Coelacanth!), while the vast majority of souls watch them gain their unfair advantage in the knowledge that they will statistically almost certainly be born right at the bottom when they first enter the wheel of life.

Thus, for a time, almost everything that was born had a brand new soul in it, which hadn’t been reincarnated from anywhere. Given this, why not simply cut out such unnecessary crap and have a brand new soul in each and every new individual? (Not that I believe in souls at all, of course.)

As for the suffering angle, ‘injustice’ and ‘undeserved suffering’ are outputs of human cognitive modules, and themselves did not exist until humans evolved (an evolutionary eyeblink ago.)