Arguments against reincarnation

[billcu1]

Cirdan:

Many reincarnationist theories (RT’s) are not pantheistic, so that fits. In some RT’s there is no one who makes or sets up the rules. Each soul decides for itself, usually with lots of baggage from that pesky past life. In other RT’s certain souls achieve higher states and are considered “teachers.” In still others, loose souls can choose a consensus type of rule, and impose, or, at least, suggest it to their brethren. So, there’s lots of discord. Oh, and by the way, it lends itself well to the instantiation of “new” RT’s and practices.

I once spoke to an RT believer who told me that when souls are loose, there’s no rhyme or reason where said soul ends up next; there’s no dictate that specifies that the ensuing life form be human. He said that they’re cult believes that a loose soul could end up in any life form.

Of course, I asked if that also meant bacteria, to which he replied, “Yes. And, even plants.”

I said that if I get to choose, I’d like not to find myself in an amoeba in some forsaken sludge pond, somewhere. He asked, “Why?” And I said, because "Amoeba don’t die. They replicate by simple cell division, which means, the old one lives when the new one is made. So, I can see myself living for eternity as an amoeba, which is of no interest to me. (BTW, he also believed that our souls were infinitely eternal: no date of creation, and no date of ultimate passing away.)

This theory is not unusual. RT requires that souls have an existential duration of their own, with each theory defining that duration differently.

In my experience with the RT (above) he said that no two people could share one soul, but, that any one person could share many souls. These sharings of many souls are what caused aberrations within animated life forms.

The man I spoke with indicated that you absolutely kept your memories and your personality. And, you knew that you had existed in another body before, perhaps thousands of times. Further, he suggested that the quanta of life submerges these facts from most of us, and, in order to find them, there are certain ritualistic things that one must go through to bring them back to the surface.

Which RT do you like?

God bless,
jd

I think going downwards on the ladder from a human to a butterfly would take a very bad person. We’re supposed to be going upwards. A human that has not built a soul or divine body as did Jesus and Krishna was born with (not a physical body) will return. I like gilgul from the Kabbalah.

 

[Love4All]

Okay, I’ve asked here some of the questions raised here.

Concerning the “who decides?” thing, she does say there is a godly judgement involved in deciding who gets reincarnated as what. She says she rejects pantheism.

Concerning the memory thing, she says that you do at the end of your life get judged as per the Christian viewpoint and go to purgatory and eventually heaven, but while you are there you are “outside time”. I didn’t quite get what being “outside time” meant although I asked several times but I guess it means that “world time” does not apply there so when you do come back (as at some point, having spent enough time in paradise you will long for another life) you could be reincarnated at any other period in history. I asked whether this meant that there could be two or more people living simulatneously who share the same soul but she says no, that isn’t so. She says that before you are born you leave your memory behind and start with a clean slate but can reclaim your past memory after you have died. But that memory does leave certain traces in the living that people with sufficient training can access.

Tell her the only thing that could possibly be significant about any of her “memories” or “illusions” or “visions,” whatever they are, is how they affect her actions in this life. The whole point of any of this is to love and serve God. Hope and pray to be reincarnated into a world with the Catholic Church established, rather than without. Worlds with the Church are heaven worlds, worlds without her are hell worlds. Purgatory is just temporal suffering preceding eternal Bliss, so, if you are still suffering in any way, you are not yet in eternal Bliss, and you have to pray and practice Catholicism in order to get there. This cuts through the worry over distinctions between concepts of Purgatory or Reincarnation, which might in reality be the selfsame thing.

 

[Love4All]

if people are reincarnated, how does the population increase? Where do these people come from? Who was the first person who ever existed reincarted from? What stop me from jumping off cliff after cliff until i get the life i want, and then do it all over again?

What would stop you would be the Catholic Doctrine that deliberate suicide leads to hell, or in terms of reincarnation, all of your future lives getting progressively worse and worse, with no possibility of Moshka. Treating life like a video game with a reset button is open contempt for life, and might be the Sin against the Holy Ghost.

 

[Love4All]

There is no explanation for why this imagined cycle of births and rebirths began.

That wouldn’t, by itself, invalidate it. There are many things we don’t understand, that do not cease to be just because we don’t understand them.

There is no mechanism for how this system of birth and rebirth is administered, and how and by whom the individual is judged. Saying it is a product of “Karma” explains nothing.

There is a physical law of cause and effect, action and reaction, stated by Newton it is that every action (physical) has an equal and opposite reaction.

Ideas of “Karma” are just the application of this observable physical law to the realm of moral action, where it is not so visible, but not perhaps, by that token, unreal.

Our first life on the earth would not have included any past evils for which we would have to provide expiation.

For those Christians (?) who espouse reincarnation, it clearly contradicts the Bible: Hebrews 9:27, “it is appointed unto man once to die, and after that the judgment.”

But what does that judgment entail? Is it not thinkable that someone might view an event in their life in retrospect, and repent of their particular action, and be granted by God the opportunity to rectify it?

What if we live our first life, are judged, and then have experiences correcting all our mistakes until we reach perfection and then enter heaven? Does it really matter whether we are just tossed into fire or whether, by contrast, we experience making our wrong decisions again correctly?

 

[Love4All]

Why would Jesus come to bring us everlasing life if we can perpetuate our own existence for ourselves?

Why did he die on the cross?

If there was another way …why would He say that He is the Way and the Truth and the Life?

I don’t think reincarnation is presented as “another way.”

 

[Love4All]

. . . what if purgatory is actually reincarnation? We know that nothing perfect and clean goes before God, so what if he sends souls to purgatory, which is actually here on earth? The experiences here and how we deal with them would then be our cleansing. That would explain things like some people experiencing great amounts suffering vs those who have small amounts of suffering. Those who need ‘more cleansing’ have more suffering here on earth. It could also explain past life experiences that have been verified (and there are quite a few out there; it’s hard to deny all of them).

I’m not saying this is my personal belief, but it is a possibility. We don’t know 100% what God actually does or how he purifies our souls. It’s a possibility.

Yes.

 

[billcu1]

What would stop you would be the Catholic Doctrine that deliberate suicide leads to hell, or in terms of reincarnation, all of your future lives getting progressively worse and worse, with no possibility of Moshka. Treating life like a video game with a reset button is open contempt for life, and might be the Sin against the Holy Ghost.

I don’t know that catholicism teaches that suicide leads to hell. To commit mortal sin one must be in a proper state of mind and know what one is doing. If you’re commiting suicide you don’t sound like your in your right mind. The unforgivable sin is believing you haven’t been forgiven.

 

[billcu1]

That wouldn’t, by itself, invalidate it. There are many things we don’t understand, that do not cease to be just because we don’t understand them.

There is a physical law of cause and effect, action and reaction, stated by Newton it is that every action (physical) has an equal and opposite reaction.

Ideas of “Karma” are just the application of this observable physical law to the realm of moral action, where it is not so visible, but not perhaps, by that token, unreal.

But what does that judgment entail? Is it not thinkable that someone might view an event in their life in retrospect, and repent of their particular action, and be granted by God the opportunity to rectify it?

What if we live our first life, are judged, and then have experiences correcting all our mistakes until we reach perfection and then enter heaven? Does it really matter whether we are just tossed into fire or whether, by contrast, we experience making our wrong decisions again correctly?

It is appointed for a man once to die. But not necessary. The one thing that makes me sad in the church is to see people suffer unecessarily. People get sick, they age, and they die. No one has to do those things. “My people suffer from lack of knowledge”.

 

[Love4All]

I am looking for good arguments agiants reincranation. Not biblical ones please as the person isn’t convinced by that. Are there any sound arguments drawing on philosophy? Sort of the equivalent of Pascal’s Wager maybe?

The best argument I have against the doctrine of reincarnation is the following: the soul is the form of the body. Reincarnation smacks of Atmanism, which is precisely the idea that the soul is different than the form of the body, the soul is an independent entity not necessarily connected with any particular body.

The genesis of the idea of reincarnation is this: a human being has an intuition that eternal life is the natural condition of the human being. The reality of death contradicts this. So, to reconcile the intuition of eternal life with the reality of death, the doctrine was contrived that the death of the body is an illusion that does not affect the soul. But since life is not comprehensible to us without the body, if the soul continues to live while the body dies, it can only be in a new body.

Reincarnation is thus a philosophical device to explain away death, and essentially reinforces the original lie told by Satan, “you surely shall not die.”

The reality of death is that it is not natural to a human being, our nature is fallen and death is a punishment for sin. The way to eternal life is therefore not some “balancing of karma,” but rather, conversion from sin.

 

[jimmy]

I have thought about this before, in connection with my own existence. I have always thought that the fact that I exist (I not we, and not life in general. My own life and existence.) is both the most amazing and absurd idea there is. For 15 billion years the universe existed and nothing made any sense. Rocks collided and stars exploded. All of a sudden 31 years ago, I was born, and everything slowly began to make sense. It wasn’t just rocks colliding and stars exploding anymore.

It also struck me that there are billions of other people in this world who are not me. That is strange that they all exist and have their own experiences, yet none of them are shared. I don’t share their experience and they don’t share mine. They force me to consider my own life in relation to theirs. I am forced to question why or how it is that I exist as opposed to some other possible person. And what is it that distinguishes me from every other person. What is it that makes me me, and makes them them? Why do I know these experiences and not those? Why don’t i experience and know what they feel, and why don’t they know what i experience? All I can say is, “I” exist. That is at once the most personal, rational, and emotional idea.

There has to be some way to explain on the one hand the fact that I didn’t live and experience life at one time, and in a short period of time, presumably, I won’t live and exist any longer. There is a certain discontinuity that needs explained. On the other hand there is the multiplicity of existences that need explained. There are two possibilities that I see of explaining this. The first one is according to the western religious perspective. There is a God who exists independently of time and space, who created the world and all life. Each person has a soul that is the source of the knowing “I”.

The other possibility is that consciousness is simply a natural property of the univers and human life is the product of the universe’s yearning toward self consciousness. So I am just an expression of the universe, and it is all my memories and experiences that combine to form my self. It is my brain anatomy and chemistry that distinguishes me from every other person. My anatomy is the source of my experiences and thoughts, so that is the source of me. On the other hand, our sense of self as opposed to others is just an illusion. We are all just expressions of the universe. All my life is just a momentary instance of the universe. So since consciousness is simply a property of the universe, reincarnation is possible, and even likely. We are all just an expression of a property of the universe, so it is possible that sometime after I die, I will live, experience, and know again. But since my anatomy and brain are the source of my memories, I wouldn’t remember this life. It would appear to be completely independent.

 

[Love4All]

I don’t know that catholicism teaches that suicide leads to hell. To commit mortal sin one must be in a proper state of mind and know what one is doing. If you’re commiting suicide you don’t sound like your in your right mind. The unforgivable sin is believing you haven’t been forgiven.

If “you” are not in “your right mind” then “you” didn’t do it. I’m not interested, at least in this thread, of treating the Fallacy of Psychiatry. (Psychiatry in its entirety rests on a fallacy.) If you want to discuss that more, we can start a new thread.

Suicide committed with full knowledge and consent is a mortal sin, and if one succeeds, there is no possibility of repentance before death, ergo, suicide leads to hell. One cannot blanketly excuse all suicides as not sinful just because one does not understand malice. The Sin against the Holy Ghost is malice. It is not so much “believing you haven’t been forgiven” as it is rejection of contrition for sin. According to the Church it takes six forms. One of the forms is willful rejection of the known truth. So if a person knows murder is a mortal sin, and commits suicide anyway (murdering the self) then how is there forgiveness?

 

[Love4All]

It is appointed for a man once to die. But not necessary. The one thing that makes me sad in the church is to see people suffer unecessarily. People get sick, they age, and they die. No one has to do those things. “My people suffer from lack of knowledge”.

No one has to get sick, age, and die? Where may I obtain this knowledge you say will prevent me from undergoing those things?

 

[Ion]

Try to convince her to come back to catholicism. Jesus Christ came because we can’t overcome the sin, we are not creators and we can’t repair any consequences of a sin;
whatever you do you cant’ repair it, no matter how much you suffer, is not going to wash it out.
We have no rights on behalf of the good things we do because we are supposed to do only good things, so judging ourself by a balance of good-bad things is a non-sense.
The good things weight nothing because this is what we are supposed to do anyway, one sin weights like infinite because we can’t do nothing to repair it.
If you can’t judge yourself and set a balance for one life, reincarnation to improve the balance is an illusion.

 

[Ion]

It is interesting how other religions say about a general judgement of all peoples, based on our deeds, but only through Jesus Christ we can make sense of it…

 

[Phil_Marinus]

I am looking for good arguments agiants reincranation. Not biblical ones please as the person isn’t convinced by that. Are there any sound arguments drawing on philosophy? Sort of the equivalent of Pascal’s Wager maybe?

In my teens I was interested in this kind of thing… like going to card readers etc.
and heard all kinds of stories of past lives and the future… and found there was superficial evidence to support such a claim… eg. some card readers were correct in specific occurrences that would happen in my life,like going to the other side of the country to live in a particular environment … but there was never any solid evidence of past life that i could put my hands on… and yes I know I committed a sin at the time… God and I had a long talk about it… and yes I’m in trouble… so… do I believe in it all ?
The Argument has merit… But Best leave the whole thing alone…

 

[Phil_Marinus]

I don’t know that catholicism teaches that suicide leads to hell. To commit mortal sin one must be in a proper state of mind and know what one is doing. If you’re commiting suicide you don’t sound like your in your right mind. The unforgivable sin is believing you haven’t been forgiven.

You made a very good point… I agree with your comment

 

[Cirdan_XII]

3NailRenewal:

Yes. Very good points. From the perspective of a fellow I know that is a reincanationist, he simply says that “our souls are 75 - 95 billion years old, and that’s that! Who cares how or who created them, after 95 billion years! Irrelevant question!” This sentiment seems to be fairly common among the reincarnationist theories (RT’s), to some degree or other. (75 - 95 billion years is almost infinity, I guess.)

You are stopped from jumping of a cliff over and over again because Life is a priority that is held onto by us by a sort of uber-natural law. In other RT’s how we treat our lives is important to how we will ultimately end up.

Population increases because these free-floating souls are constantly seeking life forms to infest, oops!, rather, occupy, and they will occupy a new life form within seconds after conception, or meiosis. Oh, and there may be trillions of “souls.” They don’t know exactly.

I’m not making this up!

God bless,
jd

My friend tells a different version of this, and one that has some metit unto itself, which is not to say that i can accept it.

She says that in the past souls waited a very long time between incarnations, but now that the end of the world is approaching there is an immense pressure for souls to get at least one or two additional lives before it ends, with souls for example seeking to make amends for past wrongs now they still have the chance. Their will to be born is driving up birth rates and population growth and explains why more souls are incarnated now than ever before. However, because of the pressure to be born, souls are clutching onto straws and accepting to be born into any body rather than one that is befitting them. This is why we have so many unhappy unfilled people today, people pretending to be somebody else. You can see this as an explanation for homosexuality, or people using drugs to have the illusion of being somebody else, or immigration happening on a massive scale because people are not being born in the country where they want to be, or plain frustarted people doing all sorts of evil things. In short, this pressure to be born is changing the face of society. At the same time, Satan is trying to prevent people being born who may be borderline souls - the ones who will probably end up in Hell when its all over, but if they put in a special effort in this their last life they may just make it to Purgatory. Thus he is targetting them for abortions to take that chance from them, which is why there are so many of those going on.

As I said, it’s not my theory and I don’t buy it. But all in all I have to admit it has some inner consistency, which cannot be said of many other reincarnation beliefs.

 

[tonyrey]

Because, um, we die?

(The subject is reincarnation.)

Why is it necessary to have more than one life in this world?

 

[Love4All]

(The subject is reincarnation.)

Why is it necessary to have more than one life in this world?

I don’t think reincarnationism specifies that it is just this world. I think reincarnation is a solution to the “problem of death.” I don’t think it’s the best, or a real, solution, but it has philosophical appeal.

 

[billcu1]

If “you” are not in “your right mind” then “you” didn’t do it. I’m not interested, at least in this thread, of treating the Fallacy of Psychiatry. (Psychiatry in its entirety rests on a fallacy.) If you want to discuss that more, we can start a new thread.

Suicide committed with full knowledge and consent is a mortal sin, and if one succeeds, there is no possibility of repentance before death, ergo, suicide leads to hell. One cannot blanketly excuse all suicides as not sinful just because one does not understand malice. The Sin against the Holy Ghost is malice. It is not so much “believing you haven’t been forgiven” as it is rejection of contrition for sin. According to the Church it takes six forms. One of the forms is willful rejection of the known truth. So if a person knows murder is a mortal sin, and commits suicide anyway (murdering the self) then how is there forgiveness?

Some of the culpability can be reduced by deep emotional scars and things like having one’s thoughts clouded and they are not making proper “normal” judgments like they would otherwise be.