have fun with your staring at blackness, not being self aware and being brain dead. Theres no such thing as "dead" nor go so dont call me a christian. I wonder what your ancestors, sons and such are then if reincarnation isnt real/fake
"I wonder what your ancestors, sons and such are then if reincarnation isn't real/fake".
Well, you just answered that.
My son is my son.
My ancestors are my ancestors.
They happened to give me extracts of their genetic code, which then used a small amount (Relatively for a lifetime) of chemical product with which to create a body, which I then continued to grow by consuming more chemicals for use in building a body.
Unless I happened to eat my parents, then there is very little of them that is part of me.
It's just that original piece of DNA, which is long gone now, having been cloned a billion+ times.
Your argument that your soul is your ancestors soul is just stupid.
Particularly because you also asked "What is your son".
By your logic, if I have a child, then I create him out of my genetic material, he grows into a human being, and is granted a soul.
The same soul that I have.
So my son, the child living at the same time as me, currently has my soul in it. With all it's worldly memories, feelings and personality.
Or does it only happen when the predecessor is dead?
If I were to have a son, and then die, does my child just suddenly have the rest of my soul jump into his?
At the precise moment of my death, does he have some sort of epiphany-like moment, where all my knowledge and memory is suddenly his (As well as all the ancestors stuff that I have too).
And what happens if I have multiple children?
Does my soul split up? Does one child get to remember my joys, and another my sadness?
Or does my soul clone itself and then plague each of my children.
If this is how you believe reincarnation works, then it's got either some flaws, some glitches, or some loopholes in it.
If there were any way for me to imagine reincarnation, then it would have to be in a way in which souls are recycled. Someone dies at 09:30:55, someone is born at (Or concieved, or whatever your view) at 09:30:40, and the soul of the just deceased has a new home.
But I'd have to imagine it if a soul was like a floppy disk. It lives inside one body for it's lifetime, and is filled up with information on it's personality, it's feelings, it's memories, what have you.
Suddenly the body dies, and the floppy disk has it's memory wiped, it's removed from the machine and put in another to start anew.
I personally don't believe in reincarnation.
I believe that I'm a complex system of organs and tissues, made up of cells and chemicals, which are made of atoms.
All this stuff happens to fit together in quite a nice puzzle, and it allows this mass of matter to move about, think, act and what not.
Then, for whatever reason, I die. Something affects a part of my body, it no longer works due to disruption, the rest of the puzzle falls apart.
And all that matter finds its way back into the earth, back into other creatures, and it forms new structures.
Maybe it'll be a tree, or an animal, or some other person. Or maybe it'll get blown into the wind, and spend centuries trapped in the atmosphere above the planet. Or it'll find its way into becoming a rock (Almost definitely).
That's what the body does.
After that, this consciousness is gone. It's just a byproduct of all the chemical reactions and electrical activity going on inside that body. Since that thing has broken apart, why shouldn't the consciousness?
It doesn't have any matter anymore. It can hardly exist on it's own. If it's some form of energy, then it'd likely dissipate.
I couldn't believe in reincarnation since it either has too many loopholes in it's logic, or it asks me to believe that souls get recycled. Wouldn't that mean that there are a finite number of souls?
What if the population get's larger than the total number of people ever alive? (unlikely, but a possibility).
And what happens when, say, there's a mass plague?
If there are suddenly fewer people alive than there are people who have ever died (which is likely), then what do the souls waiting to be recycled do? Do they wait for millenia for their turn, or do they all fight to be born?
Perhaps they exist in a catholic way. Perhaps they all inhabit the sperm of men, and in the race to the egg, all the souls waiting for a new birth will be a sperm and charge on in.
I suppose if that were the case, then you'd probably have to believe in a ban on contraception and a ban on abortion, if every one of your sperm happens to be some ancient soul.
If that's the case though, and all these souls just wait in line, then can you actually extinguish a soul? If I kill a person, do I just condemn his soul to a long wait? Does that view in itself justify murder or abortion? Those people will just have to wait until next time.
There's just too many loopholes or unknowables for me to believe in reincarnation.
This doesn't mean I don't fear death though.
I recieve some solace in knowing that my body will return to being something else, which may come to be another complex system. It might not. It'll last until the end of time and space though. It can't be destroyed. Shuffled around a lot, yeah, but not destroyed.
But it's still pretty human to fear death. I don't really want to die. And if I could comfort myself by telling myself that once I die, my consciousness will go elsewhere, or be recycled to live again, I could listen to that.
I choose not to, because I find flaws in those ideas. I'd prefer not to trick myself. If I deep down believe that I'm going to just die, and nothing more will happen, then I don't want to lie to myself by saying otherwise.
Someone else might not agree with my view, and it'd be wrong of them to lie to themselves if they can't believe in my view. If someone thinks they are going to heaven when they die, it shouldn't be right for them to force themselves to believe in nothing. If they find solace in whatever view, then they should stick to it if they can.
You don't have to throw it at other people, but you can believe in whatever you want.
We don't know anything for certain.
Because when you are reincarnated, you have a new brain which doesn't remember anything before it was formed.
Wouldn't that suggest that the brain is what holds the soul then? Or that the soul is mostly empty? What does it really carry then, if not memories?
If it can't remember anything in a new brain, what's the purpose in recycling it.
Is the soul nothing more than, say, the ignition key to the person? Perhaps it fits all bodies, but it has no personality of it's own. A plain old skeleton key, loaned out to each new body.
Masssive post. :3
Too much to write about.
