Do you believe in reincarnation?

No – thank god. One go round will be enough for me.

Only insofar as the chemicals that make up my body will be absorbed by other life-forms.
But that is not a belief, that is a fact.

No…because I HATE the idea of reincarnation and it scares me. Well, not only that but because the more I think about it, the more it doesn’t make sense to me. A lot of religions say karma is part of reincarnation and the goal is to reach nirvana…it doesn’t make sense to me how a cockroach or an animal can be “good” to become human and why does being human make it “better” than being an animal? A lot of us are no good, I don’t know if I’m making sense.

To live over and over and over again, being a completely different person, not remembering your loved ones, starting all over again, to me sounds like hell.

I’m agnostic I’d say…

No.

How can I give reasons for not believing in it? There are plenty of things I don’t believe in, without having a list of specific reasons.

More importantly, I have no reason to believe in reincarnation. There’s nothing convincing me to think it should happen.

It makes more sense than most other superstitions. @chelle21689 You’re making perfect sense. And the concepts of Karma and reincarnation might just evolve as an explanation for why “some of us are no good”.

I want to be a snot otter when I am reincarnated.

I like to think there is some form of payback for being an ass or a nice person. It’s what helps me behave.

heck no.

No. It would require that there be some kind of core “me” that would get moved from one existence to another, and I don’t see anything in my own makeup that would qualify as this kind of personal essence. What, in other words, would be the “same” from one life to the next? Scarcely anything is the same from one moment to the next.

From what I can see, everything about me depends on factors that aren’t “me” in the conventional sense. Put simply, I am the way I am because everything and everybody else is the way they are. I may have a feeling of being a discrete and independent being, but that’s just a conceit caused by my inability to fathom how densely interconnected I am with everything else.

So everything that I do has some effect, large or small, on everything else, just as what anyone else does has some effect on me, whether I can perceive that or not. Each of us, by our actions, sways the course of our common flow. That’s the only way I feel that karma has any real or useful meaning. The interconnectedness of us all is such that it makes more sense to me to see us all as a single being: this common flow. That being will go on when this lump of flesh is gone, and I care about it and all the individuals flowing in it, because it’s our common sort. I don’t want, by my actions, to introduce painful turbulence into that flow; not because that will screw up my future life prospects, but because I love that flow.

In the sense that energy is neither created nor destroyed.

And perhaps in the symbolic sense that the same hopes and dreams, happiness and sorrow will live on in others after I’m long gone. Putting our own egos aside, the things that make us us really aren’t all that unique.

I never used to. However, it is a thought that is swimming around my mind. I’ve watched a few documentaries that seem convincing enough. Or at least very odd.

Well yeah. This time.

It depends on the nature of our universe. While I do get a “gut feeling” that there is more than meets the eye here I do not have any religious leanings at all. If life is a game, if we are truly just information then everything in theory can be recreated, played back, modified….

Yes. One day I was randomly researching different religions and eventually it led me to look further into reincarnation. Usually most religious beliefs turn me off and are hard for me to wrap my head around. However when reading about reincarnation, I was shocked to actually be interested in the idea. I have watched several documentaries and read many books and articles about the topic. I am now convinced it exists.

I don’t believe so. What exactly is it that would continue from one being to the next? Like many religious tales, it is a mythical construct that helps illustrate a point. I’m not sure it was ever intended to be taken as a literal concept.

Belief in reincarnation foists more problems onto the subject of origins. Who is a new soul, and why? And who is a reincarnated soul, and why?

The universe is a very efficient machine. Reincarnation requires an inefficient machine.

I probably felt different about this in my past lives.

Nope.

No. I am scared of dying but not scared enough to buy in to something that ridiculous.

Let’s say: There is such thing. So, if I can not remember my life or my beloved ones, then it does not matter if I am ‘new’ or old like a stone. Senseless. And another question: Whre do all the new’souls’ come from? In the las 40 years 3 billion…?????
My answer: I DO NOT BELIEVE.

No, but I like some of the ideas I have heard regarding reincarnation. Like the idea that souls stay near each other. Like my husband might have been my sister in a previous life, or a best friend.

I don’t understand how reincarnation works with our ever growing population on planet earth. Are there billions of souls just waiting around never having taken human form before?

@ml3269 and @JLeslie Maybe the new souls come from all the species that we’ve sent extinct, and they are given human form because they died with honour. Maybe I was a Thylacine in my previous life.

To believe in reincarnation requires believing that the essence of who I am does not depend on my physical being. This is something that I do not believe. By way of analogy, to believe in a separate spiritual self would be like believing that a computer program has a spiritual dimension capable of moving from one computer to another without requiring any supporting hardware for this transference.

@FireMadeFlesh Do the numbers work? Species go extinct, but new ones are created. I have no idea if the numbers work, but if they do I’m willing to consider it. I usually think of humans coming back as humans, but I’m not against the idea of being an animal.

If one turns the world inside-out and decide that all that is observed is phenomenal, then with some effort, one can discover that the “I” who sees and names all these things is a lone constant. Further, even, that this “I” can be observed. Getting to this point is akin to identifying oneself as the common flow mentioned above. If there really is this common flow, for example, then how are we not that already? How have we not always been that?

To put a finer point on responding to the question, I see it more as a matter of forgetting. Somehow, we forget we are that and opt to experience life with the mind’s blinders that we are people in the conventional sense until it comes time to relegate the mind to servant (of whom?) instead of master.

So to me the idea of reincarnation is a finger pointing at the moon, but not the moon itself.

Anyone interested in reincarnation should read Many Lives Many Masters. It’s written by a psychiatrist who didn’t believe in it, nor was he very religious in any way. In his practice he used hypnotherapy and discovered some patients regressed to past lives. It helped them get over anxieties and phobias. He now is a big believer. The book is a very quick read and interesting.

hypnotherapy also produced countless alien abduction “memories”. It has more to do with suggestibility during hypnosis than with actual experiences.
http://skepdic.com/hypnosis.html

@ragingloli I read it and I wasn’t brainwashed. Lol.

In order for reincarnation to work, time has to be linear and not relative. Does anyone know of a case of preincarnation; that is someone whose memories are from a life in the future?

@JLeslie I’ve got no idea if the numbers work. It’d probably be impossible to calculate, since many scientists think some species have lived and died out due to habitat loss without us knowing of their existence at all.

Not at all! Reincarnation is an interesting concept to explain many things in life, but it is really an illusion, and a goos illusion at that.

Nope, personally, I think when you die you just cease to exist, end of life, nothing happens afterwards. IMO.

Man I fucking hope not, once around is plenty.