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Permalink Reply by Janelle Campbell on November 23, 2010 at 1:20pm

I'd take out of Buddhism what is good, such as ending suffering and being compassionate and apply it but you can do that with other religions as well. I also think that meditation is good, it helps ease your mind and I listen to chants and some of the relaxation music. I know that believing in a god isn't compulsary with Buddhism but making a shrine and leaving food or incense offerings seems pretty theistic to me. Do what you want, I certainly wouldn't think it's reckless to explore other ways of thinking. Good luck to you :)

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Permalink Reply by Scot68 on November 23, 2010 at 7:30pm

Just out of curiousity, why do you believe in reincarnation? Have you had any personal experiences that support that belief, or is it more philosophical? Of course, you can't prove that we haven't lived before, but for myself, I know that I have no memories of past lives. I know the theory is that one is supposed to not remember the past lives, but then, why would their be such a system?

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Permalink Reply by Lorryslorrys on November 23, 2010 at 9:00pm

Well. It's not plausible and I think you know that. It's wishy washy, but you still will be asked to believe something dogmatically, transfer of karma ""energy"" from past lives or some such mystical nonsense.
But what's more important is that sounds nice and you believe it will aid in your personal development.

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Permalink Reply by Louis on November 23, 2010 at 11:38pm

No. Just no.

Make your own moral code. You know what's right and wrong, you don't need Jesus or Buddha or me to tell you.

Also, what exactly do you see is a compelling argument for reincarnation?

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Permalink Reply by Keri on November 24, 2010 at 12:31am

Thanks for the responses, guys. They are very helpful. And nicely worded, Louis. That's actually a really good way to look at it.

But in response to the questions about REINCARNATION. I obviously didn't believe in that as a Christian. When I was no longer a Christian, I first stopped believing in the existence of a God. But then I questioned the entire "nothing happens when you die" thing. At first I was kind of upset. Then, I was unsure. It was driving me crazy. Or, to say the least, I was really worried. Not that I think I could ever "know" what happens to you after you die. But I wanted an educated guess. I think you guys can agree that simply accepting that nothing happens to you when you die without any investigation into the matter and only taking someone else's word for it is ill-advised. So, I was sitting in a college class when a girl made a debate on a subject, referring to a girl that was reincarnated with memories of living in a nearby town. It had been in the news. This was the first time I had heard of such a thing. I immediately researched the topic that afternoon. I found the exact story she had mentioned and several others. Some stories had been in the news or documentaries. There are research departments in universities and else-ware that study and keep track of children (generally between the ages of 2 and 6) that have memories of past lives with exact details of things that they could not know about (locations, terminology, past people, events, etc.). These things occurred whether their parents believed in reincarnation or not. There is also a small number of adults that learn about a past life through hypnotherapy or dreams with the same details. But those are much rarer. I think that the time unaccounted for in between these lives could be forgotten lives, lives as animals (if such a thing is possible), time as a spirit or ghost, or maybe some kind of resting period. I dunno. But I think near death experiences are all in the mind. If you are still wondering why it seems like such a crazy idea or you don't understand why most people wouldn't remember past lives... Here is why people should not know about reincarnation as a fact: (Life seems more precious if you think you only have one. It also makes you want to preserve your life more. If everyone knew they were always living, they may feel trapped and suicide wouldn't feel quite the same. People could also commit suicide if they were unhappy and wanted to sort of "try again" and hope for a better life.) If you think a God would have to exist for reincarnation to happen, I disagree. It seems like a natural process to me. If bodies are material and souls are immaterial, then it makes sense for them to continue existing after we die. If you still aren't happy with this, assuming that time and space is infinite (or really close), then we would be bound to live a life of some kind again, right? Then, why not many times?

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Permalink Reply by Louis on November 24, 2010 at 2:18am

I guess my first problem is your last point, the idea that the soul is immaterial. What does that mean? What is something that doesn't have matter? How is something that is immaterial fit into the natural process?

My second problem is your infinite/near infinite universe. Firstly we know with some certainty that the universe isn't infinite. It's very very very big, but not infinite. There was a finite amount of stuff at the big bang and that stuff persists, no more and no less has been added or lost. We have a rough estimation of where the edge of space is which is to say that the universe is quite finite. But let's take it as given that the universe is infinite/near infinite. Why does that necessaritate reincarnation? I can just as easily say that 'because the universe is infinite when I die I sit in a quiet room and eat pie for all eternity.' Why is your prediction necessarily better than mine? Maybe you like the thought of reincarnation, maybe I like the thought of eating pie. At least one of us is wrong, how do you decide who is?

Third, I really don't want to touch hypnotherapy and memory regression. The practice is quite debunked. Psychiatrists who have built their names on memory regression have been disbarred for it. Just as an exercise, think of all the people who have undergone such memory regressions. Think of the lives they describe. Read into some of them. How many of them were nobles? How many of them were knights? How many of them were the poor fuck peasant who had to carry the noble's shit in the morning? How many were hung for cowardice? Given the ratio of nobilites to dirt-eating peasants in all of human history, I would expect at least one shit kicker for all the kings and queens who've come back.

Fourth, what is it exactly that those 2-6 year old kids are recalling? Why do we believe them? My 2 year old nephew tells me that Santa exists. Why is he wrong and they right? What is degree of accuracy of recollections? What is the degree of precision? What is the degree of specificity? Are they shotgunning it? Is there an unedited, uncut video of a child recreating a scene that they could not possibly have witnessed without any significant errors? Have the bits of recollections be spliced together from different bits of film? How strong is this evidence?

Personally I would like to see what you've seen to convince you that this is true. I've more or less laid out for you an approximation of the standard I will use to evaluate this claim. As neutral as I possibly can, I will come to this willing to change my mind if those criteria are met.

I don't care if reincarnation is true or not. What I do now is not and has never been (since my atheism) predicated on what happens after I die. If you're convinced of this, I humbly ask you to share so that I can see for myself and maybe change my mind.

edit:

One final point. If it turns out that reincarnation is true, are you happy to accept the necessary corollary that children with birth defects have earned that fate in a previous life? Or have you taken reincarnation while shaving karma? If you've shaved karma and the ladder model of rebirth, then where do all the new human souls keep coming from?

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Permalink Reply by Keri on November 24, 2010 at 11:13am

I have to say, I love discussions like this because it helps me to challenge what I believe. Thanks for posting :)

So, to address your first problem, the material/immaterial debate was one I first heard in a philosophy class, a large point from Plato and Aristotle. There is this "dualism" going on between the mind (or soul) and the body. (keep in mind that the mind and the brain are 2 different things) I don't know what a soul would consist of if it was immaterial. So, I'm not going to pretend that I do know. But soul being separate from body and being made of something different... I dunno. It makes sense. It could be some kind of energy or something, but I honestly don't know. I'm sure that a soul could not be material though. Then it would be an actually thing that we could see or sense. If you have a problem with souls being immaterial, perhaps it is because we are used to everything being material. I personally think it is possible to have something exist and be immaterial.

For your second problem, this was really just something I figured out. It is kind of a way of looking at it as, if souls do not exist and/or reincarnation does not occur, but time goes on forever and so planets, worlds, and organisms also exist forever, then we would eventually be bound to live again, experiencing life for ourselves, from our point of view, etc. I feel like over trillions and trillions and trillions of years, it would be much more unlikely to not live again.

Third, I think I didn't explain this well enough. I don't believe in anything that psychiatrists or memory regression therapists say. It is different when people that go to visit these therapists have personal experiences within their minds that reveal forgotten secrets. For example, one story I saw involved a man that was dared to see a memory regression therapist by some friends. Once he was under, he unknowingly said things about people, places, and little details. He also saw an image of a painting. Since the session was recorded, he took notes of all of the things he said. He researched and looked through records of paintings. Then, when he found that painting and the name of a little-known artist that had lived in the 1800s, he eventually got a diary by the artist from a museum, which contained details from his session. This included names, deaths, attitudes, etc (all of this took him years to find). There was another with a man that had his memories trigger when he went to a battlefield where he had died. He investigated his past life from there. A woman with dreams of her past life just investigated from there.

Fourth, the parents of those children generally don't believe them at first. But these kids are very persistent. They talk about where they used to live with specific city names and locations, they recall their old houses, their other parents which they love just as much, old pets, how they died, names, and a longing to go back. Many of these parents get in contact with someone (perhaps a research lab like the one at the University of Virginia for these children with past memories), then they find out that everything actually exists or existed. They go to these places to see for themselves. They often find out who the child was and how they died. One story was about a little boy that knew all details about war planes and war against the Japanese. He had nightmares about his plane crashing, which is where he died. He and his parents ended up going back to that exact spot. These are only a few of the numerous stories like this. Try youtube or something if you want to see more.

For your final point, birth defects are a result of something scientific going on with cells and genes. I feel like out previous lives don't have much affect on our current lives. I mean, the point is to start new, right? Karma has nothing to do with it either. And as far as where human souls come from, maybe they were all created a long time ago along with the planets, the sun, and everything else. Maybe more are forming all the time. I don't know. That will always be a mystery. To me, it really is like asking where anything comes from. It's difficult to answer.

So, let me know your thoughts on these. And I really do suggest researching reincarnation. I'm sure there are plenty of fake stories, like people saying that they are famous people or royalty reincarnated. But there also seems to be a great deal of truth.

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Permalink Reply by Dustin Martin on November 24, 2010 at 2:13pm

Yeah uhm, this.... :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2upDm-xFqMo

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Permalink Reply by Scot68 on November 24, 2010 at 6:12pm

Good conversation. I hope I express my disagreements with you cordially, and you don't get offended.

1. Why does it follow that if time goes on forever then we are eventually bound to live again?

Yes, time might go on forever, but most likely the earth and sun will not. First the sun will flare up and incinerate the earth, and then, much later, it too will eventually use up all of it's fuel. And much later it's possible that the whole universe will expand so much that everything is so spread out that there is basically nothing anywhere. All of this is on time scales that are mind boggling to even imagine, and probably impossible to truly comprehend.

So maybe, an egg shell that I smash to pieces today will someday have all it's randomly vibrating atoms vibrate in exactly the right sequence for it to spontaneously put itself back together in it's perfect egg shape. It is conceivably possible based on the oddities of quantum mechanics, but even if that did happened, why would it follow that the chick inside the egg would live again? I do understand that an immaterial soul could behave differently.

I guess that is the crux of the issue: do humans, and possibly other life forms, have an immaterial, immortal soul / spirit / essence / whatever you want to call the concept.

Again science, quantum mechanics inparticular, show us that the universe is not o ly stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine. For example, the recently trapped negative hydrogen atoms at CERN. We're talking anti-matter here. Until recently I thought anti-matter only existed in Star Trek. And scientists KNOW that we are only one universe in a multi-verse that exist stacked on eachother and that there are 11 or so dimensions and that time and space are in fact the same things. Or at least that is what my father has tried to explain to me, and he has put the time and thought into trying to understand these things, some of which I kind of understand, and some of which I simply don't care enough about to put the time and research in to understand. So I am open to possibly believing some pretty odd ideas.

As odd ideas goes, a soul isn't so odd, but I think that is simply because we as a species have had that idea for so long.

So, let's assume for a moment that humans do have an immaterial and immortal soul that could possibly go into a new physical body after the death of a persons body.

Really pondering that raises many questions:

1. At what point does the soul enter the physical body?

Is it when the sperm enters the egg and the egg does it's thing to it's cell wall to prevent any more sperm from getting in? In other words the moment of conception.

But what about clusters of cells / embryos that then split into identical twins. Does each have half a soul? Or does the soul stay with one half and a new soul jumps into the new souless body?

And what about all those fertilized embryos produced by invitro fertilzation? Are souls waiting in them patiently waiting for the chance to live again?

Or maybe the souls have figured out that an embryo is just too risky, they can so easily end up miscarried or aborted or put in a freezer for years, so they wait until it is more clear that the developing life form is going to have another go at this thing called life. If it's that, when does the soul go into the fetus? 6 weeks? 6 months? Maybe it's when the baby takes it's first breath. Maybe they are breathing in their soul then. It is a poetic idea, but what about the experiences the fetus has in the womb that we know have an effect on the newborn, it's mother's voice for example or music it heard. Were these formative experiences without the benefit of having a soul?

Going to the other end of life, when does the soul leave the body?

This question comes into play with brain dead patients, and I would argue, with Alzheimer's patients. I remember a case in Germany many years back where a pregnant young woman was in an accident that left her brain dead. They kept her on life support throughout the pregnancy, delivered the baby by C-section and then took her off life support and she died. Was her soul waiting around those nine months? Or did she say, "I'm out of here, goodbye!" Or did her soul simply migrate the very short distance to the fetus in her womb?

On a personal note, my grandmother rececently died after several years of Alzheimer's. At the beginning it was forgetting where the dog was, but in the later stages she forgot who I was, then who my mother was, then how to talk, and in the final stages I would argue that if she had a soul, it was already gone, or at least imprisoned in the prison of a destroyed mind.

Assuming that humans do have immaterial immortal souls, I find it difficult to imagine answers to those questions that hold up to logical scrutiny. The Catholics would say that the soul is incorporated at inception and remains til death, and I guess that an all knowing god gives two souls to the embryos that are destined to split into two or more human beings, I guess it's pretty crowded in there at first, but wait, souls are immaterial, so they've got all the room in the world in there. And they would say that it's immoral to leave those souls trapped in the fertility clinics freezer, after all, every sperm, and soul, is sacred.

So now let's assume that a person, such as myself, has asked these questions and thought about them a lot.

It is a mind shattering thought that when you are dead, you are dead and that is it. It is so huge that most religions have been built around human kind's natural Darwinian desire to not die.

But looking at the evidence availabe to us, that is what I conclude. Our "soul", or what I would say a better description of would be "personality" is in fact created by our brain. This is why you can live and even thrive after a liver or heart transplant, but brain transplants remain science fiction. Though I can conceive of a time where medical science is advanced enough to give total life support to a brain, similar to the bad guy in Robocop 2.

I am not sure I would chose to undergo such a treatment if I were alive at a time it was possible. I do feel that the 70-90 years most modern humans have is not quite enough. I know the first 42 years of my life seem to have gone by rather fast. I definitely would not mind having a lifespan measured in centuries rather than decades, but I imagine that if I did I would wish for millenia. Regardless, the evidence leads me to believe that this life is the only one I've got, so I'd better do the best with it I can.

A guy at another forum I'm on has a tag quote from Mark Twain. "I was dead for billions of years before I was born and it didn't bother me at all."

Some how thinking about the billions of years I won't exist after I am dead is still more forboding than thinking about the eons that came before I did. It must have something to do with our perception of how time only flows in one direction.

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Permalink Reply by Keri on November 24, 2010 at 9:45pm

So first, thanks for the link Dustin Martin. I've heard these arguments (granted that it has been a while). I understand what it is saying, but it doesn't say that dualism is impossible or doesn't exist. It basically just says that we can't prove it and that it is unlikely. I don't know what the case is and I don't believe that dualism exists 100% or even 80%. So, I'll be thinking and researching on that.

And Scot68, dang! I thought I was leaving long posts. Woo! I'm impressed :)

So Scot68, I'm going to give my short and basic ideas on what you have said. I don't think I will say anything long, just because it would take forever.

First, when I say that we would be bound to live again in all of time... Supposedly the universe could expand forever, or snap back to one point before expanding again, etc. But I am sure that there will be life out there during much of time. And, that being the case, I believe that a living creature could exist with our current point of view. I don't have any scientific explanations, and it is a personal belief, so don't expect any intelligent answers for how this would work. I just think that in infinity... I mean... it's infinity!

I THINK (no knowing here) that a soul could enter an egg any point between conception and being born, mostly based off of those reincarnated children, some of which were supposedly reborn mere weeks after death. Of course others were reborn decades later. So, I suppose with twins, the two souls could enter at different times when eggs are available. The fertilized embryos is a difficult question. I don't know where I stand. I suppose the soul would rest there or the egg just would not have a soul yet. Something like that. As far as interaction with a fetus in the womb, that works with my earlier thought on souls entering at any point between conception and birth. The last big point about souls leaving the body and brain dead people seems easiest to me. Your soul leaves when you die. It is not the soul that suffers when you lose your memory or become brain dead. That is physical, your body, your brain. So, your soul would be fine when you got out. You may lose all your memories, but that is getting into shaky territory and another subject. Let's not get into that.

And, based on the fact that I am alive right now, out of all of the quintillionths (real number) of existence... I am pretty sure that it isn't a coincidence that I just haven't died yet. I realize, of course, that this mindset is pretty crazy. But it's personal.

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Permalink Reply by Louis on November 25, 2010 at 2:20am

A lot of people chimed in before I had a chance to and I didn't want to add another battery of questions before you could answer those.

Unfortunately my problem is thus:
[quote]I don't have any scientific explanations, and it is a personal belief[/quote]

That is where you and I will have to part ways on this subject.

You believe it, and that's fine. You have your reasons, and that's fine too.

From experience, I don't see the existence of a personal belief to be a useful starting point or pit stop along the way of understanding reality.

You talk about assuredness in things where science treads lightly. Case in point, the infinitiness of the Universe. Science has said a lot about the Universe, it has not, however, said it is infinity. Everything that science has said and fundamental physics points to the Universe being distinctly finite. You talk about the infinity of time, science doesn't know much about the nature of time. Science measures the age of the Universe in billions, not trillions and certainly not degrees of infinity. But you say that this is personal belief. Again, that's fine.

You say that children 2-6 recalling events that they could not possibly have experienced is evidence of reincarnation. Crystal enthusiasts say it's resonant crystal energy from the Earth. Christians say it's the devil. (True story) A lady on the street told me that it's the CIA experimenting with putting memories into our heads. Why is yours necessarily right, and theirs necessarily wrong? But you say it's a personal belief. And that's fine.

It's fine only in so far as it is evolved from the admission that this belief is founded on essentially anecdotes in the absence of scientific explanation. However, if you have no scientific explanation, no plausible theoretical model, or model at all, how is it that you have not arrived at, "I don't know."? Essentially, how is it that you have looked into the shapeless void of beyond-death and, instead of placing nothing, decided that reincarnation fits nicely?

Unfortunately for me, if this thread is going to evolve into a discussion of who believes what more strongly, I must respectfully bow out now. It's not a discussion I feel like having.

Still though, back to before I totally derailed this thread, don't bother with Buddhism or any other moral model. Don't let yourself get trapped into a moral framework built by other people for another time.

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Permalink Reply by Keri on November 25, 2010 at 5:02pm

Thanks a lot, Louis. This has been a nice discussion/debate. And I don't want this to become a matter of who believes what and who is right. I like to learn from others and challenge the beliefs I have arrived at. I know that most of what I have said cannot be scientifically proven. It is basically impossible to prove any of this or for it to ever be anything more than a theory. Thanks for the direct suggestion about not bothering with Buddhism too. I don't know for sure that I won't, but I will remember not to get caught up in religion. I am also willing to admit that I'm too scared to admit that there may be nothing left of us after we die. However, I get comfort from knowing that there may also be SOMETHING left of us after we die. Something living. And I will continue my research and thought on this until I am VERY confident with it. It doesn't matter what others will think of it. I just want to be as close to knowing as possible. But I am nowhere near that right now. Thanks! And Happy Thanksgiving! :)

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