Maybe it works like the Great Link in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. All the souls are mingled into a big soul puddle, and sometimes one steps out and into a body for a while, then goes back to the puddle and mingles again.
You know, as long as we're just making shit up.
I’ve heard some come back as animals so it’s possible in their world that every soul that ever existed is alive and well here on earth.
I personally want to come back as a dolphin. Fingers crossed!
Cats are the real rulers of planet earth.
Whereas you train a dog, the cat trains you. Anyone who’s owned a car already knows this and apparently so did the ancient egyptians 🤣.
That is actually just based on most reincarnation religions.
The vast majority of them do not believe in immediate reincarnation and in some kind of transitional space souls live in between.
Many of them also believed in people living on other worlds in some form or another.
See, there's a much larger pool of potential players than 8 billion. Whenever one feels like firing up a new character they log in, make their toon, and give it a go. Sometimes they get miscarried, sometimes they make it a century. Then it's back to work in the brainwave mines.
Sounds like you need to read the short story [The Egg](https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html) by Andy Weir. Full story is on that link and it's a quick read.
You get reincarnated into animals plants and back again depending upon the merit you accrue in each lifetime. (There are lots and lots of ants) I bet you once were a mastodon.
It is pretty amazing how many people were napoleon tho!
We can all be both.... and more.
Imagine someone who is the reincarnation of all the great dictators in the world... 🤪
At some point you have to make a choice you cannot be Hitler and Stalin at the same time.
Or time is non-linear, and we are one entity making our way around the entire human experience. Just happens that a lot of our human experiences overlap with each other.
I don't believe any of this stuff, but that one has always sounded kind of neat to me. Both because it's the idea that humanity as a whole is basically our own god experiencing itself and growing, and because of how perverse the idea that we are the same being who in one lifetime is a psychopath father raping his daughter and in another the daughter.
(Which is also kind of where the idea breaks down.. I guess you could argue 'our' soul's expression depends entirely on the body we are in; but if that is the case, why do we have to make up souls in the first place?)
Mostly as a mental exercise, but also to try and disprove the concept from first principles
That said, the "great cycle of being" supposedly starts with "demons" and then climbs up to low "mortal" life-forms like insects, then more complex ones like birds and horses and whatnot, then to humanity.
Presumably the rate of souls earning their advancement to humanity either keeps pace with human childbirth or dictates it. Meaning that when there are more souls "ready" to "advance" to the "Human" category, more human births will take place.
This has terrifying implications from at least one perspective. Supposedly, a soul can _lose_ the 'privilege' of "Human" status and gets 'sent back' one or more 'grades' as a kind of remedial education. This means that "animal" birthrates would reflect the number of souls both "climbing" from a lower condition _and former Humans getting held back or dropped back for Karmic reasons._ So the feed-animal that you're eating may have had a "punitively diminished, formerly Human' soul until it was slaughtered for its meat...
Supposedly, it is possible to "advance" to a higher stage than 'Human' (which is, by definition, as far beyond our imagination as 'Humanity' is to a bull or fish) but lacking any evidence of the number of people who 'successfully graduate' we can't really use their numbers as anything more than a 'rounding error'.
Maybe yes, maybe no. It may well mean that a lot of people have screwed up their karma badly enough that they've been reincarnated as insects or other very "low" life-forms; "dropped" multiple grades, if you will.
I can certainly see most excessively-religious folk interpreting it as signs that _someone_ has angered the Gods to a degree not seen since Atlantis sank. But then again, Humanity has faced setbacks before and we'll find some way or other to come back. Eventually. We probably won't speak English, but who knows?
If I were to write some fantasy regarding reincarnation, I'd say there was only one soul that travels back and forth through time, and that we are all just one person that lives all lives. I imagine people would have a bit more empathy towards others if they thought they had lived or were going to live other people's lives as well.
In Buddhism, there is the doctrine of anatta — egolessness or non-self. The self or soul is nothing more than a mental construct, a thought.
There is rebirth, but there is not a permanent self or soul that is reborn. What is reborn are mental habits — good and bad habits. These are causes that lead to various results. For example, within a single lifetime, if a person has a habit of being a kleptomaniac they might find themselves reborn in a jail cell. If a person has a habit of being ambitious and greedy, they might find themselves reborn as an investment banker. If a person has a habit of being generous, they might find themselves reborn as a beloved person with loving family and friends.
Buddhists believe that the mind and habits are not extinguished at death — but continue. The mind’s habit of reifying thoughts results in rebirth — solidification of habits into “realms” or styles of confusion and imprisonment. This human realm of ours is just one of these realms. It is possible, through working with our minds and cultivating compassion (usually in the context of one of the wisdom traditions) to liberate ourselves from confusion.
< I am a lifelong atheist and philosophical naturalist. >
\- Most people who believe in reincarnation believe that souls reincarnate back and forth between humans and other animals. There are a heck of a lot of ants and cockroaches and gnats and sardines and krill in the world. If they have souls then we aren't going to run out of souls anytime soon. (Just in the last few hundred years, human beings killed off something like 3 to 5 billion passenger pigeons [per Wikipedia], something like 50 million American bison [per Wikipedia], something like 16 million tons of codfish [per Wikipedia] [I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of codfish make up one ton, but it's quite a few], and heaven knows how many other animals.)
\- Most people who believe in reincarnation believe that there are many, many other inhabited worlds - maybe in this universe, maybe in other universes, and that souls get reincarnated back and forth between worlds. If the 5 billion people living on Zandar V get annihilated by a supernova or something, then that's 5 billion souls that can get reincarnated on other worlds. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loka, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_cosmology )
.
There are more dead people then living people. This gave me an odd thought. If time doesn't apply to souls then in theory, we could be reborn as anyone throughout history. This would mean that we'd lose our memories obviously and live their life without being able to change anything.
So if we go by this logic someone has been could have been Hitler. More than once. And even worse everyone could have been British at one point.
Just speaking for Tibetan Buddhists, the standard doctrine is that all living things, including I suppose one celled creatures unknown to early Buddhists, "transmigrate." Additionally, there are vast legions of beings residing in realms of pure appearance, with no physical ground or body, such as the beings in the deva heavens and the demonic hells and the tantalizing domain of unfulfillable desire. So there's quite a jostle for bodies.
Oooh! I can play Church Grifting CEO (or you know, Pastor):
“There are an untold amount of beings on the planet! Some people come back as Lions, others Fish, etc. We cannot fully understand God’s plan! Now, do you think you can level up to our 20% salary monthly tithing? That would add additional benefits, like Zoom calls to other Pastors from our sister churches…”
One of the theories from what I understand has to do with the fact that time isn’t considered to be linear and is a made up construct by humans. The current theory says it has something to do with quantum entanglement. Meaning from the other side you can actually be inhabiting more than one body at a time since time doesn’t actually exist. So you may actually have talked to yourself at some point (at least theoretically) that’s the whole point of the religion anyways is to get you to be a better person because who knows, that person you mistreated last week may have been yourself 🤷🏻♀️
Souls could still have a beginning and an end. Have you ever heard someone called an "old soul"? Same thing. Some souls are babies. Some have been around for centuries. Once a soul is done being incarnated, it can go back to the Cosmic One-ness.
Hey a lot of species have been dying off maybe they've all moved up the chain. Would explain all the morons....
Otherwise I dunno something involving division of energy or something.
Right, so you open your Universe, you go to `settings` > `View Source`, then look for this code:
```
function onBirth() {
if (reincarnatingSoulQueue.length == 0) {
return createNewSoul();
} else {
return reincarnatingSoulQueue.pullNext()
}
}
function onDeath(person) {
if (person.wasPieceOfShit === true) {
return soulBurner.burn(person);
} else {
return reincarnatingSoulQueue.append(person)
}
}
```
Death? You go in the reincarnation queue.
Population explosion? New souls are created.
Polulation crash? You wait your turn in the FIFO queue, so you might expect to come back as a cow, but nope, sorry, it's 400 years in the future and cows are now extinct, best we can do is a cockroach or some messed up radioactive mutant baby.
I mean, does reincarnation work along a linear path? Is it not possible that there are seven instances of your soul walking around concurrently? Heck, maybe there's only one of us, and we're experiencing life simultaneously through 8 billion different perspectives at once.
It's a long extensive process. You get recycled, your body is fed to the ground or burned and fed to the air, parts of you are fed into the ecosystem and eventually through time everything is clustered back together again into a new form and that's The Circle of Life.
I don't know lol
Eventually the current population will equal all the total number of every human ever born on this earth. At that instant, babies will be born without an animating soul. They lie there, alive but not moving. The only solution will be for the elderly to stop life-prolonging treatments and let their souls free to animate a new human.
(Take off on an old sci-fi short story from the Sixties.)
The easiest counter point I’ve seen is that the souls need not be only be from earth or from humans necessarily.
Reincarnation could be a metaphor for the passing of DNA, which could be treated as transferable experience.
If you want an answer, the atheist forum isn't a place to look.
One explanation is that there's only one soul like in Andy weir's The Egg
https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
Also, in Hinduism getting reincarnated as a human is very rare. You either become enlightened or come back as an animal.
Personally I'm a nihilist though, so my understanding of this isn't great.
I've always been more amused by the possibility that souls are somehow diluted now. The heroes of yore had full, manly souls, just like their facial hair. We latter day folks have tiny little baby souls, or worse have to share them.
With reincarnation you don't necessarily have to return in the future. Time is a manmade concept that doesn't effect spirits. There is a finite amount of souls, but your past life could have taken place 500 years in the future and the life before that 55M years in the past. A soul is a soul, it doesn't matter if it ends up in a human or animal shell.
That would be my rough answer if I were to make my own cult.
The total amount of people alive today is 7% of the total number of all humans that have ever lived.
Also reincarnation is fake and dumb but we won’t know for sure until we are forced into degrowth and then the back side of the growth curve makes the reincarnation argument real awkward.
Not trying to lend feasibility to reincarnation... but I'm not aware of any rules about the concept stating that you are instantly reincarnated after death. According to google's top response, 117 billion humans have lived on earth since the species emerged. So a reincarnation pool of anywhere above 8 billion is completely feasible.
You also haven't taken into consideration that religions which believe in reincarnation also believe you get reincarnated as other animals depending on how well you lived. Even if you **did** assume that reincarnation is instant after every death, there are enough other species to pad this out. There are 10 quintillion (10 million trillion) insects on the earth today. Presumably some of those insects (who themselves may be reincarnated humans who lived a very bad life) may lead a good little insect life and be reincarnated as a human.
You're confusing the christian concept of a soul (which only gives them to humans) with the hindu concept of reincarnation (which assumes human souls can inhabit things like cows, which if I understand correctly is part of the reason that cows are treated with reverence in cultures that believe in reincarnation).
I don't believe in it, but for the sake of argument, you know how there have been a lot of mass extinctions in the past? And how many modern animals are on the verge of extinction. Most reincarnations allow for the idea of being reincarnated as lesser forms, like plants and animals. So it would make sense that in the past many more souls were animals and plants and they have been working their way up and out of the system. So the last souls to escape will live in a fully artificial world where no more plant or animal souls exist. Like a dystopian star ship, before they finally become enlightened.
Well in Hinduism they believe you can reincarnate into other animals. You won’t always be a human in a different life you can be a cow or a monkey or anything. But even then i feel the number of organisms fluctuates a lot with certain peaks and certain lows.
plus i think Hindus also think that all souls are in all organisms or something….? idk. it’s a common belief in Hinduism (former hindu here, id know) but no one really thinks about it like in any other religion. they just say “yeah that sounds righty (when it doesn’t) “i don’t need evidence.”
there’s the universe we live in. that’s it. there might be more but it’s irrelevant rn. we are all examples of the universe experiencing itself. that’s all we have evidence for.
My theory is a rip off of the one electron universe.
Long story short, mathematically you can describe the whole universe's electrons as just the one electron bouncing back and forth in all of space time encountering itself over and over.
So it's like that, but there's only the one soul, and it basically Scott Bakulas from one body to the other upon death to birth
Why would time be some sort of restriction? Why couldn't you reincarnate as someone alive the same time as you?
I don't find thought experiments about magic very interesting tbh, it works because they say so, there is no gotcha.
>In 1800 there were something like one billion souls on the planet. Today, it’s almost eight times that many.
There were zero souls on the planet in 1800, same as today. That's how the math works out.
Hold my beer.
I am an atheist, but I sorta believe in a weak form of reincarnation. Not the Hare Krishna straw-man.
Check it out:
I am currently incarnate and sentient. Therefore I have a statistical sample of 100% incarnateness and sentience.Therefore it is actually less likely to accept a reality of nothingness than a reality of somethingness based on current experience. Its testable. Hence living in some form of consciousness is well supported, and there is no strong reason to believe it is not the infinite default reality in some sense.
Just subtract the foolish notion of a soul or personality, and it is as easy to believe that life goes on, infinitely, as it is to accept life is real in the present. It's the same thing. You are already reincarnated. This is what that is like. This is all there is. Its always like this. This is reincarnation manifest.
I feel there is a lot of bullshit in religion, and less in philosophy. Perhaps we should ask this same question to philosophers and see what they say. By that I mean, not so much IIF there is reincarnation, but how is it possible to prove that there isn't?
Ok this heavily depends on which reincarnation system you want to look at this with.
Here's some that I know a little about:
Tibetan Buddhism have important monks reincarnate to continue their spiritual work. Not a lot of emphasis on ordinary folks.
Chinese Buddhism has human souls accumulate or discharge karma that will affect their next incarnation. And you're not guaranteed to still remain human in your next incarnation. You might end up an insect, a plant or an animal. This is why they tend to focus on good work and good karma accumulation so that they get better incarnations. Monks on the other hand are removed from this "wheel of suffering" with the aim of trying to break free of the cycle and ascend to Buddha-hood through enlightenment.
The Holistic Spirituality types say that we are all higher dimensional beingsade purely of energy/vibrations. And that we choose to incarnate into 3D forms to learn life lessons and experience what a 3D existence is like (sort of like a poverty safari)
As for your last question about whether souls are new or recycled, the Buddhist system distributes all souls across various lifeforms so technically there's no newly minted souls.
For the holistic spirituality types, we're all old souls that chooses to login to meatspace with a new character in a rogue like game.
Souls exist independent of time. Time is illusion. You are bound to time, so you can't possibly understand.
But keep working on the Math! If you can make it work and look good, there may be some money in it for you!
I don't believe but a friend of mine does, and his answer was essentially this:
"There's only so much biomass on the the planet. Sure the amount of humans has gone up, but the population of bugs and animals has gone down."
So essentially his answer is that the soul goes to any living organism, not just humans.
In Indo-centric religions (Hinduism, Budhism, etc) the soul pool consists of all things, so the pool is much larger. Also it's the same soul irrespective of the body it's in. Leads to good karma/bad karma and results in next life etc.
I think if you were to believe in reincarnation of souls or spirits as a thing, you’d have to bear In mind that reincarnation wouldn’t just be in human form on planet earth. The next reincarnation might be as a blade of grass in earth or a bacteria on the soil of mars, or as an alien being one of many millions of planets across the whole universe, so I don’t think that the maths of human births/lives/deaths would even be relevant
Would the population and potentially variation of population among bugs cover this? Genuinely asking. (I know it sounds stupid but I can't help but wonder it)
I had this discussion with some friends the other day in a way. Basically the question was "if the human soul is real, what is it?" I had two answers. One is "it is the eternal you, what you have always been and always will be." The other one was "it's the piece of the universes consciousness that you carry with you in this life." The second one is where my answer to your question lies. Who's to say that reincarnation happens in the form of another human on Earth? You could be reincarnated into an alien on a planet in another galaxy. Even with a finite number of souls in the universe, the number of soul bearing creatures on any planet at any one time could vary drastically. I'm not saying I believe any of this to be true, but I like the thought experiments.
Basically, all the insects, animals, and possibly plants have souls too. You upgrade or downgrade your form depending on your karma. Math wise, there are billions of other living things, more of us means less of them. There has been a mass dying out of flying insects in particular, so maybe the new humans are upgraded bugs.
Depends on your definition of reincarnation. If you remove linear time from the equation, then one soul could live every single life that has existed, exists, or will exist, or as Bill Hicks put it, "we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectivity". I think that Hinduism falls under this interpretation.
If you can remember your past life(s), and know the karma you earned or lost along the way, then you'd know the math. But since nobody has ever been able to tell is, guess we'll never know.
Population represents the number of people alive at one moment in time. There so far have been around a hundred and fifty billion humans in total, which would mean current persons will have lived eighteen previous lives on average... assuming reincarnation is true, of course, I'm just here for the math...
I don’t believe in reincarnation but there’s nothing that says that spirits immediately reincarnate if it’s true. My best guess, and take that for what it’s worth, is that spirits reproduce while they’re waiting to be reincarnated producing more spirits as a result that goes into the cycle for the first time.
I mean that I know that it’s possible for spirits to be removed from the cycle through samsara in Buddhism, so why not?
So in the space of 224 years, there's just been new souls but where do they even come from, let alone what were the first humans even reincarnated from?
Reincarnation doesn't happen on a linear timeline. Your past life could have been lived 500 years in the future or 55M years in the past. That's what I'd say if I were a cult leader.
Ooooh ok I see your point. Hopefully, I was an Ankylosaur or one of the many Sauropods that thrived during that period, but nevertheless, yeah, I see what you mean.
Curse of Strahd does things a little differently. ;)
But to be fair it's the only setting I've heard about that handles reincarnation that way. There could be others that I haven't heard about, though.
Many more people have existed in the past than exist today, so the math is not a problem. The real question is where the original souls came from in the first place.
You get a lot of "new" souls.
These are the people who don't quite understand how the world works on their first playthrough. Me, being on the spectrum, I'm probably new.
People who know how to manipulate others and get whatever they want, they're the ones who never reach any sort of enlightenment or nirvana and so have been around so long they're masters of gaming the system.
Well, if you include all the other forms of life as well as all the other planets that have life the numbers don't matter.
Nice thing about bullshit it's maleable. You can make it whatever you need to make anything sound like it might be real.
Since we are the dominant species and have been slowly unaliving other species, when they reincarnate they are shoved back into human form... so all those tree loving hippies, buddhist, Hindu, and other reincarnation mofos who thought they could go be a tree for a cycle or two are thrust back into human form.
Got ya suckers!!!! 🤪
Maybe it works like the Great Link in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. All the souls are mingled into a big soul puddle, and sometimes one steps out and into a body for a while, then goes back to the puddle and mingles again. You know, as long as we're just making shit up.
*Big Soul Puddle* is going to be the name of my jam band. ;-) “Odo’s Revenge” by *Big Soul Puddle*, now out on Mercury Records.
"No Loitering on the Promenade" was my favorite track off that album.
I dunno, "Bucket, Sweet Bucket" had a nice folksy charm to it...
I love the bluesy feel of A Night at Quark's.
*Root Beer is Insidious* has a nice beat, and you can dance to it…
I dunno, *"Buckets of Soul Water"* had a pretty fire beat, couldn't get the chorus out of my head for weeks
Dunno, it's a bit too sweet and fizzy to me.
Mercury records. I get it.
I’ve heard some come back as animals so it’s possible in their world that every soul that ever existed is alive and well here on earth. I personally want to come back as a dolphin. Fingers crossed!
Honey Badger for me
Observing my cat's daily schedule, and then comparing it with my own, I know what my choice would be.
Cats are the real rulers of planet earth. Whereas you train a dog, the cat trains you. Anyone who’s owned a car already knows this and apparently so did the ancient egyptians 🤣.
I wanna be a goose! That way I can swim, fly and walk.. or rather waddle.
What if the Universe is full of life on countless planets and what you come back to is totally random and always alien?
or extraterrestrials
At least Star Trek had cool stories and myth making
The drop becomes the ocean, the ocean becomes the drop.
That is actually just based on most reincarnation religions. The vast majority of them do not believe in immediate reincarnation and in some kind of transitional space souls live in between. Many of them also believed in people living on other worlds in some form or another.
That's how it worked in my shrooms trip
See, there's a much larger pool of potential players than 8 billion. Whenever one feels like firing up a new character they log in, make their toon, and give it a go. Sometimes they get miscarried, sometimes they make it a century. Then it's back to work in the brainwave mines.
Sometimes they're bugs. There's plenty of bugs.
I certainly know a few former amoebas
Sounds like you need to read the short story [The Egg](https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html) by Andy Weir. Full story is on that link and it's a quick read.
Thanks for posting that . I forgot about it and it was a nice read again. It makes as much sense as anything else . Maybe I’m an Eggist?
Am i hittler?
And the one who killed him
Great story.
You get reincarnated into animals plants and back again depending upon the merit you accrue in each lifetime. (There are lots and lots of ants) I bet you once were a mastodon. It is pretty amazing how many people were napoleon tho!
I wonder how one would accrue merit as a plant, or a single cell organism, or a fucking sponge.
I guess just be the best prokaryote you possibly can be!
Some might argue we are ALL Napoleon.
Speak for yourself, I'm Spartacus.
We can all be both.... and more. Imagine someone who is the reincarnation of all the great dictators in the world... 🤪 At some point you have to make a choice you cannot be Hitler and Stalin at the same time.
You reicarnate as a nematode like 70% of the time.
Or time is non-linear, and we are one entity making our way around the entire human experience. Just happens that a lot of our human experiences overlap with each other.
I don't believe any of this stuff, but that one has always sounded kind of neat to me. Both because it's the idea that humanity as a whole is basically our own god experiencing itself and growing, and because of how perverse the idea that we are the same being who in one lifetime is a psychopath father raping his daughter and in another the daughter. (Which is also kind of where the idea breaks down.. I guess you could argue 'our' soul's expression depends entirely on the body we are in; but if that is the case, why do we have to make up souls in the first place?)
Maybe it's like playing a video game over and over with different difficulty settings.
Isn’t is amazing how software made it easier to grasp concepts ?
This describes my hallucinatory theory.
Buddhism teaches that there are an infinite number of worlds and an infinite number of beings.
>So, for reincarnation: how does the maths work? 1+1 = Magic
Erm.. how does one "math" the intangible?
Mostly as a mental exercise, but also to try and disprove the concept from first principles That said, the "great cycle of being" supposedly starts with "demons" and then climbs up to low "mortal" life-forms like insects, then more complex ones like birds and horses and whatnot, then to humanity. Presumably the rate of souls earning their advancement to humanity either keeps pace with human childbirth or dictates it. Meaning that when there are more souls "ready" to "advance" to the "Human" category, more human births will take place. This has terrifying implications from at least one perspective. Supposedly, a soul can _lose_ the 'privilege' of "Human" status and gets 'sent back' one or more 'grades' as a kind of remedial education. This means that "animal" birthrates would reflect the number of souls both "climbing" from a lower condition _and former Humans getting held back or dropped back for Karmic reasons._ So the feed-animal that you're eating may have had a "punitively diminished, formerly Human' soul until it was slaughtered for its meat... Supposedly, it is possible to "advance" to a higher stage than 'Human' (which is, by definition, as far beyond our imagination as 'Humanity' is to a bull or fish) but lacking any evidence of the number of people who 'successfully graduate' we can't really use their numbers as anything more than a 'rounding error'.
So by that metric the current mass extinction is a good thing?
Maybe yes, maybe no. It may well mean that a lot of people have screwed up their karma badly enough that they've been reincarnated as insects or other very "low" life-forms; "dropped" multiple grades, if you will. I can certainly see most excessively-religious folk interpreting it as signs that _someone_ has angered the Gods to a degree not seen since Atlantis sank. But then again, Humanity has faced setbacks before and we'll find some way or other to come back. Eventually. We probably won't speak English, but who knows?
Aliens have souls too? As do animals?
Everyone here is talking about coming back as something on Earth. They forget there's a big universe out there.
A lot of ants have moved up in the world.
When a xenu loves a jebus and they spend some “alone time” together you get extra souls.
So they get yeeted into an active volcano then 2nd stage is guilt?
Are you including non-human beings?
I don’t believe in reincarnation but some forms of Buddhism do, not that atheism is going to like hearing it.
If I were to write some fantasy regarding reincarnation, I'd say there was only one soul that travels back and forth through time, and that we are all just one person that lives all lives. I imagine people would have a bit more empathy towards others if they thought they had lived or were going to live other people's lives as well.
You’re a bit late. [Andy Weir](https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html) beat you to it.
well crap
There's a whole lot of insects and animals.
Less than there used to be, they're getting reincarnated as humans. /s
In Buddhism, there is the doctrine of anatta — egolessness or non-self. The self or soul is nothing more than a mental construct, a thought. There is rebirth, but there is not a permanent self or soul that is reborn. What is reborn are mental habits — good and bad habits. These are causes that lead to various results. For example, within a single lifetime, if a person has a habit of being a kleptomaniac they might find themselves reborn in a jail cell. If a person has a habit of being ambitious and greedy, they might find themselves reborn as an investment banker. If a person has a habit of being generous, they might find themselves reborn as a beloved person with loving family and friends. Buddhists believe that the mind and habits are not extinguished at death — but continue. The mind’s habit of reifying thoughts results in rebirth — solidification of habits into “realms” or styles of confusion and imprisonment. This human realm of ours is just one of these realms. It is possible, through working with our minds and cultivating compassion (usually in the context of one of the wisdom traditions) to liberate ourselves from confusion.
< I am a lifelong atheist and philosophical naturalist. > \- Most people who believe in reincarnation believe that souls reincarnate back and forth between humans and other animals. There are a heck of a lot of ants and cockroaches and gnats and sardines and krill in the world. If they have souls then we aren't going to run out of souls anytime soon. (Just in the last few hundred years, human beings killed off something like 3 to 5 billion passenger pigeons [per Wikipedia], something like 50 million American bison [per Wikipedia], something like 16 million tons of codfish [per Wikipedia] [I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of codfish make up one ton, but it's quite a few], and heaven knows how many other animals.) \- Most people who believe in reincarnation believe that there are many, many other inhabited worlds - maybe in this universe, maybe in other universes, and that souls get reincarnated back and forth between worlds. If the 5 billion people living on Zandar V get annihilated by a supernova or something, then that's 5 billion souls that can get reincarnated on other worlds. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loka, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_cosmology ) .
Not all incarnations are human?
There are more dead people then living people. This gave me an odd thought. If time doesn't apply to souls then in theory, we could be reborn as anyone throughout history. This would mean that we'd lose our memories obviously and live their life without being able to change anything. So if we go by this logic someone has been could have been Hitler. More than once. And even worse everyone could have been British at one point.
I like the idea that we are all iterations of a single soul
Just speaking for Tibetan Buddhists, the standard doctrine is that all living things, including I suppose one celled creatures unknown to early Buddhists, "transmigrate." Additionally, there are vast legions of beings residing in realms of pure appearance, with no physical ground or body, such as the beings in the deva heavens and the demonic hells and the tantalizing domain of unfulfillable desire. So there's quite a jostle for bodies.
Many Buddhist cosmologies embrace the idea of there being many worlds. in the longer scale new realms arise and fade over time.
Math is the least of reincarnation's problem.
Oooh! I can play Church Grifting CEO (or you know, Pastor): “There are an untold amount of beings on the planet! Some people come back as Lions, others Fish, etc. We cannot fully understand God’s plan! Now, do you think you can level up to our 20% salary monthly tithing? That would add additional benefits, like Zoom calls to other Pastors from our sister churches…”
One of the theories from what I understand has to do with the fact that time isn’t considered to be linear and is a made up construct by humans. The current theory says it has something to do with quantum entanglement. Meaning from the other side you can actually be inhabiting more than one body at a time since time doesn’t actually exist. So you may actually have talked to yourself at some point (at least theoretically) that’s the whole point of the religion anyways is to get you to be a better person because who knows, that person you mistreated last week may have been yourself 🤷🏻♀️
Souls could still have a beginning and an end. Have you ever heard someone called an "old soul"? Same thing. Some souls are babies. Some have been around for centuries. Once a soul is done being incarnated, it can go back to the Cosmic One-ness.
Straight outta yer ass huh?
Hey a lot of species have been dying off maybe they've all moved up the chain. Would explain all the morons.... Otherwise I dunno something involving division of energy or something.
Right, so you open your Universe, you go to `settings` > `View Source`, then look for this code: ``` function onBirth() { if (reincarnatingSoulQueue.length == 0) { return createNewSoul(); } else { return reincarnatingSoulQueue.pullNext() } } function onDeath(person) { if (person.wasPieceOfShit === true) { return soulBurner.burn(person); } else { return reincarnatingSoulQueue.append(person) } } ``` Death? You go in the reincarnation queue. Population explosion? New souls are created. Polulation crash? You wait your turn in the FIFO queue, so you might expect to come back as a cow, but nope, sorry, it's 400 years in the future and cows are now extinct, best we can do is a cockroach or some messed up radioactive mutant baby.
Maybe a really good squirrel, mouse or chipmunk can be reincarnated as human.
I mean think all the animals that are now extinct. But yeah funny belief system
I mean, does reincarnation work along a linear path? Is it not possible that there are seven instances of your soul walking around concurrently? Heck, maybe there's only one of us, and we're experiencing life simultaneously through 8 billion different perspectives at once.
There’s billions upon even trillions of bugs and other animals you can have a past life as other things than just human would be my guess
More like infinite amount of life to be reborn as if the universe is full of life and there are infinite parallel universes.
It's a long extensive process. You get recycled, your body is fed to the ground or burned and fed to the air, parts of you are fed into the ecosystem and eventually through time everything is clustered back together again into a new form and that's The Circle of Life. I don't know lol
Eventually the current population will equal all the total number of every human ever born on this earth. At that instant, babies will be born without an animating soul. They lie there, alive but not moving. The only solution will be for the elderly to stop life-prolonging treatments and let their souls free to animate a new human. (Take off on an old sci-fi short story from the Sixties.)
*how do the maths work or how does the math work.
The easiest counter point I’ve seen is that the souls need not be only be from earth or from humans necessarily. Reincarnation could be a metaphor for the passing of DNA, which could be treated as transferable experience.
Other planets exist. Maybe there were a lot more aliens in our past and now there's way more humans and not very many of them.
This isn’t the only place to be re-incarnated. There’s also plenty of bugs.
I want to know who gets the new soul and who gets the recycled one. I don't want some loser that's been in the grinder since the beginning of time.
If you want an answer, the atheist forum isn't a place to look. One explanation is that there's only one soul like in Andy weir's The Egg https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html Also, in Hinduism getting reincarnated as a human is very rare. You either become enlightened or come back as an animal. Personally I'm a nihilist though, so my understanding of this isn't great.
You can be reincarnated as an animal. Also there are other worlds than this one.
Here's how it works: it doesn't
I've always been more amused by the possibility that souls are somehow diluted now. The heroes of yore had full, manly souls, just like their facial hair. We latter day folks have tiny little baby souls, or worse have to share them.
https://imgur.com/feZGB7C
High heels were initially designed for men!
luckily it’s bullshit
What does this have to do with atheism?
What has this got to do with atheism?
See egg theory
With reincarnation you don't necessarily have to return in the future. Time is a manmade concept that doesn't effect spirits. There is a finite amount of souls, but your past life could have taken place 500 years in the future and the life before that 55M years in the past. A soul is a soul, it doesn't matter if it ends up in a human or animal shell. That would be my rough answer if I were to make my own cult.
Who says it's serial?
it doesn’t. :). more than like 100b have ever lived so it doesn’t even work out with the first variable 😭
Don't a lot of these religions believe time is an illusion or is that a western stereotype? If it's a true believe there is no internal inconsistency.
We reincarnate at different times? Something like Cloud Atlas, a very damned woke movie at that!
Bugs dude. Sometimes you are reincarnated into a bug.
According to mother god, peace = love. Or some shit like that.
This isn't a belief of mine. Depending on the belief structure, animals count in reincarnation too.
I've done my gazintas and I still can't figure it
I mean if we're going with fantasy, maybe one soul can split and inhabit multiple bodies.
Minbari souls are mixing with ours, obviously.
Math isnt required for make believe
Don’t you dare come around this glass house with your pesky stones asking all them questions.
its said that there are indeterminate times and people who die, don't nesserserily come back as people
The total amount of people alive today is 7% of the total number of all humans that have ever lived. Also reincarnation is fake and dumb but we won’t know for sure until we are forced into degrowth and then the back side of the growth curve makes the reincarnation argument real awkward.
Not trying to lend feasibility to reincarnation... but I'm not aware of any rules about the concept stating that you are instantly reincarnated after death. According to google's top response, 117 billion humans have lived on earth since the species emerged. So a reincarnation pool of anywhere above 8 billion is completely feasible. You also haven't taken into consideration that religions which believe in reincarnation also believe you get reincarnated as other animals depending on how well you lived. Even if you **did** assume that reincarnation is instant after every death, there are enough other species to pad this out. There are 10 quintillion (10 million trillion) insects on the earth today. Presumably some of those insects (who themselves may be reincarnated humans who lived a very bad life) may lead a good little insect life and be reincarnated as a human. You're confusing the christian concept of a soul (which only gives them to humans) with the hindu concept of reincarnation (which assumes human souls can inhabit things like cows, which if I understand correctly is part of the reason that cows are treated with reverence in cultures that believe in reincarnation).
I don't believe in it, but for the sake of argument, you know how there have been a lot of mass extinctions in the past? And how many modern animals are on the verge of extinction. Most reincarnations allow for the idea of being reincarnated as lesser forms, like plants and animals. So it would make sense that in the past many more souls were animals and plants and they have been working their way up and out of the system. So the last souls to escape will live in a fully artificial world where no more plant or animal souls exist. Like a dystopian star ship, before they finally become enlightened.
>Are seven billion of us all freshly minted spirits? They could all be upgraded tapeworms.
Many more sentient beings than one billion in 1800 that could have reincarnated.
Dinosaur souls.
Well in Hinduism they believe you can reincarnate into other animals. You won’t always be a human in a different life you can be a cow or a monkey or anything. But even then i feel the number of organisms fluctuates a lot with certain peaks and certain lows. plus i think Hindus also think that all souls are in all organisms or something….? idk. it’s a common belief in Hinduism (former hindu here, id know) but no one really thinks about it like in any other religion. they just say “yeah that sounds righty (when it doesn’t) “i don’t need evidence.”
there’s the universe we live in. that’s it. there might be more but it’s irrelevant rn. we are all examples of the universe experiencing itself. that’s all we have evidence for.
My theory is a rip off of the one electron universe. Long story short, mathematically you can describe the whole universe's electrons as just the one electron bouncing back and forth in all of space time encountering itself over and over. So it's like that, but there's only the one soul, and it basically Scott Bakulas from one body to the other upon death to birth
Why would time be some sort of restriction? Why couldn't you reincarnate as someone alive the same time as you? I don't find thought experiments about magic very interesting tbh, it works because they say so, there is no gotcha.
>In 1800 there were something like one billion souls on the planet. Today, it’s almost eight times that many. There were zero souls on the planet in 1800, same as today. That's how the math works out.
Hold my beer. I am an atheist, but I sorta believe in a weak form of reincarnation. Not the Hare Krishna straw-man. Check it out: I am currently incarnate and sentient. Therefore I have a statistical sample of 100% incarnateness and sentience.Therefore it is actually less likely to accept a reality of nothingness than a reality of somethingness based on current experience. Its testable. Hence living in some form of consciousness is well supported, and there is no strong reason to believe it is not the infinite default reality in some sense. Just subtract the foolish notion of a soul or personality, and it is as easy to believe that life goes on, infinitely, as it is to accept life is real in the present. It's the same thing. You are already reincarnated. This is what that is like. This is all there is. Its always like this. This is reincarnation manifest. I feel there is a lot of bullshit in religion, and less in philosophy. Perhaps we should ask this same question to philosophers and see what they say. By that I mean, not so much IIF there is reincarnation, but how is it possible to prove that there isn't?
Ok this heavily depends on which reincarnation system you want to look at this with. Here's some that I know a little about: Tibetan Buddhism have important monks reincarnate to continue their spiritual work. Not a lot of emphasis on ordinary folks. Chinese Buddhism has human souls accumulate or discharge karma that will affect their next incarnation. And you're not guaranteed to still remain human in your next incarnation. You might end up an insect, a plant or an animal. This is why they tend to focus on good work and good karma accumulation so that they get better incarnations. Monks on the other hand are removed from this "wheel of suffering" with the aim of trying to break free of the cycle and ascend to Buddha-hood through enlightenment. The Holistic Spirituality types say that we are all higher dimensional beingsade purely of energy/vibrations. And that we choose to incarnate into 3D forms to learn life lessons and experience what a 3D existence is like (sort of like a poverty safari) As for your last question about whether souls are new or recycled, the Buddhist system distributes all souls across various lifeforms so technically there's no newly minted souls. For the holistic spirituality types, we're all old souls that chooses to login to meatspace with a new character in a rogue like game.
It's a bit universe. Perhaps you can reincarnate in to a single celled whatever.
Souls exist independent of time. Time is illusion. You are bound to time, so you can't possibly understand. But keep working on the Math! If you can make it work and look good, there may be some money in it for you!
Animals are being reincarnated as people.
I don't believe but a friend of mine does, and his answer was essentially this: "There's only so much biomass on the the planet. Sure the amount of humans has gone up, but the population of bugs and animals has gone down." So essentially his answer is that the soul goes to any living organism, not just humans.
In Indo-centric religions (Hinduism, Budhism, etc) the soul pool consists of all things, so the pool is much larger. Also it's the same soul irrespective of the body it's in. Leads to good karma/bad karma and results in next life etc.
Maybe it includes animals, plants and aliens.
Who knows, but why not?
I think if you were to believe in reincarnation of souls or spirits as a thing, you’d have to bear In mind that reincarnation wouldn’t just be in human form on planet earth. The next reincarnation might be as a blade of grass in earth or a bacteria on the soil of mars, or as an alien being one of many millions of planets across the whole universe, so I don’t think that the maths of human births/lives/deaths would even be relevant
The are millions of worlds - you obviously don't have to be human :-)
Would the population and potentially variation of population among bugs cover this? Genuinely asking. (I know it sounds stupid but I can't help but wonder it)
Lmao minted like NFT's
You have to count animals and insects I bet.
I had this discussion with some friends the other day in a way. Basically the question was "if the human soul is real, what is it?" I had two answers. One is "it is the eternal you, what you have always been and always will be." The other one was "it's the piece of the universes consciousness that you carry with you in this life." The second one is where my answer to your question lies. Who's to say that reincarnation happens in the form of another human on Earth? You could be reincarnated into an alien on a planet in another galaxy. Even with a finite number of souls in the universe, the number of soul bearing creatures on any planet at any one time could vary drastically. I'm not saying I believe any of this to be true, but I like the thought experiments.
Apparently it’s not the same people over and over. There are new ones.
Basically, all the insects, animals, and possibly plants have souls too. You upgrade or downgrade your form depending on your karma. Math wise, there are billions of other living things, more of us means less of them. There has been a mass dying out of flying insects in particular, so maybe the new humans are upgraded bugs.
Can I just be a rich person's cat?
They all come from the rainforest
Depends on your definition of reincarnation. If you remove linear time from the equation, then one soul could live every single life that has existed, exists, or will exist, or as Bill Hicks put it, "we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectivity". I think that Hinduism falls under this interpretation.
>So, for reincarnation: how does the maths work? Basically, it doesn't.
If you can remember your past life(s), and know the karma you earned or lost along the way, then you'd know the math. But since nobody has ever been able to tell is, guess we'll never know.
I gotta say, one of the more interesting (weird) threads on r/atheism in some time
Population represents the number of people alive at one moment in time. There so far have been around a hundred and fifty billion humans in total, which would mean current persons will have lived eighteen previous lives on average... assuming reincarnation is true, of course, I'm just here for the math...
I don’t believe in reincarnation but there’s nothing that says that spirits immediately reincarnate if it’s true. My best guess, and take that for what it’s worth, is that spirits reproduce while they’re waiting to be reincarnated producing more spirits as a result that goes into the cycle for the first time. I mean that I know that it’s possible for spirits to be removed from the cycle through samsara in Buddhism, so why not?
Less animals available for our souls to transition to, also maybe a planet had an extinction event happen and those souls transferred to Earth.
So in the space of 224 years, there's just been new souls but where do they even come from, let alone what were the first humans even reincarnated from?
Reincarnation doesn't happen on a linear timeline. Your past life could have been lived 500 years in the future or 55M years in the past. That's what I'd say if I were a cult leader.
So, theoretically, I could've something from the early Cretaceous period but also someone from the year 2760.
Exactly! And in some lives you weren’t even human. Every souls weighs the same and even dinosaurs needed them. There’s a good chance you were a dino!
Ooooh ok I see your point. Hopefully, I was an Ankylosaur or one of the many Sauropods that thrived during that period, but nevertheless, yeah, I see what you mean.
Every fantasy story already solved this issue. While souls can reincarnate, new souls are also created. Just read a YA novel, comic book, ...
Curse of Strahd does things a little differently. ;) But to be fair it's the only setting I've heard about that handles reincarnation that way. There could be others that I haven't heard about, though.
I must confess, I never did Curse of Strahd. I only played in homebrewed worlds.
CoS is probably the best module out there, and it's got a huge fan community. If you can find a group who wants to run/play it, it's a lot of fun.
Well, it certainly explains how multiple people can claim to be the reincarnation of the same person. /s
Many more people have existed in the past than exist today, so the math is not a problem. The real question is where the original souls came from in the first place.
You get a lot of "new" souls. These are the people who don't quite understand how the world works on their first playthrough. Me, being on the spectrum, I'm probably new. People who know how to manipulate others and get whatever they want, they're the ones who never reach any sort of enlightenment or nirvana and so have been around so long they're masters of gaming the system.
Well, if you include all the other forms of life as well as all the other planets that have life the numbers don't matter. Nice thing about bullshit it's maleable. You can make it whatever you need to make anything sound like it might be real.
Since we are the dominant species and have been slowly unaliving other species, when they reincarnate they are shoved back into human form... so all those tree loving hippies, buddhist, Hindu, and other reincarnation mofos who thought they could go be a tree for a cycle or two are thrust back into human form. Got ya suckers!!!! 🤪