MortalWombat

You know, I keep hearing these claims. You might want to pick up a copy of "Reincarnation : A Critical Examination" by Paul Edwards, reveiwed here:

<a href="http://www.csicop.org/si/9901/reincarnation.html" target="_blank">http://www.csicop.org/si/9901/reincarnation.html</a>

Also see:

<a href="http://www.csicop.org/sb/9803/reincarnation.html" target="_blank">http://www.csicop.org/sb/9803/reincarnation.html</a>

Mendeh

I suppose that the energy that makes us up is going to be around forever, and bits of it will probably find its way into other living things... but that's not really reincarnation, is it?

Marduk

That sounds more like the carbon cycle.
Unless our last thoughts, in the form of an electrical transmission, go on in space forever like old TV shows

[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: marduck ]</p>

Waning Moon Conrad

It doesn't make sense to you.

Waning Moon Conrad

Yes I might if it had anything to say about Buddhist reincarnation theory that is actually meaningful, sensible or valid.

Some New Agers reading it might see the kiss of death marching over the hill but what I see is an army of straw men and I'm not even vaguely impressed.

<strong> Some woman in Northamptonshire or wherever tells whoppers about being an Irishwoman last time and uses faulty logic.

And?

tronvillain

Waning Moon Conrad:'
Of course it is - you defined it in such a way that it didn't exist. The rest of us actually use the word, so we don't define it that way.

Do its founding premises include a definition of "we"? Does it even vaguely resemble the definition the rest of us use?

2tadpoles

If we can exist as beings, without gods, why can't souls exist as beings, without gods?

joedad

When I consider reincarnation, I don't think of myself being alive again after my death, but rather of someone in the future thinking along the same thought lines as myself and remembering people like myself/himself as having existed in past generations.

This sharing or projecting of common thoughts and experiences can feel very "connecting," when I think about it that way, even if it is somewhat delusional and fantastic.

In this personal context of my own comforting invention individual death becomes very unimportant.

joe

echidna

As I see it, atheists who believe in reincarnation, lose some of their intellectual high ground by claiming the existence of something for which there is utterly no evidence.

Personally I see merit in both afterlife worldviews, and as such have no intellectual credibility whatsoever.

Oresta

When I consider reincarnation, I don't think of myself being alive again after my death, but rather of someone in the future thinking along the same thought lines as myself and remembering people like myself/himself as having existed in past generations.
This sharing or projecting of common thoughts and experiences can feel very "connecting," when I think about it that way, even if it is somewhat delusional and fantastic.

In this personal context of my own comforting invention individual death becomes very unimportant.

Nicely said, Joedad. I think of our genetic memory as a continuing evidence of ourselves in each generation. Within my DNA is the coded "experience" of my ancestor who came to New Amsterdam to find a husband and who died in 1670, giving birth to her ninth child; or my New England ancestor who must have gathered with hundreds of others in the church yard to hear George Whitefield speak during the Great Awakening. Furthermore, my genetic past goes forward in my children who have, besides my Northern European genetic memory, the Southern European story of their father's past and all the rich mix that carries.