Part 1 of 2
The Case For and Against Reincarnation (Part 1)
I have to admit, Reincarnation scares me as much as the prospect of having to give up carbs. It’s frightening.
I have to admit, Reincarnation scares me as much as the prospect of having to give up carbs. It’s frightening.
Now I wouldn’t mind being reborn as a movie star or even Paris Hilton’s spoiled pooch — talk about luxury! But if I didn’t get to choose my avatar, I think the prospect of being randomly born again is spooky. Who knows where I’d end up?
In some ways, I do think Reincarnation may be a possibility, otherwise how would one explain the discrepancies that seem to appear in one lifetime between the haves and the have nots? Between the refugee and the billionaire? Between the healthy and the disabled? Between a dying child and a 100 year old smoker?
Karma doesn’t seem to right itself in just one lifetime. If it did, a certain orange narcissist would choke on his fast food. So if there is a planned design to the universe, then it makes sense that Reincarnation would be part of that design and help smooth out these imbalances over time.
On the other hand, I often doubt its existence at all. As logical a system as Reincarnation might seem for checks and balances amongst souls, it doesn’t seem to quite execute in a way that follows that same logic. In other words, the idea of Reincarnation makes sense to me, but if I look around, our daily world seems to be a stark contradiction of it. There are a few major reasons for my confusion:
1) Population Growth — the concept of Reincarnation, at least as explained by some Eastern religions, posits the idea that the soul has to go through a chain of plant and animal life forms before it can reach the human form, where it has its one chance to progress spiritually and achieve moksha (liberation from the cycle of rebirth). If the goal is not achieved, then the soul is sent back down the chain to start the climb again, from amoeba — to tumbleweed — to snake — to Joe the Plumber. Perhaps not all the way from the beginning, but from a point that reflects the spiritual wisdom it has attained and the good or bad karma it has earned.
Hinduism puts estimates at 8.4 million life forms that need to be traversed before one finally reaches its human avatar. The human stage is said to be the main platform where a soul gets to further its spiritual progress due to its new ability to think beyond basic animal instincts. Human birth is considered the pinnacle of the earthly chain of Reincarnation and therefore the most precious and important life form we can achieve.
If this were true, then how is it that the homo sapien population is increasing over time? Instead our numbers should go up or down every year, i.e. sometimes there would be more of us and sometimes less, depending on how many souls happen to be passing through the top of the chain before falling back down again. Why is the number simply going in one direction?
With billions of additional humans coming into the world every few decades, it implies new souls are being injected into the system — which doesn’t really make sense. What are they doing in the meantime, waiting somewhere on a cosmic playground for their turn on the slide into our world? The increasing population number seems to contradict the premise of Reincarnation.
2) Extinction — Similarly, the fact that certain species have gone extinct — dinosaurs, Tasmanian tigers, bipartisan politicians — doesn’t make sense either within a system of Reincarnation. If each of us has to experience the same test as other souls — perhaps modified by our own good or bad karma points and earned trajectory — but still similar in structure — why would certain species, or tests go missing? Shouldn’t all of us be going through the same life forms in order to experience the same challenges?
Of course if one wanted to, one could conveniently theorize that the test remains the same no matter which life form we take on, and it doesn’t matter whether we’re a dinosaur or platypus, we still have to learn to pee in the forest. But to me it seems that a Reincarnation exam room such as the world would be designed a little more consistently if an SST — Standardized Soul Test — was the goal.
3) Dying Young — A third contradiction I find is the death of children and babies. I understand the possibility that certain life forms may be cut short because the work they were assigned is complete. But if the human avatar is our most important one for intellectual and emotional growth, then what sense does it make for a baby to die after just a few days in the hospital intensive care? What kind of spiritual growth could the poor thing have possibly attained in that blip of time? If it had any bad karma to work off, the soul could have done it in another way, it seems vastly inefficient to be born human and leave so quickly.
4) Endless cycle of Karma — And lastly, I don’t understand why a system was designed to almost force us to repeat our mistakes. We supposedly take our spiritual growth with us as we progress through our journey, but there seems to be too much opportunity for us to generate more bad Karma for ourselves. Because even if we bring some wisdom with us, surely we have to make SOME mistakes in our next human or sentient life in order to acquire new knowledge and wisdom? We are not allowed to remember exactly what we did wrong in past lives, so it’s almost like a harried, hopeless hopscotch where we might take two steps back in order to move one step forward. (I was never good at hopscotch — butterscotch is more my thing.)
Why not just give us one lifetime in which to build upon our knowledge and experience and rid ourselves of any bad Karma in one efficient run? Why create an inefficient, mysterious, complicated system like Reincarnation when there could be so many simpler paths instead?
I know there may be elaborate or far-fetched rebuttals that could be made to defend these contradictions. There is no end to being able to confirm one’s own bias or blind faith if that is the goal. But while I am always open to all conjectures, these specific points seem to greatly discredit Reincarnation and instead give support to Science and Evolution.
On the other hand, true to my wishy-washy agnostic nature, I do think there are other compelling arguments that could be made in favor of continual rebirth. And not all of them are spiritual or theist in nature. I’ll be sharing those counterpoints in my next posting.
