Reincarnation

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Max35

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Simple question, do you believe in reincarnation?
 
I do. I think when you die, you simply get reborn as another person, but can't remember your previous life.

My old art teacher said that he was an aircraft carrier in a previous life... the guy was a nut job.
 
There's no reason to say yes. So why would I?
 
Absinthe said:
So... what's the point of reincarnation then? If there is one, I mean.
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I believe it's some sort of learning thing, experiencing things from different perspectives, trying to get as much of the spectrum of life as possible, both the positive aspects and negative ones. I think you remember your lives, just not while you're experiencing one of them. I think there's a possibility that you can access them, there's supposedly people who get flashbacks from earlier/future lives and stuff, maybe not every single account is genuine but there's always the possibility..

I think one of my recent past lives were as a nazi soldier and a middle class person in the 80's. I have an intense feeling of fascination and connection with the 80's, I think there must be some relation to it other than just randomness.

Call me a crackpot!
 
StardogChampion said:
I do. I think when you die, you simply get reborn as another person, but can't remember your previous life.

My old art teacher said that he was an aircraft carrier in a previous life... the guy was a nut job.
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an aircraft carrier? wow.....
 
It has to be the last thing I'd ever believe in.



Your consciousness (what many people believe to be your soul) is a weird and not yet understood interaction between a few billion brain cells. When you die, they break down. Poof there goes your soul.
 
gick said:
Ditto.

I have not been given any reason to believe in such a thing, so why should I?
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That's weak atheism, not agnosticism. Most agnosts are just weak atheists really. Weak atheism is saying "I don't believe in X because there is no reason to.". Strong atheism is saying without a doubt "There is no X".

I don't get agnosticism, this post by Qckles sums it up nicely (if I may be so free to use it :naughty: )

qckbeam said:
I don't know why the god topic gets special treatment. Now, in all honesty, it doesn't really bother me too much. There are just some minor, inconsistent statements which confuse me. It all boils down to this: How can a person be undecided? Does the agnostic line of thinking apply to everything, or just this one issue? If it applies to everything, how do you make sense of anything? If it applies to just this one topic, why the special treatment? From what I understand the viewpoint could be summed up with "I don't know. I don't see evidence to point towards a god, but that doesn't mean he doesn't exist. I'm undecided".

I can't prove to you that magical dancing faries don't exist. It's just that there is not any evidence to suggest they do. Because we lack evidence which tells us magical faires exist, we don't even bother to entertain the notion that they might. The concept doesn't even enter our minds until we have some evidence hinting towards it. To think in any other way is ridiculous. There are an infinite number of things which might exist. Now, obviously, this is not the way people regularly think. We don't consider all possibilites. We only consider the possibilities which are supported by evidence. So I don't understand why people make exceptions for god. There isn't a single iota of hard evidence to suggest god exists. Nothing. But still, people refuse to make up their minds. I don't get it. No one would say dragons might exist. No one would say unicorns might exist. If they did it would be 1) insanity or 2) an attempt at being difficult in a discussion like this one. There isn't any good reason to remain undecided about god. At least, not one that I can see.
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PvtRyan said:
That's weak atheism, not agnosticism. Most agnosts are just weak atheists really. Weak atheism is saying "I don't believe in X because there is no reason to.". Strong atheism is saying without a doubt "There is no X".
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Heart-clr-Web.gif
 
No, it dosn't exist, you are an enclosed biological entity, nothing more.
Once you die so does your consciousness.
 
I'm more of a "I don't know, but to be honest, it's useless trying to think about it, as you're wasting valuable living time"

-Angry Lawyer
 
I think people like to suggest, and ultimately accept, beliefs about god, because it's such a huge effect over the way we percieve life, whether it's a completely pointless existance or there's a meaning to it.

The existance or non-existance of unicorns or dragons don't really affect the way we think of life, unless you're speculating over unicorn or dragon gods.

I believe because I have the right to choose. I can look at suggested evidence of the opposite, yet resort to my own beliefs because of what fits together the best with my feelings deep down.

I think christians and most religious people deal with god and deities just the same.

No one is hurting anybody, well, some christians and general religious extremists tend to, but other than that I don't see why alot of atheists are going apeshit over people who reserve their own right to believe. It's part of what makes us human.

Also, there's enough evidence to at least hint towards, if not the existance of a god, at least a reality beyond that which our eyes see. At least enough to convince people who have the tendency to believe, or in a more appropriate term usage, essentially open minded people.

Few people equal extremist christians when it comes to general narrowmindedness and adversity against deviating beliefs and opinions, but I think some types of atheists are able contenders. Not all though. Everyone's entitled to their own opinions, and i think the internet is a good place for sharing and learning about people's opinions, but alot of people seem to see their goals to convince the rest of the world about their own opinions, something that in my opinion hints towards general insecurity about the validity of such opinions.

There, I said it. I've used maybe more complex verbality in this post because I really wanted to use the terms that fit the best with my message, it's one thing that I love about the english language that we don't have in swedish. We basically have one word about every general thing.

I'm more of a "I don't know, but to be honest, it's useless trying to think about it, as you're wasting valuable living time"
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I have to agree with you on that. A minute spent thinking is a minute better spent drinking. :cheers:
 
I'd like to take the liberty to quote someone I know on another forum. Long read I know, but it's a very very interesting and convincing perspective.

Waking life is merely "online dreaming..." in so much as it is a dream-state modulated by constraints produced by specific sensory input...

The contents of the dream are still all imaginary: the global model and the self model we place inside it...

The dream-state itself is an ongoing process supported by biological organisms which constantly confuse themselves with their own self-model.

"This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. The dead are not alive, and the living will not die."
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the problem lies 1) in confusing a biological organism with a "self"

a "self" is an abstract concept - a biological organism isn't a someone - it's a machine like any other - the brain isn't a person, it's a whole community of cells all pushing and pulling in different directions, projecting an imaginary self... none of them are really living either...

2) the first-person perspective

when you ask questions from within an fpp you have limited access to memories and experiences - so while a "self" can't actually be asleep, unconscious, dead, etc. it can attempt to fill in the gap of missing time from a waking state and envisage a world-model without a self-model in it.

it's a simple mistake of cognition. the whole concept of "non-existance" is ridiculous if you think about it.
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Here's the full theory http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/metzin...onen/precis.pdf

"Thomas Metzinger is one of those courageous explorers who dare to travel beyond the borders of their familiar territory. This book is a successful and brilliant attempt to bring together what had been separated artificially, the philosophy and the neuroscience of mind. It is a must for those who believe that consciousness is a mystery and for those who think it is not."
-- Wolf Singer, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research

"The strength of Metzinger's book lies in his mastery of supposedly disparate fields. Being No One successfully bridges the gap between elaborate philosophical models of the self and the neural models that were elaborated in our laboratories. It is a book that has much to offer to a wide array of scholars and readers."
-- Marc Jeannerod, Institut des Sciences Cognitives

"Being No One is essential reading for all scholars interested in the study of the self and of its distortions. In this thought-provoking book Metzinger presents an exciting new theory of phenomenal awareness, a theory that has the merit of being firmly grounded on a vast neuroscientific and psychopathological literature, which is here synthesized and made available to a wider audience for the first time."
-- Vittorio Gallese, University of Parma


Whether it's right or wrong, it can't be denied it the most rational and reasoned way to look at things.
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How is "non-existence" a ridiculous concept? Cells die off, consciousness ceases unless you want to argue that it is not dependent on having a functional brain. Or are you saying it's ridiculous because self is an illusion in the first place? If a person believes in a soul, then naturally they believe that sense of self is carried on somehow metaphysically, regardless of how it's explained physically. I'd have to better understand your position in order to respond further.

*edit: ahh, just saw your new post. I'll have to look at that when I have time.
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well i'll explain briefly... non-existance is a fairly obvious paradox... a cell can't non-exist

when we perceive a cell it's seen as a mental object... we never see it for what it is directly, which is a process... "cell" is a small part of this spectrum of intellectual knowledge - to know a cell is to identify with it, in some way for a part of us to become identical with the concept of "cell," which should be the same through regardless of who's viewing it.

of course, we don't have to know each cell individually - we can know one cell and realise that the rest are essentially the same thing.

sure, a cell lives and dies, but then, it's never really got its own internal world, identity or perspective to get confused over such issues - at the same time, every living cell on this planet is a resurrection of other living cells... so we have a hierarchy of processes within processes...

as soon as a process at any level gains mental capacities, such as a first person perspective, memory, a self-model, world-model, etc. it has the potential to confuse itself over the nature of its own existance.


this is only one half of the puzzle... the other half is much more difficult
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we need to completely redefine how we talk about ourselves if we are to make sense of this...

for one, i can't talk of my own consciousness, or of an "I" in possession of or experiencing consciousness, because the relationship is the other way around - consciousness experiences the "I", which is no more than a subjective model - again, metzinger uses thousands of case studies, such as muliple personalities, various psychotic disorders like cotard's syndrome, to demonstrate what happens when a self-model is damaged...

for example, in cotard's syndrome, the brain of the biological organism cannot resolve its own existance (or lack of)... it has (you could say realises it has) no self-model, and therefore concludes that it must be dead... these people smell their own rotting flesh, believe they're ghosts, etc.

if we strip away all subjective (i.e. imaginary) models, we're left with this hierarchy of impersonal processes, from cell division to phenomenal consciousness...

when identity confuses itself with process, we conclude that our subjective world model will one day be without a subjective self-model - this is our existential crisis...


a simple case study: were you to reincarnate as your own brother, the day after you die, you would notice nothing untoward... you would wake in his bed, with his life and with his memories leading up to that moment... you would have no reason to suspect anything else.

the most logical answer is that there is no one subject to birth or death in the first place - just consciousness attaching itself to various mental objects... see? the whole concept of reincarnation just proves how we think about ourselves inside out...
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Here's a video lecture with more on this: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3658963188758918426

"every cell that comprised you 7 years ago is already dead - you leave behind at least 10 complete corpses in a life time... there's parts of you scattered all over the place already, whatever body you die in as an old man is no more special than the one you've got now"
 
I believe we should stop talking about what happens after death, live our lives, and then find out when we die, no has any idea of what happens after death and its just an endless debate with no proper conclusion. But just for the hell of it, I think dejavu (cant spell it) may have something to do with being in an exact situation in a previous life, say if you have been somewhere you have never been before but it somehow feels farmiliar.
 
I can't believe in anything that I can't prove, but I do think there's a possibility that our souls enter new forms (lives) after our physical bodies die off.
 
Shift said:
I believe we should stop talking about what happens after death, live our lives, and then find out when we die, no has any idea of what happens after death and its just an endless debate with no proper conclusion. But just for the hell of it, I think dejavu (cant spell it) may have something to do with being in an exact situation in a previous life, say if you have been somewhere you have never been before but it somehow feels farmiliar.
Click to expand...

I think we should accept what happens after death, go clinically insane for a year then realise how amazing life is and cherish every moment of it.
 
I believe there is life after death (heaven in my beliefs :p). I don't feel my death is the end, it is only the start. There is beauty to witness beyond your world & our dimension. Very far far away from earth's galaxy.


The avatar speaks for itself.
 
life after death = wishful thinking based on fear/control

"if you're good you go to heaven, if you're bad you burn in hell"

we die, end of story ..although if we can reincarnate I'd like to come back as a lesbian
 
I don't believe in heaven or hell. As for reincarnation, well, I just don't know. I was simply curious as to other's opinions on the subject.
 
CptStern said:
life after death = wishful thinking based on fear/control

"if you're good you go to heaven, if you're bad you burn in hell"

we die, end of story ..although if we can reincarnate I'd like to come back as a lesbian
Click to expand...
Don't generalize stern. Tsk tsk.
 
Being dead is exactly the same feeling as that you can remember before you were conceived.
 
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