Life After Death...

[devonin]

Torture is a different matter, having to die in pain and agony is just wrong, but if you just 'respawn' (because i know that word will play over better with FFR'ers) right when you die... are you really losing much?

See, I've always felt that discussion about the prospects of reincarnation was a complete and utter waste of time, for the following reason:

Nobody I have ever met in the entirety of my life has ever put forward a solid assertion that they have direct and confirmable memories of a past life. In fact, nobody I have even -heard about- has put forward a solid assertion that they have direct and confirmable memories of a past life -INCLUDING- people who -have- put forward "some kind" of claim of direct and confirmable memories of a past life.

(The usual downfall of people claiming to have past life memories is that they always claim to be, or be directly connected to some well known historical figure, because it is easy to gain outside knowledge of their lives, but universally fail to possess any memories about the more esoteric mineutia of the life they claim to have [famously someone claiming to have been Cleopatra's hairdresser could talk at length about Cleopatra, but did not actually have any memory or knowledge whatsoever about the tools used by hairdressers in ancient egypt])

From this I can only conclude one of two things:

1/ Regardless of how many past lives you've had, you never retain any memory of your past lives.

or

2/ By some incredibly freak coincidence -every single person I have ever associated with, spoken to or heard about- just so happens to be a "new soul" who has never reincarnated.

If 2/ were the case, there would still be millions upon millions of people who had clear discernable and confirmable past life memories, certainly sufficient numbers to establish reincarnation as an outright fact, but so such phenomenon exists, so I do not believe that reincarnation exists with persistant memories but just by pure happenstance I've never met someone who reincarnated.

That leaves /1, the statement that if reincarnation exists, we retain no memory whatsoever of our past lives.

If that is so, then the concept of reincarnation is meaningless. It simply -doesn't matter- that you "come back" as someone else, because in this life you have no confirmable knowledge that you will reincarnate, and in the next life, you retain no memories of this life, and thus -still- have no confirmable knowledge that you reincarnate.