Rebirth: Do Turds Dream of Sheep?
Ignore the silly title above. I was gonna call it "Do Turds Dream of Shit". It's just a vague allusion to the possibility that shit might get reborn (as yet more shit), just as human souls allegedly do. After all, why should our souls be so precious, so special, so invaluable that they can't simply end up on some Grand Soul Pile with the rest of the garbage? Why are we any better or more important than turds? Who says turds don't have souls?
Be kind to your excrement, whenever you flush it down... It's your "daily brown child". The least you can do is flush it away with love, or at least respect.
Anyway, enough of the bullshit... On to serious business.
Before I get to the explanation though... Reincarnation is in its essence a very silly concept, as most highly optimistic ideas are. It is a Disneyland version of the cycle of life and death, complete with even a variety of cute animals one could end up as.
"Bambi? Maybe I'll be reborn as Bambi. Or Dumbo. I wanna have big ears and fly around. A gremlin? They're such fun! Maybe even a dinosaur - but only a cute one like the ones in cartoons. Yoda even? Why not? Life is Disneyland."
Yes, it is Disneyland to sheltered morons, the very lucky few, and to hopeless optimists.
Why worry about anything when you know you'll be eternally recycled like a Pepsi can? So quaint. Problem solved. If only.
Why would anyone/anything even need to recycle humans? What purpose could this possible serve?
Answer: "God moves in mysterious ways."
Ah, yes: the all-purpose cop-out. A truly eternal thing, this "answer", guaranteed to be recycled forever - or at least as long as humans defile this goofy universe.
There is also a blatant numerical inconsistency that I believe is never brought up... It leads to a bunch of new problems with this Swiss-cheese theory:
If every "soul" gets recycled into infinity, then how does this explain mankind's exploding population? Do we get an influx of "new souls" in every generation, every year? Who is producing these new souls? Where and why? For what reason isn't the number of souls/people consistent throughout the ages? If these newly created souls exist then wouldn't that imply that all souls were created at some point? If so, when was this starting point? Why this particular starting point? Why not earlier or later? The implication that souls have a starting point means that each of us (or some of us?) has had a period when we didn't exist, our "pre-recycling" stage.
If mankind were to undergo a major cataclysm such as a huge asteroid collision, and the Earth population went down, wouldn't this mean that a bunch of these allegedly "indestructible" souls have been destroyed? Or perhaps they are being kept in a large cosmic freezer where they await a new reincarnation?
Do frozen souls dream of sheep? Do they dream at all? Are they alive while awaiting a new body? Are they busy doing exercises? Playing video-games? Or do these extra souls get sent to distant planets until Earth's population goes up again? Do they go into alien or human bodies? Are there regular "soul-exchanges" of this sort between worlds?
Since sex creates new humans, does the sperm or the egg contain the soul? Or is the soul added afterwards? If so - when? If it's added later and not immediately - why? By whom?
Do the sperm and the egg both contain halves of each soul? If so, what happens to all the soul-sperm that ends up on walls, on women's faces and in handkerchiefs? Does the soul escape the unsuccessful sperm right at the moment when a sperm is doomed not to hit the egg? If so, where does it escape to? Is it bitterly disappointed - or is it glad it won't be reborn as Sean Penn's offspring?
If a soul is handed to an individual only after the infancy, does that mean that babies are soul-less? (That would certainly explain their animalist "me me me" selfishness.)
So yeah, bullshit theories such as reincarnation tend to elicit a flood of (goofy) questions which help obliterate the theory, exposing its numerous flaws and absurdities.
So why is reincarnation utter bullshit?
It's very simple: memories. What makes up a person is primarily their memories, i.e. the sum of all their experiences and knowledge acquired throughout their life - even if these memories were artificially implanted, as in Blade Runner; a robot with artificial memories and self-awareness is the same as us, basically. You take those memories away and start anew with new memories and experiences - and you are basically rebooted: a new person. Someone else, in other words. You can't be this new person and your old self at the same time.
Soul shmoul.
Forget the soul. What we are isn't some elusive undefinable "soul". What counts is the part of our brain that contains all the past events that formed us. Our DNA too; because if reincarnation exists then genetics has zero value or meaning in our development - but this clearly isn't the case. DNA doesn't "just" define our gender, race and size i.e. our physical traits: it has a say in our personality too. Yet, if each individual soul is just one eternal being that merely shifts from body to body, then the soul's personality needs to remain the same. And if it does that, this means genetics has no influence: it is there merely as useless biological "decoration", serving as a sort of lie, a way to further deceive us. (But if we're being deceived, why use genetics, which was very hard to "stumble" upon in the first place?) On the other hand, if this "eternally recycled soul" does keep changing its personality then is it really the same person from one life to the next? Of course not. Completely new memories, new experiences and a new personality?
A new person.
If the soul existed, by definition it would have to be permanently intertwined with all our experiences. It isn't. Nobody has any memories of themselves as a caveman or a knight. Nobody sane at least... (More on Shirley later.)
Without our memories we are not who we are - or in this case, who we were. If after death we start from scratch then we are no longer the same person we were in the previous life. Tabula rasa crushes the reincarnation theory like the Bambi joke that it is. You can't have your cake and eat it too: you can't have a completely new life with new memories, a new body and a new personality - yet claim to be the same person.
Take dementia and Alzheimers, for example. People in close contact with sufferers of these afflictions report how they can barely recognize the person they once knew, sometimes going as far as to describe them as "a completely different person", or "a changed person". It could be argued that amnesiacs of this sort have become new persons.
Now imagine that kind of "deletion" but as a "deletion of all files", a 100% rebooting of the system, not just partial deletion as in dementia.
When you reboot your computer after changing the Windows system on it, the only thing that still connects the "old" machine with the new is the hardware. But, as we know, hardware isn't what makes a computer the great machine that it is. It's the type of software you install that defines the machine: the way it will work, its quirks and foibles. Not a great analogy, but hey: I'm not an IT expert, not even close. Besides, in rebirth the "hardware" changes too.
The reincarnation theory offers the laughable prospect of giving you a new body, a new life, a new brain, new memories, new everything - yet promises you that new life. As if it would be truly yours.
It can't be. It couldn't be. It would be a totally new life completely independent and separate from you. Just as a clone of you would not ensure your continuation: it's kind of similar to that. A clone is just a copy of you, a copy that doesn't extend your life by even a second. Not to mention that a rebooting of the life system wouldn't even be remotely close even to a cloning. Hence life-recycling in the "spiritual" sense cannot exist, only in a biological/physical sense - which would be completely useless to us.
Even if Shirley's idiotic fantasy tales were true, this would beg the question: why does only a tiny minority of all reborn people have memories of their past lives? By logic, reincarnation should be possible for everyone equally, or at least based on some "fair cosmic laws" about the virtuous deserving reincarnation as opposed to the wicked.
However, that in turn would beg the question: why the hell would a self-infatuated, virtue-signaling, egotistical idiot such as Shirley get the benefit of reincarnation? The cosmos and its gods prefer wickedness and stupidity?
Not to mention that whatever Shirley says or believes is nearly always the opposite of the truth. Isn't she a bloody retarded liberal? Yup, she is. So the fact that Shirley believes in rebirth may just be the most convincing argument that it's bullshit. Because when is the last time liberals were correct about anything?
Yeah, it's totally bullshit. I've pondered this myself since my early-teens; made me anxious at one point to try and do something worthwhile with my life (while i had it), which ended up with me making dozens of stupid decisions.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of a soul existing is just as bogus as that of the claim that there's a god (the two go hand-in-hand). Makes no sense; no proof whatsoever. It's just what people tell themselves to make themselves feel comfortable against the ultimate unknown, and especially so the religious types can feel better believing that limiting themselves of various joys of life was worth it. Coz wouldn't it be utterly crushing to subject yourself to the (often ridiculous) rules of some religion, only to realise that it was all bullshit and you wasted your only chance at existence being a mindless sheep?
All said: what are your thoughts on "cellular memory"? I find it interesting hearing stories of people who've received organ transplants from donors, and hearing how their personalities supposedly change. There was a case where a donor shot themselves in the head, then their recipient offed themselves the exact same way later.
People (very understandably) tend to get very hung up on the fact that "there is just this one chance", which turns them into hyper-active lunatics (especially young people, I suppose), trying to cram as much activity into their lives. Others realize that there is no winning against the passage of time so they become inactive, despondent, smoke weed in order to indulge their hedonistic nature and to escape. Many don't ever even think about it, since most people don't analyze or think as a general rule.
DeleteFunny that you should mention "wasting your only chance at existence". My next post has partly to do with that. Or to be more precise, about what each life means within what we perceive as eternity. I've reached an interesting conclusion. It'll be posted probably in early December.
This cellular memory business is something I'd only vaguely heard about here and there. It sounds like rubbish to be honest. I am no geneticist, but the notion that a piece of someone else's flesh (or whatever) invading your body makes you change your behaviour as a copy of that person sounds like Ed Wood science. Besides, why would for example ONE liver dominate your entire "body" i.e. take over your personality - when that "invading flesh" still makes up only a small % of your entire body mass i.e. DNA? Just from the standpoint of (dis)proportion and percentage this theory makes no sense. As for reports of people doing this or that while under the influence of foreign DNA, the internet is so full of lies these days, these sound more like urban myths than actual examples of real events.
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on such a topic, there're so many ways you can entertain it: how does it affect your views on abortion? How about the (terribly) disabled, is it truly kind to let them live through their hampered (and most-often painful) lives? How about hunting, even if for sport? Etc. I've gone through this thought-train before as well, back when i was one of those (depressed) lunatics. Now, i like to think that it's given me a whole new appreciation for my life - coinciding with the fact that 'life' itself is a "miracle". I'm not religious, but i feel i can sympathise with those pagans who treat every life (and rock, i guess) as something "sacred" - and not to be callously disregarded for your own frivolous, selfish needs.
DeleteIt does sound pretty nonsensical, i suppose; at the time of writing that comment i just heard of that last story related to the concept and i thought it'd be an interesting bit to think about over my conceived ideas of consciousness. I've never delve into the subject of cellular memory before (surprisingly), but i do know that the human mind is a fickle (and fragile) thing that could betray it's host at any moments notice. Heard of Cotard Delusion? Or Alien Hand Syndrome? These sorts of conditions do make cellular memory seem somewhat plausible, in that it could be a reaction from the brain upon sensing that the body's been 'altered', though what i'm theorising doesn't really lend to the idea of cells (or organs) having memory - but more of the mind itself freaking out over foreign implants.