I have a question for those of you who believe in reincarnation.

in religion •  8 years ago 

If you are a terrible person you will end up as a lesser being in your next life. So let's just say you end up as a dung beetle for living a crappy life as a human. How would you then be a "good" dung beetle to increase your karma to become human again? I am perplexed.

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By making bigger balls of shit?

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

Shit - this is the fertilizer
fertilizer - it is a lot of food
a lot of food - the presence of many people's happiness.

By not smelling too bad ?

Isnt the real question that if we are good in a past life then you come back as a higher being, then we must all have been great people in our past life to come back as humans?

Either that or humans aren't the higher order beings we thought we were....

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

Well first of all, the Karma concept is different from the final judgement in western religions. There isn't a creator or omnipotent entity that tallies up your deeds and determine which animal you turn into. Karma simply describes a causal-effect relationship. Your thoughts and habits (cause) tend to sway you do things a certain way (effect) which leads to some outcome (good or bad). That outcome becomes the new cause for the next effect. So Karma describes this continuous chain of cause and effect.

At the time of death, the Karmic forces are still active. A person's thoughts and nature carries on into the next life. During the transition the karmic forces could steer a being to select one life form over another based on their inclinations. So think of Karma as a force of attraction or similarity and not a form of reward/punishment for good/bad deeds.

There's also ancestral karma as well as individual karma.

I think of it like a bank account.

Additionally, accrual of any karma causes reincarnation.

I think if you do believe in reicartion, then maybe bieng a dung beetle is a sort of punishment, then you get to be a butterfly, a mouse, a cat, a horse, a dolphin (hmmmm) and so on till you are human again

If humans have increased in population from thousands to billions, in some cases replacing larger animals ( dinosaurs) where do the extra souls come from? Was there a big queue waiting to be born? What happens when the queue is exhausted?

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

These are unaccountable as we don't know how many total life forms there are to begin with, such as number of bacteria or even alien life forms. There isn't a requirement that you can only reincarnate back to Earth.

Well, from a strictly logical standpoint, the fact alone that we came to be in the first place is an argument for reincarnation. Because if life happened once, than the precedent is set and so there is a chance that it could happen again, and also that it might have happened before. It is not a proof, but it is a reason to consider reincarnation as a possibility. We have cyccles of life in nature. So maybe there is some bigger cycle. There is no way for telling how would that work though. Without being able to apply some science, it is all guesswork from here. Altough I sometimes wish that reincarnatian and the idea of karma was as popular as other religions. If people believed they could return here some day reincarnated in a poor family living in a slum, there's a chance they would be working to make the world a better place for everybody and not just for the rich. Just a thought :)

When I lived in New Orleans I did see a lot of evidence for reincarnation because there are a lot of cockroaches down there. Which leads me to wonder how good of a cockroach would you have to be to come back as something better and how bad of a cockroach would you have to be to come back as something worse? Also, what is worse than a cockroach, maybe a maggot? And how good of a maggot would you have to be when you grew up? Would you have to be a fly that only ate garbage and not one that ate poop? Yeah, an explanation would help.

The Upanishads teach that whatever you desire in death is what you will come back seeking. The idea you pay for your past life in your next life is more of a western ideal than an eastern.

You should check out this lecture by Manly. P Hall (RIP) about reincarnation.