Reincarnation

Never said it was perfect. Random collisions and chance meetings between souls result in information transfer.

 

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then its not clear what inherent difficulties you have with one soul discarding a body to enter another body.

 

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What difficulty is that? My skepticism?

 

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your skepticism doesn't seem to be based on logic, since there is no logical requirement for your scenario to rely on anything that the given scenario does not

 

Since people would prefer an unproven God entity over a conscious universe that you can actually touch then little reincarnation stories will perpetuate the feeling there's more going on then what's observed. Goodnight

 

strange

I wasn't aware how the discussion suddenly shifted to indicate issues for god's existence/nonexistence

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We've been down this road before and you came up with no answers. You are unlikely to do so now, so I'll leave you to it.

I asked whether you understand what it is to explain something because you clearly do not. You make a statement then, when asked what it means or how you came by such klnowledge, you make another unsupported statement and, for reasons beyond my comprehension, you believe you are engaged in a duscussion.

 

funnily enough, neither do you

ditto above

if you can't even adequately explain what you are, it tends to beg the question what is the value of any of your subsequent explanations

ditto above

 

Not what I intended. Wouldn't it be wonderful if reincarnation was true. It may be as natural as a fly on shit but I believe many people do or would associate it with souls which in turn are associated with deities. You know my stance on that.

 

I just thought it was strange that you would reassert your values out of context to the current discussion ....... in fact I still think it's strange .....

 

I'm just not as good as you are at changing the subject

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. Personally I was worried some people might have been taking me seriously.

 

I'll say

personally I would be worried if I thought anyone takes anyone else on sciforums seriously

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Wouldn't be any fun though. I'm glad some do take others seriously. Unfortunately more than a little animosity can result, the best debates contain wit and humor.

Anyway, enough of that shit, back to reincarnation. Maybe I missed it but why isn't anyone suggesting some kind of possession of a living person by the spirit, soul or essence of a dearly departed is taking place? It seems the most obvious solution or is it too Hollywood and not in vogue anymore?

 

sorry I don't understand your suggestion

 

Reincarnation is akin to demonic possession or along those lines.

 

so everyone is a demon?
or only those who indicate their previous incarnation?

 

I said akin, similar to. I can't remember the exact term for possession of a body by some wandering spirit or whatever. I'd google but that's cheating.

 

I often reincarnate.

 

lightgigantic, you said in the original post:

I'm not going to watch. I have dial-up and YouTube is a bitch to use on dial-up. Please explain what the skeptic said and how his or her words are logically fallacious. Please don't assume everyone interested in the discussion is capable of downloading more than 50 kilobits a second.

If scientists had found any noteworthy evidence that suggested reincarnation, I'm sure they would've written about it. They sure have had plenty of time to do so.

To be fair, we can't really say that reincarnation is impossible. Strictly, we have to be agnostic about it. We can only say that we're aware of no credible evidence in favor of it. In practice, however, we're justified in not believing in reincarnation.

It really depends on what you think of as heaven. One of the interesting things about ideas derived from religion is that, like religion, you can bend and twist it as you please.

Who knows. Judging from this thread, one will sometimes encounter a claim that humans aren't the only living things with souls, whatever those are.

As an interesting side note, put away the question of whether or not souls really do exist. Let's assume they do. Let's further assume that living things other than humans do have souls, that those souls do reincarnate, and that the host organism's species doesn't matter. Now think about the moral implications of this! Might we be able to argue, for example, that fishing and hunting are wrong when you kill something because killing is wrong? This rests on the warrant that all souls are equal in dignity and rights, but it's still interesting to think about.

I don't think life is supernatural. It happens in nature, and scientists have been able to describe it to a great degree. Logically, if something can be empirically observed and scientifically explained, that something is perfectly natural.

It's improbable that life was around from the very moment of the Big Bang. The building blocks thereof did form immediately, but it would have been a very long time before life could actually form. If there was no life when the universe came to be, and there's life now, that means the population of life in the universe has increased.

I believe that poster interpreted your post like this: "You think you're a reincarnated bug! How are we supposed to take whatever you say seriously?"

Interesting explanations, but is there proof for either? I realize you're a skeptic and you're possibly just coming up with random ideas and throwing them out there, which is good! But for others to read, I want to make clear that these explanations fall apart when you apply Occam's razor: We have no proof that reincarnation is possible, so these explanations beg the question. How can we know if these explanations are even close to the truth when reincarnation, on which they rely to be true itself, is in question?

What?!

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I'm a human. More specifically, I'm an organism whose genetic makeup matches that of a human, and whose body is charged with electricity. That electricity, combined with chemical reactions in ways unique to humans and possibly other animals, results in sentience and sapience.

Tell us more.

 

Athelwulf

The big bang remains more of a theory than a fact, what to speak of abiogenesis. There is just too much about it that is unknown to hold it as a reliable yard stick to which one can measure other claims

I think you missed the thrust of the question
It's unlikely that you were thinking like that when you were eight years old
And furthermore the idea that consciousness can be reduced to issues of chemical and electrical stimulation is another thing yet to be achieved in any sort of peer reviewed fashion

Dr. Carl Sagan



Carl Sagan was a noted scientist, teacher and skeptic.[23] Sagan was a founding member of a group that set out to debunk unscientific claims, and wrote the book The Demon-Haunted World in which he said that there were several areas in parapsychology which deserved serious study:

"At the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study: (1) that by thought alone humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers; (2) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive thoughts or images "projected" at them; and (3) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any way other than reincarnation. I pick these claims not because I think they're likely to be valid (I don't), but as examples of contentions that might be true."[24]

This is not to say that Carl Sagan believed in reincarnation, but he believed that reincarnation research should be taken more seriously [25] because to dismiss such research out of hand would be unscientific.

there is a staunch resistance to seriously investigate reincarnation - of course there is the romantic notion of the scientist being the staunch investigator of the truth, but in reality there are issues of funding, prestige, credibility and institution