Jul242006
Reincarnating Again
Out of all the possible afterlife theories, reincarnation used to be my favorite. From ages 8-12. I was recently reminded in a debate of the wonders of recycling the “soul”. Sounds extremely selfish, right? Where are all the souls coming from if the planet is getting more and more populated? Its interesting when I’ve been told passed lives (or heard someone else’s), you’re always something great and never just a chamber maid who didn’t do much and died. At least it is better than that heaven/hell theory.
Would anyone really have wanted to live during any other time than now?
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One of the technical problems with reincarnation is that there are more people alive today than have ever died. :-O
Actually, the belief that ‘there are more people alive today than have ever died’ is simply not true. If we assume that the average lifespan throughout history was between 40 and 50 years (and for much of history it was actually a lot less – like 30), and if we also assume that humanity (homo sapiens) has been around for 100,000 years (a conservative estimate to say the least), plus taking into consideration estimates by historians and demographers that the earth in 1820 had one billion people, in 1920 2 billion and so on, then take into consideration that the current population is just over 6 billion (don’t have an exact figure, but then again who does?) – well, anyway, my point is that this has all been worked out, and as it turns out the number of people who are calculated to have died thus far exceeds the number who are alive today (by a very wide margin). Which makes perfect sense when you think about it, because even the people who were alive just as recently as the year 1900 are all dead now (with a few rare exceptions of course). The population in 1900 was approximately 1.8 to 2 billion, so there you already have one quarter of the current figure. The world total a couple of generations or so before this (let’s say between 1830 and 1850) would have been about 1.4 to 1.5 billion, and they (the vast majority anyway) would have been dead by 1900 – remember life expectancies were MUCH lower than it is today – about 50 years if you were lucky in 1850.
All of this is beside the point anyway if it is reincarnation that you are trying to discredit, because (and this must be really obvious to anyone who has seriously thought about it), if we assume that reincarnation is real (and I’m not saying that it is), then logic would necessarily dictate that there are many individuals who are in their very first incarnation. That is, they have never lived before, this is their first life. After all, the process has to begin somewhere, at some point in time. So this ‘technical problem’ is nothing of the sort, it is an imaginary problem.