Reincarnation... could my theory be true???

Question

Basically.... i was raised as a Christian, but now i am confused. my theory... "something inside us makes us alive.- fact (whether it is energy or simply a soul, but we are alive and plastic bottle isnt.) When we die our body gets broken down... our essence of life, as it were, must go somewhere. and if it were our energy it goes into different beings and can never dissapear. Therefore what stops our soul being passed on in some way?" please argue against this from a christian, or even scientific point of view.

Answer 1

My theory is that our essence gets broken down into small pieces after we die, and then each small piece will combine with the small fragments of the other dead people's essence to form a complete new soul, so everyone's soul is like a pastiche of the essences of people in the past.

Answer 2

Hmm what do you mean by alive, in the terms of vs a plastic bottle? Because we can think? Move? Feel? That would be our brain, lovely little thing that it is :) But even then you have to think what about people in comas or some organisms who who do really think or feel? And plants they are alive.

Personally I am a pantheist. Thinking of the building blocks of the universe and everything within it. Everything from us to that plastic bottle are made up of the very same things. I believe in this energy (energy for lack of a better word) that is within everything and everyone.

I do believe in a type of reincarnation. I view it that this energy is like an endless ocean of water and everything is like a drop of water. We do not die our body does, our energy doesn't it can not cease to exist, it just merges with the whole until it is time for it to take the shape of something new.

Answer 3

Think of it from a 'what you do know and can prove' point of view

Firstly you have lived in three different places for sure. Firstly inside your father as spermatazoa in the first instance. So what is the male production process of spermatazoa? You would have been a mixture of the genetic cellular activity within your father, so in essence you lived within another person, your father.

Secondly - you were carried by your mother. However you were a very fortunate spermatazoa to have made it through as the one that fertilised the egg. But what happened to the rest who didn't? They were simply discarded and broken down to join the elements again. The very elements that support life in the first place!

Third you lived with your mum for 9 months and then entered your third universe, the world as you now know it.

You have no recollection of life in your father, yet another life was waiting for you, you have no recollection of living with your mother for 9 months in the womb, but another world was waiting for you.

The probabilities are therefore stacked heavily in your favour that other worlds are waiting for you, its happened twice already!

In the same way that you didn't know that this was true when you were spermatazoa, or a foetus, sure enough there was another different world waiting.

The frustration is that we simply don't know what the next different world is. What becomes of our changed atomic structure? We are a part of the universe and nature recycles everything! You will be something, as you were before you lived within your fathers testes, its just that you cannot remember what.

However that led to life!

Seems probable to me that it will over and over again.

Answer 4

You are assuming there is a "soul" that exists separately from your body. What makes us alive are all the biological processes that a plastic bottle does not possess ;)

Yes when we die our "energy" is dissipated first as heat, as our body grows cold. Then if the body is not enbalmed, bacteria, bugs, mold etc can use us as food... eventually breaking us back down to our basic elements, if it goes into the ground it may fertilize plants, etc.

You are thinking of "energy" as some mystical thing, when it's really a simple physical fact.

Your "essence of life" survives in the memories of those who have known you and in the things you have created during your life.

Answer 5

One cannot 'argue' this point of view, it is a 'feeling' that people either believe or don't. Certainly not from a scientific point of view can it be "proved" or even argued that our souls or essences survive death.
Personally, I think it does one no harm to believe it and can be comforting. It is very hard indeed to accept the idea that one simply ceases to exist, and it can be quite frightening to confront the idea of "death", or ceasing to be. What harm does it do to want to believe that we do have some kind of life after death?
If , when you die, you should find out there is no such thing, you will be unaware of it, and there will be nobody to ask for a refund.
Grim humour, but be honest......you just won't know until you kick the bucket.

Answer 6

The scientific view isn't clear cut on the existence of soul. Most scientists do in fact deny that any non-physical soul exists but there has been research that suggests something in the nature of an electro-magnetic field exists within but not as part of the human body so perhaps this is scientific evidence of the soul.

Answer 7

When has it been established that there is an 'essence of life' that 'must' go somewhere? When has it been established that there is a 'soul' to be 'passed on'?
As your statement consists of nothing but unsupported speculation, there can not really be a scientific argument for or against it, other than to invoke the law of parsimony.

There is no shred of empirical evidence that anything survives death, I'm afraid!

Answer 8

I can't argue from either of the views you're looking for. I can, however, suggest some of my own thinking on the nature of the Soul.

Spirit is not really a finite thing, nor is it directly equivilent to energy. Rather, Spirit can be said to be an abstracted flow of energy within a biological system. Our spirit is that aspect of us that is emergent from the series of complex interactions of the various components within us.

Now, it is my view that the Spirit is not an entirely internal thing. As everything in this reality interacts with other things, we are in turn affected by others, and our spirits experience a degree of exchange of their own. You could, if you like, consider our society and world themselves to have effective spirits. In any case, a human soul is never entirely present within one being. As we interact with others, the abstraction of "Soul" must widen. Over time, that which could be reasonably considered "my spirit" is in fact present in all of the other people I have met and interacted with, just as theirs is in me.

However, this is all just a way of looking at things. My own body retains much of its energy regardless of whether or not it distributes it among itself, and doubtless many aspects of my "spirit" will remain vaguely coherent as my own matter spreads into other bodies and living things, interacting just as it did within mine.

Answer 9

The "soul", as an epiphenomenon of the brain, ceases to exist when the brain shuts down. Its like the hole in the donut. When you finish eating the donut, the hole has vanished. You think of the soul as something "extra", or over and above the body, but this thesis has no empirical basis. Presently, all of the data of consciousness are coded for in brain adaptations acquired through the course of ones life, were this consciousness to continue, it would need a new coding medium in which to inhere. Such a feat would be possible, but would require trans-mundane technology or supernatural effort.

Answer 10

Scientific point of view: there is no physical soul. After you die, your body decomposes naturally and is swept up in the organic matter of the Earth.

What you have posited is a semantic theory, and not a scientific theory.