To quote Contrapoints: the wheel of samsara is my stomping ground.
Not sure I care much about a test that passes Mao and Mother Theresa and fails Hitler and Kurt Cobain.
I guess it depends on what outcome you were hoping for.
Now that is a proper shower thought.
I’m not sure I like the analogy here. Why would a teacher let a student retake a test they walked out on without finishing? It’s one thing to fail, and try again, but you have to complete the test first.
They didn’t walk out. It’s just how they chose to complete the test. Nobody fails.
I like to think that if reincarnation is real, the reason it can’t be verified is because the universe is so vast, the likelihood of reincarnating as something on Earth is super miniscule. Even if you could only come back as something intelligent like a human, if there are other intelligent life forms in the universe, the odds of coming back as a human on Earth would be super small.
I’ll offer this (even though I fully believe life is prevalent in the universe): Who says you have to be reincarnated in chronological order? You could be reincarnated a dinosaur. A microbe in the primordial soup. A lizard 100 years from now. An armored fish.
So the odds of landing on “human” are pretty small.
If microbes were in play for reincarnation, their sheer numbers would make it almost inevitable that you’d reincarnate as one
Does anything say you have to be a higher life form?
I once showerly thought that reincarnation could not even be tied to entities that we would consider sapient. A bit like Leibniz’idea of a monad.
For instance over could be trapped for millennia as a copper atom, solidified in an asteroid. So when you get to be in an animal form it is something fantastically rare and wonderful. And when you get a human body is the most exhilarating thing ever!
If more people were too believe that, life wouldn’t be treated with the disdain we often put on it.
This made me think of a movie I really enjoy called Wristcutters: A Love Story
Added this one to my watch-list. Thanks. This is the kind of stuff I scroll Lemmy for!
Its a very good strange movie. The odd music was very addictive when i first watched it as a teenager.
Never heard of it! Will check it out. Ty 4 the recommendation!
This is an incredible film. It’s probably a 9/10 or 10/10 for me.
I watched it again last night and it was still as good as I remember.
With no tutelage whatsoever
Okay but what if our souls only have a finite lifespan. You pull the reset trigger and gotta start all over, but now you only have 20 years left.
- Cool idea for a book or a movie
- Club 27 resolution
- Unreleased X-Files episode
- Stillbirth and early neonatal deaths theoretical explanation
One of the book series I really liked is “Odd Thomas”, and a recurring theme is this life is boot camp for the challenges you’ll face in the next. This showerthought is right in line with that: clearly some people need to repeat boot camp
OP, why is suicide the only way to fail? Rape, murder, torture, those all receive passing scores?
Suicide is more like not turning up to the exam and taking it later.
this is stupid
I think this is true. I’m curious how you came to this particular question. Did you try?
Well presumably there are a finite number of souls since the celestial powers that be fight over them and there is not much point in fighting over an infinite resource in a domain that is outside of our sense of time.
Which would mean that as earth time goes on the population would be more and more those that commit suicide. Introverts and depressed people. Might explain some of the data we are seeing.
I mean yes, but it wouldn’t explain population growth
That depends on how time works. Could be a single soul/consciousness experiencing every single life one after another (or simultaneously; who knows what we’re capable of if there’s more to us than just these bodies).
100 billion humans have lived so far. Maybe the souls got sent into storage?
“Shit this one was so lonely it killed itself early”
“Hey I got an idea let’s keep it away until there are a lot more people around. That way it won’t be so lonely. It will have some friends”
In a long enough timeline the world will have a 10s of billions of people with an average density of Hong Kong full of the most introverted depressed humans of all time. On the bright side those humans won’t fear hell
This is why my Buddhist ass isn’t a very good Buddhist lol. I appreciate the parts that help get through life, but the whole thing falls apart at the random cruelty of the universe and the non-random cruelty of humanity.
Ascribing any purpose to all of the suffering/stress of living is, frankly, bullshit in any religion. I don’t blame people for clinging to karma as an idea to explain such things, any more than I blame the whole “God’s plan” principle when things are theistic more directly. People sometimes need a pretty lie to get through the next horrible thing.
But I don’t, and can’t buy into it. To believe that any structure or entity would do the things that happen just as natural phenomena would drive me insane trying to find a way to destroy it. That’s not covering the fact that humans do even worse things, regularly, and that’s an even bigger sign of any intelligence of the universe being a cruel and hopeless monster.
Arguably Siddharth’s concept of karma was more of a physics thing than a moral thing. He made friends with the low of society and talked smack about the priestly caste. Believing in rebirth and at the same time not accepting that punishment here is for sins of the last lifetime.
Karma is deed done. If I break your farm you don’t have food. That’s karma. That doesn’t mean I get punished for what I did that doesn’t mean you get a reward to make up for it.
