Opinion of reincarnation

[John Dule]

I don’t really get why people have such a hard time believing there is nothing after death (or rather I do - it’s out of fear of non-existence - but it is irrational). What do you think you were doing for the eternity before you were conceived?

Well, it's objectively a scary thought. The question is whether you're strong enough to confront it head-on or if you're so terrified that you have to invent an intermediary through which to tackle that fear.

[John Dule]

I don't think fear of non-existence can explain the popularity of belief in either an afterlife or reincarnation. Cosmodicy, is a far likelier explanation. Why is there apparently no justice in this life? It's dealt with in the next, and there's no particular requirement that we be able to remember our prior lives or interact with our prior plane of existence for the issue of cosmodicy to be resolved, unlike with the fear of non-existence.

I don't know... the more I've thought about it, the more I've come to believe that religion is an ingenious trick of evolution. DNA clearly exists to replicate itself and to pass itself on in future generations, and through mutation it finds more efficient ways of doing so. Heightened intelligence in an organism (such as humans) is clearly an excellent advantage for self-replication, but the problem is that humans are so intelligent that, unlike other species, we're capable of unraveling these sorts of mysteries and figuring out just how meaningless life is. So in order to prevent us from becoming purely nihilistic, nature has given us instincts to believe in things outside of the material world.

[John Dule]

I don't think fear of non-existence can explain the popularity of belief in either an afterlife or reincarnation. Cosmodicy, is a far likelier explanation. Why is there apparently no justice in this life? It's dealt with in the next, and there's no particular requirement that we be able to remember our prior lives or interact with our prior plane of existence for the issue of cosmodicy to be resolved, unlike with the fear of non-existence.

I don't know... the more I've thought about it, the more I've come to believe that religion is an ingenious trick of evolution. DNA clearly exists to replicate itself and to pass itself on in future generations, and through mutation it finds more efficient ways of doing so. Heightened intelligence in an organism (such as humans) is clearly an excellent advantage for self-replication, but the problem is that humans are so intelligent that, unlike other species, we're capable of unraveling these sorts of mysteries and figuring out just how meaningless life is. So in order to prevent us from becoming purely nihilistic, nature has given us instincts to believe in things outside of the material world.

Throw in very vague words about “specific definitions of belief and divinity” at the end and you’re basically Jordan Peterson.

I thought Peterson was an actual Christian though. Regardless, if you think this is bad I should tell you my thoughts on Nietzsche's eternal recurrence sometime.

[John Dule]

Regardless, if you think this is bad I should tell you my thoughts on Nietzsche's eternal recurrence sometime.

I can't speak for Kingpoleon, but I'd like to hear those thoughts.

Well, I think Nietzsche might've stumbled upon something that has logical credibility with that thought experiment. The concept of a prime mover is a problem both in religious philosophy (who created God?) and in secular materialistic worldviews (what caused the first cause/Big Bang?). This is an especially big problem for me given that I'm a determinist; if you think that causality is all that there is, the idea of an "uncaused cause" is pretty much devastating to your worldview. However, I think it's possible that there is some sort of deterministic loop that routinely creates the exact same universe over again, through infinite Big Bangs and Big Crunches. This removes the necessity for a "prime mover" in a literal sense, because everything will both cause and be caused by the same events. If this were true, that would mean that the exact molecules constituting your body will break down into atoms, then be diffused throughout the universe, then crunched into a dense pocket of matter, then released in another cosmic explosion, and then ultimately reunited when the loop plays back on itself. Your exact body will be reformed in exactly the same way, and you will have to live your life over again in exactly the same manner for all eternity. This is exactly like Nietzsche's eternal return of the same, just with an unfathomably large gap of time between incarnations.

Anyway, I don't believe this in a literal sense, but it would neatly solve the biggest issue with determinism, which is why I was thinking about it in the first place.

[John Dule]

Sounds like hell to me.

Hell is preferable to an eternity of nonexistence, which is probably why we invented that myth to begin with.