Opinion of reincarnation

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's not something that would bother me. I've always prefered the 'fairness' of reincarnation over the once and done and eternal consequences alternative.

I would actually agree with this. As I think I've said before on this forum, I'm a member of a major mainstream monotheism (hey kids, alliteration is fun!) in spite of the heaven/hell setup, not because of it.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Obviously I can't disprove it, but there are nearly 8 billion humans alive today, so if there are 8 billion souls or more, we must have had long waiting periods between lives for most of human history when global populations were much lower.

Traditional/orthodox Buddhist and Hindu cosmology posits enough other universes, previous universes, other forms of life one can be reincarnated as, and (in some schools) time between incarnations, that worrying about the number of mindstreams that are incarnated as humans at any one time isn't really at issue. In the "pop" belief in reincarnation one sees around, where you have a certain number of past lives all of whom were human and all of whom were either conceived or born at the moment the previous one died, the Carlin "inflation of souls" thing is, yes, more of a concern.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

This take actually got a lot more interesting to read as it went on.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Sounds like hell to me.

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

This is a very doomerish position for a convinced atheist and materialist to take. I prefer afleitch's observation (which he gets from Socrates) that, if there's no afterlife, his situation after he dies will be identical to his situation before he was born and thus nothing to worry about.

Hell, if it is a myth, was probably invented to make people feel better about tyrants and abusers prospering while they're alive, not because people thought it was somehow a preferable fate to cessation of consciousness at death.