lightgigantic, you said in the original post:
watch the spontaneous logical fallacy escape from the lips of the accredited skeptic
I'm not going to watch. I have dial-up and YouTube is a bitch to use on dial-up. Please explain what the skeptic said and how his or her words are logically fallacious. Please don't assume everyone interested in the discussion is capable of downloading more than 50 kilobits a second.
stuff ike this has been around for quite a while, its a shame scientists haven't come out with detailed evidence on a more public scale - the only when for the general body of the population to hear about this stuff is through tv programs - which obviously arouses certain suspicions.
If scientists had found any noteworthy evidence that suggested reincarnation, I'm sure they would've written about it. They sure have had plenty of time to do so.
The concept might make entire sense, but when you think about ... it you start to say "how the hell does this exist?" And you get down to, eventually, "it can't exist. There is no proof. There is no evidence. There is nothing to show for."
To be fair, we can't really say that reincarnation is impossible. Strictly, we have to be agnostic about it. We can only say that we're aware of no credible evidence in favor of it. In practice, however, we're justified in not believing in reincarnation.
If we are all reincarnate, with or without memory of past lives, then is it unreasonable to assume heaven does not exist or maybe heaven is overcrowded and a few souls spill out now and then?
It really depends on what you think of as heaven. One of the interesting things about ideas derived from religion is that, like religion, you can bend and twist it as you please.
PsychoticEpisode said:
Also, whose past lives did the first humans possess?
Who knows. Judging from this thread, one will sometimes encounter a claim that humans aren't the only living things with souls, whatever those are.
As an interesting side note, put away the question of whether or not souls really do exist. Let's assume they do. Let's further assume that living things other than humans do have souls, that those souls do reincarnate, and that the host organism's species doesn't matter. Now think about the moral implications of this! Might we be able to argue, for example, that fishing and hunting are wrong when you kill something because killing is wrong? This rests on the warrant that all souls are equal in dignity and rights, but it's still interesting to think about.
Maybe the only thing in this universe that's supernatural is life itself.
I don't think life is supernatural. It happens in nature, and scientists have been able to describe it to a great degree. Logically, if something can be empirically observed and scientifically explained, that something is perfectly natural.
what sources are you calling upon to say that the population is increasing?
i doubt you can fathom how many living entities there are in your house (microbes, bugs, etc) let alone the universe, much less the trends of planetary placement and population
It's improbable that life was around from the very moment of the Big Bang. The building blocks thereof did form immediately, but it would have been a very long time before life could actually form. If there was no life when the universe came to be, and there's life now, that means the population of life in the universe has increased.
You use words you do not understand. What I said was NOT an ad hom: I was merely addressing LG in the manner he had described himself. If my argument is to be construed as an ad hom, then you must show that LG was never a bug in any of his incarnations. Can you do so ?
I believe that poster interpreted your post like this: "You think you're a reincarnated bug! How are we supposed to take whatever you say seriously?"
Two easy explanations for soul believers:
Interesting explanations, but is there proof for either? I realize you're a skeptic and you're possibly just coming up with random ideas and throwing them out there, which is good! But for others to read, I want to make clear that these explanations fall apart when you apply Occam's razor: We have no proof that reincarnation is possible, so these explanations beg the question. How can we know if these explanations are even close to the truth when reincarnation, on which they rely to be true itself, is in question?
You didn't know this but mass extinction epochs on Earth usually occur when souls go in to upload and reprogram.
What?!
well who are you?
(meaning you have a sense of self that is continuous and is not affected by changes of the corporeal self, so who are you, or where are you?)
I'm a human. More specifically, I'm an organism whose genetic makeup matches that of a human, and whose body is charged with electricity. That electricity, combined with chemical reactions in ways unique to humans and possibly other animals, results in sentience and sapience.
Tell us more.