Is reincarnation the only "fair" belief system outlining human existence?

[Jody]

When I ask myself why I believe in reincarnation, and struggle to be honest with myself, I must admit a huge part of it is the fact that I don't see the alternatives as being "fair."

When sweet, lovable children die in squalor of horrible diseases and rich, unpleasant wretches live long comfortable lives ... it's really painful for me to contemplate that there's nothing more behind this than chance.

I don't think I could function as an atheist. My life has been too difficult for me to keep pushing on without the hope of a just and loving Universe, with an agenda far exceeding my own feeble understanding, that can explain and justify the readily apparent travesties of the world.

The conventional reading of Christianity doesn't cut it for me. If we all only have one life, and whether or not you get to heaven hinges on whether or not you accept Christ as your personal savior, doesn't that naturally favor people born to Christian parents, in Christian nations, and whether or not you were born before or after Jesus lived? That's not fair ...

 

[Truthseeker]

Jody, I could not agree more. These are all things that I wrestled with for years as a practicing Christian. I could not understand what would be just about someone like the Dalai Lama, who is such a holy and spiritual person, going to hell because he did not accept Jesus as his personal savior. I did not understand a child dying in infancy and that being their only shot at life for all eternity. I could not accept a certain people or religion being chosen and by God and placed above all others. It seemed to me that life was like the lottery and salvation was the luck of the draw. It wasn't until I discovered reincarnation that the pieces to the puzzle started to fit together. Not to mention it explained all the fears, phobias, deja vus, talents, and feels of nastalgia that had no source in this life.

 

[Nightrain]

As a boy growing up in Detroit, I remember the morbid curiosity that my friends and I shared when looking upon one of the many small animals that would lay crushed at curbside along the busy bus route at the end of our street. Years later I observed with distant emotion the dead and mangled bodies of people caught in war. Somehow, the specialness of being human no longer seemed appropriate, and life, itself, took on a whole new meaning. I lost my faith there, and no longer believed in miracles of any kind, because being spared seemed more like a curse than a special favor from God.


I have, since, rediscovered life as something that cannot be interrupted by death. And, I've included all living things as co participants in this eternal dance. But, until discovering Dr. Ian Stevenson and the many cases of children remembering past lives I still had doubts that were the result of our materialist culture. And the study of reincarnation alone was not enough to diminish those doubts. It seems one must survey the history of the world along with all of its mythical, religious and cultural beginnings in order to discover all of the possible options.


Science, as I see it, is only one more paradigm among many, and it is already failing to offer a realistic picture. It seems to me that reincarnation along with its psi components offer the only acceptable model of existence that there can be; and this is regardless of how fair it seems to be. Being fair is only a wonderful side benefit, but it is still dependent upon what we view as unfair or unjust. Some people still find it hard to rationalize the loss of loved ones, even within the model of reincarnation. In some ways, reincarnation is still a harsh and difficult way to exist. Some skeptics feel that the belief is a result of wishful thinking, but nothing could be further from the truth. Reincarnation is about challenges, which can often feel impossible to overcome.

 

[Truthseeker]

It's hard for me not to view things in terms of unfair and unjust when relating it to the punishment/reward system of spiritual belief that I was raised with. Eternity is a mighty long time, and it seems that from the traditional Christian angle the rules of the game rely so much on variables that often are out of our control.


Beyond that I feel like reincarnation allows the completion of the process of the entire human experience. When I think of it in terms of the size of the planet, variation of people that inhabit it, and the historical timeline that has and will exist long into the future, my existance in this life is not even a speck of dust in the totality of the human experience. It is impossible to understand life and the world we live in in one lifetime. Not even close. The gender we are assigned in the womb will automatically guarantee to deny us 50% of the human experience before we are even born. That does not include race, religion, health, social class, geographic location, and on and on.

 

[stardis]

Quoting from the Story of Philosophy by Will Durant as he comments on the writing of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza:

The will of God and the laws of nature being one and the same reality diversely phrased, it follows that all events are the mechanical operation of invariable laws, and not the whim of an irresponsible autocrat seated in the stars.
The root of the greatest errors in philosophy lies in projecting our human purposes, criteria and preferences into the objective universe. Hence our "problem of evil": we strive to reconcile the ills of life with the goodness of God, forgetting the lesson taught to Job, that God is beyond our little good and evil. Good and bad are relative to human and often individual tastes and ends, and have no validity for a universe in which individuals are ephemera, and in which the Moving Finger writes even the history of the race in water.

Ultimately, I think that we have to remember that we are intermittent sojourners in this world and that we are subject to events that we have put into play over many lifetimes.

 

[Truthseeker]

Ultimately, I think that we have to remember that we are intermittent sojourners in this world and that we are subject to events that we have put into play over many lifetimes.

This makes perfect sense in the context of reincarnation. From the standpoint of believing that your eternity is riding on the outcome of one and only one life, misfortune can easily be seen and unjust or unfair. There is someone I know that is going through a difficult time in which I feel like is a terrible wrong that must be made right. However, when I looked at it from a reincarnation perspective, she might be paying back a karmic debt from another life or many lives.

 

[hydrolad]

What actually caused me to finally embrace Reincarnation was the unfairness of my religious upbringing, where according to our Methodist Minister, there was only "one shot" at life, and those poor people the missionaries had not yet reached were doomed for all of eternity!


Needless to say, even as a young child, I could see the unfairness of all of this, and often wondered about these thoughts, like what about a really, really good man alive somewhere in the world, but he was not saved, would he go to Heaven or Hell when he finally died?


Even as a child/teenager, I just knew there had to be more than this.