I don't know the stats on believers or anything but I do believe in it.
I am born and raised in Canada. My family is mainly catholic, but my mother is agnostic and raised me such. Always said she thought reincarnation could be likely, and both my parents have said how they believed they could have been reborn.
Seeing this, and the people online who talk about reincarnation, i thought for a long time that a vast majority of people believed in it to some degree. Is this true, or has bias blinded me? Thanks.
I don't know the stats on believers or anything but I do believe in it.
No. I don’t believe in any kind of afterlife.
I never did, but I never had that upbringing either.
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Egoic continuation after the body's disintegration is an impossibility. Most people on earth believe in hogwash such as free will and personal responsibility. No one likes their beliefs challenged. To answer your question: yes, most people do believe in reincarnation, in some form or another, unfortunately, at least in my circle.
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Do they? I am Internet sure\* that more people believe they move on to something better, rather than reincarnate back here as something different. Surely if people believed they would come back, they wouldn't work so hard at screwing up the planet they are going to have to live on again. /\* AKA too lazy to look up the data
I'm athiest But I find reincarnation much more appealing and intuitive than any sort of christian afterlife. I don't buy into it literally, but I am more receptive towards it than most. It seems... Difficult to not acknowledge that we are a part of an everlasting cycle of life on earth on a literal, physical level. Like, how we interact with the world around us, how we impart on the world, how we are connected to things. I guess I see reincarnation as spiritualism based on that reality.
Seeing this, and the people online who talk about reincarnation,
The algorithm strikes again! You are literally the first person on social media that I have seen noticed discussing reincarnation. If you are seeing lots of people discussing it it is almost certainly due to your previous discussions/comments about it skewing social media feeds to show you it.
No. And it sounds like a really bad idea! Over and over for eternity you live a life of some earth creature?
Seems like the least painful eternity to me. If we all have been reborn many times, we dont remember. Some people remember a past life, but mostly not. Sometimes when I think about the possibility of truly chasing to exist after death, I wonder if really an end is genuinely possible. You cant experience not existing. this is seen with birth. I dont remember when i became sentient, I simply remembering being. So if you were to stop existing, would you even realize it? Or would that last moment alive stretch on evermore in your mind?
I once believed in reincarnation but that was an entire lifetime ago…
To primarily answer your question OP, most people believe in some kind of afterlife. Whether that is reincarnation back into a mortal form is rather divisive. There is no scientific apparatus that allows for consciousness to continue after biological function ceases. Classical physics doesn't touch the concept, string theory basically ignores reality as we individually perceive it, and quantum mechanics requires some form of an observer to be realized. I think there is a thread to pull in quantum mechanics where you can argue that consciousness has to continue in some form. Maybe all things in the universe are part of a shared consciousness that is fragmented in the third dimension and when any individual dies, they reintegrate with some greater whole in a higher dimension. I personally don't believe in some grand creator that also isn't a active or participatory force in the universe. If I had to pick some eternal belief in something beyond our perceivable universe, it's that all conciousness is something manifested by a combination of the substrate of the universe (space-time) combined with matter and chemicals structured as to give rise to intentional interaction with the universe. The idea that conciousness is everywhere all the time all at once feels lazy, but some interpretations of physics doesn't really work without it. There's no way that the sun or rocks or other inorganic substances are conscious, but maybe there is some translation from the substrate into reality with use of organic chemicals. To me, conciousness is the awareness of self and intentionality of action. But all living behaviour can be controlled and manipulated with hormones and synaptic pulses, what is conciousness? Maybe organic chemistry isn't needed for the emergence of consciousness. But if that's the case, the why isn't a rock conscious and why doesn't it need an afterlife? What if reincarnation is the experience of the matter of your body just changing shape?
Don’t know and don’t care. It’s an emotional crutch to help us bear the pain of losing loved ones - the hope that they’re someplace else or that we may still meet again someday. But honestly, it has nothing to do with being a good person on earth, which is something I thing we should all focus more on.
In the words of Christopher Hitchens, what can be claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. So, no.
The first law of the conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change from one form to another. Meaning, our energy of life must change form upon our death.
I generally try not to critique the religions of others unless asked directly, but since you asked: I consider most other religions to be kind of ridiculous (hypocritical of me perhaps) but reincarnation as absolutely crazy. While most theist faiths can't be objectively proven to be incorrect, reincarnation is physically impossible. There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that reincarnation is actually a thing - and I think less of those who believe in it because you can't possibly have any real intelligence if you believe in something like that.