Question: Is belief in reincarnation is not limited to Hinduism and Buddhism. Many traditional cultures share that belief, and early Christianity also shared the belief in reincarnation. from Tom Carr (tomcarr@well.com): True enough, but so what ? There are lots of ideas that are common to traditional cultures that are not true. For example, the idea that they are the chosen people, the only civilized race, the master race, the only true people and so on. For example, the idea that the sun revolves around the earth. I could go on and on with a little research. The point is that just because lots of old cultures believed something is not evidence that it is true. This idea that there is some relevance to the fact that lots of traditional cultures believed in reincarnation pops up again and again in the discussion. I don't think it is relevant.

About reincarnation: If we can ever scientifically prove it exists, wouldn't it abolish the death penalty? And what kind of weird spin would it put on life and consecutive life sentences? Imagine the machine we would want hooked up to Charles Mansion. WER

I can barely imagine this scenario, kitchenmanager. And Tom Carr has a point, the fact that a belief is well established in history does not make it necessarily valid. There are many beliefs well grounded in history with very little basis in fact.

WER, you've fairly "freaked me out" with your hypothetical situation... With religion as the oft referred to "opiate of the masses" it is no wonder multiple religious cultures have latched on to the idea that they may indeed return to a realm of familiarity after death.

Stay calm, m'am, the spring freakout team in on the way.

Sorry, stacey, but if I try to be serious and stimulate(simulate?) conversation and thought, it is usually with some off the wall worst case scenario, and this is the only problem that I have with reincarnation. And I know that faith is not validity, that's why I threw in the "scientifically prove" part, although some would consider that a belief system also... WER

No need to explain... being freaked out is a way to grow. I don't mind it.

Oh, goody,... WER

Hi, I'm new here and my main interest is the "Zero" topic, but I was exploring around and figured I'd say Hello. Zero has something which is very similar in nature to Reincarnation, it's called Regeneration. Regeneration states that we can be seen as a collection of patterns and that these patterns will reappear in other individuals. Regeneration doesn't need a "seperate essence" which represents the Self yet is not the body. I'm going to try to include a link to the page on Regeneration, but I don't know how HTML gets processed on this board. I'll include ascii text of the link just in case. Death http://home1.gte.net/dleeper/ZDeath.html Let me know what you think of the idea! =-= David de Void Homo Deus

html gets auto processed. just list the url like this: http://www.minds.org That's all you need. Of course the way you did it will work. Glad you're here!

> Glad you're here! Thanks. Is there any way to have Sub-Topics within a topic? =-= David de Void Homo Deus

No, we're nonthreaded. Do you need a threaded playground?

Is that an innuendo?

: No, we're nonthreaded. Do you need a threaded playground? Well, I'm trying to figure out the best way to introduce some of Zero's ideas to people. It's new stuff, so people won't even know what to ask.