/r/skeptic poster unusually upset over reincarnation

/r/skeptic is a place where, as you might expect, the posters haven't been skeptical about a single thing since they downloaded the reddit app. if it's a 2024 Democratic party approved talking point, it is the incontrovertible truth, and if you disagree you are a fascist. However, reincarnation doesn't quite fit into their rigid system of secular dogma, since it's a belief mainly espoused by the 1.5 billion people unfortunate enough to be Indians and most /r/skeptic users are American instead of Canadian so they don't know too many Indians. thus, this reincarnation thread is actually somewhat open to discussing the possible metaphysical basis of this belief.

everyone except one intrepid little low-t butterball named /u/critically_damped. This guy is a parody of 2010s New Atheism and he wants you to know he somehow isn't ashamed of it at all. He comes in and shits up the thread with like 20+ replies mocking and eventually inevitably blocking anyone who dares even entertain the idea of reincarnation even on a theoretical basis. It's really a wonder to behold. /u/critically_damped if you hate Indians so much, why not join us? You're so close...

sadly because this waddling caricature of a Redditor has 535,350 comment karma I don't think the bot can ping him. Maybe in the next life :(

Why would souls have to obey the laws of time as well? Maybe reincarnation doesn't happen immediately after death, or maybe reincarnation happens "before" you last died. Bottom line is that it's not a logical concept, so why use logic? It's just fun to think about and no more.

The moment someone retreats to "My ideas don't have to make any sense", I'm done "having fun" with them. Except for mockery, of course, there's lots of fun to be had in mocking such people.

I like to distinguish ideas that are unsupported by evidence, ideas that are contrary to known facts, and ideas that are internally inconsistent. It is, loosely, the distinction between good sci-fi, good fantasy, and just plain bad writing. As far as I can tell, reincarnation falls into the first or second category if it's formulated correctly, so it can be fun to speculate about, but that doesn't mean I take it seriously as anything but a thought experiment.

Please give the "correct" formulation of reincarnation of the soul that cannot be shown to be internally inconsistent. Because that's quite a claim you've just made.

If you allow new souls to be created when needed, most of the problems go away. If you don't require souls to be reincarnated immediately, more problems go away. If you allow a soul to be reincarnated before the previous body exists, you can even do wild things like having all people share a single soul. What do you claim is internally inconsistent about reincarnation?

No, that's not a formulation of reincarnation. Try again. What specifically is a soul, what happens to it when it is "reincarnated"? You said you can present a formulation of reincarnation that is internally consistent, so please do that. Start from the beginning, please, because I can guarantee you that anything you just try to "tack on" to existing definitions for these concepts will not eliminate contradictions, but will only add new ones.

I don't really care what people choose to believe, as it rarely effects me.

So you're completely unaware of the very great harm that stems from "what people choose to believe", huh? What that must be like, I wonder.

I don't care when it doesn't effect others. Believing in Santa is perfectly fine, but forcing me to abide by North Pole Law when I neither believe in Santa or live in the North Pole is not fine.

And yet one would, by definition, stem from the other. And those like yourself who insist on pretending there's no harm intrinsic to simply not caring about truth are complicit with the "North Pole Law" that becomes the law of the land when they fail to recognize the harm of adults who believe in fricking Santa. There's a monumental amount of very real harm that is demonstrably attributable to those things "you don't care" about.

Ahh the slippery slope. My arch nemesis.

Except that we have a very long and well-documented history of how belief in fundamentalist religious horseshit leads to fundamentalist laws which destroy people's lives and wellbeing on a massive scale. This isn't a slippery slope at all, it's a well-travelled line of climbing anchors that have been placed at regular intervals into a cliff, the procedure for which is so well-documented that modern authoritarians literally use it as a step-by-step guide. You are now in the camp of disingenuous liars who use "it doesn't affect me" as an excuse to ignore the very observable harm that it causes others.

Then push for the prevention of laws stemming from those beliefs, not the prevention of the beliefs. I'm not in the business of restricting what people can and can't believe in.

Oh dear, we have SUCH a disingenuous, goalpost moving pile of failure going on here, don't we? It's not "restricting what people can believe in" to recognize that some beliefs are actively harmful. That's a pathetic straw man you've thrown out because you realize how utterly full of shit you are. As for working to pass laws protecting the targets of religious authoritarian fascism, yeah we're frickin doin that already. The problem is they can count on people like yourself to sit on your butt and do nothing because "it doesn't hurt you": And that's not when you're right there voting in support of them, and using "it doesn't hurt me" as a shield against criticism. That's the last I'm going to put up with from you, as you're now a complete fricking joke with regards to the point in question.

We are each a drop of water from the same ocean.

Which always bothered me b/c if I succeed in attaining escaping samsara, and my drop is integrated back into the ocean, but souls are drops from the ocean, doesn't that mean I still may be reborn again?

The bigger problem is that "drops" in an ocean do not actually exist. "Drops" placed in an ocean immediately defuse throughout the bulk, and getting "the same drop" back out again is simply not a thing. Any particular grouping of water molecules is a transitory thing on the time scale of microseconds, not to mention lifetimes. The metaphor is bad and fails at first contact with rational thought. It's just horseshit piled upon horseshit, and asking any proponent to "explain" it just invites them to pile on another shovelful.

You're soooo close. Like ridiculously close. Painfully so. It's not the metaphor that's bad. It's your rationale.

No, the problem is people who retreat to metaphor while claiming it accurately describes what they believe, or who raise such "metaphors" as if they constituted a response to criticism of how demonstrably nonsensical their beliefs are. The problem is that every single aspect of Buddhism is a pile of deliberately nonsensical and contradictory horseshit. Well, that and the number of disingenuous apologists for that horseshit who have decided that fricking /r/skeptic is the place to make their stand today.

You can be skeptical of Buddhism, that's fine. But the least you should do is understand the metaphor, which you obviously don't.

Yes, that was MY point, because this is a thing that I see Buddhists and "I'm not Buddhist but..." apologists say on a regular fricking basis. The metaphor doesn't work for Buddhism in particular, because there are no fricking drops in an ocean. So saying "we're all drops in a ocean" is an absolutely horseshit metaphor for how Buddhist reincarnation works specifically. Now if you still don't get that (and it's clear that you DO) or if you want to keep pretending I've missed the exact point that I fricking made it's because you've deliberately chosen to keep being obtuse and nothing I can say will stray you from that path. So spelling aside, "the clip" doesn't talk about Buddhism. At all. That was an apologist trying to engage in special pleading to say that there is a form of reincarnation belief that the clip doesn't "debunk", and the "drops in the ocean" remark was a response to that comment. So now that we've caught you up on the context of the discussion, I want to make it clear that I do not give a frick about Buddhism or anyone's attempt to steelman it or engage in apologistic special pleading for it. It's all horsefrickery, and the "metaphors" that its adherents regularly reach for to "explain" it a are even more disingenuous and nonsensical than the belief system itself.

I don't need to pretend, the whole world saw you do it.

Your ignorance is showing.

It really isn't.

You're right, it wasn't ignorance, it was blatant dishonesty, aka lying. People can talk about reincarnation without it being specifically about Buddhism, and it's very fricking clear you understand that fact. It would, in fact, be beyond the fricking pale to claim to actually believe such a ridiculously indefensible piece of absolute horseshit, so it stands to reason that you were lying when you said, in direct response to "the clip doesn't talk about Buddhism. At all": "Yes it does. Reincarnation has it's roots in Hinduism. Buddha was, wait for it, a Hindu." And since we've established that you, like your fellow hordes of wrong-on-purpose buddhism apologists who have flocked to /r/skeptic today, are a proven fricking liar, I see no reason to reply to anything you have to say, ever again.

It's special pleading all the way down.

It's a fundamental principle of Buddhism that the self is an illusion. Buddhists don't believe that eternal souls exist. I don't see how that's special pleading.

That so-called "fundamental principle" is in fact just special pleading, in the form of the fallacy of composition, to get around the obvious fact that we do, in fact, exist as individuals. It is literally the only fact that we can take as being directly observed, the point beyond which the problem of hard solipsism gets in the way. But cogito ergo sum is not really negotiable. Every individual SELF knows they exist, because that's what consciousness IS. Whether that self is part of something greater doesn't matter, the self is a still a thing. Being a part of a greater whole does not mean that one's consciousness is an "illusion". As with everything else in religion, this is just wrong-on-purpose misuse of language to defend the positions of those who say other wrong things on purpose. It's literally "It doesn't have to make any sense, MAAAAAAAN".

I'm not a Buddhist, but I do think that you're being harshly critical of Buddhist philosophy based on a very cursory understanding of it. For instance: "we do, in fact, exist as individuals" The Buddhist argument on the self is not about physical reality. No Buddhist is going to tell you that your current subjective experience is not defined by a literally real physical form. What the Buddhist will tell you is that the idea of that physical form being "you" is illusory - that fundamental personhood in the philosophical sense doesn't exist, because what every person (and every other thing) is at every moment is just a loosely grouped sequence of qualities based on their material conditions. The Buddhist denies personhood because they see the "you" typing this comment right now - your identity, your mind, and so on - as so transient, subjective, and conditional that it can't really be said to exist in a meaningful sense. That's not an inherently mystical line of thought, nor is it particularly out of place with western schools of philosophy. Like, yeah, Buddhism falls apart to the skeptic once you take into account cosmology and tradition and actual lived practice - but the philosophy of anatta is not some wacky superstition to be dismissed with "well, you obviously have a body". You're dismissing ontological arguments by pointing to physics, and those two things are simply not stringently reliant on each other in that way.

Literally, "it doesn't have to make any sense". Special fricking pleading. I'm not humoring this horseshit on this subreddit anymore today. This is /r/skeptic, not /r/makeexcusesforirrationalhorseshit.

Do you understand the difference between philosophy and science? Genuine question. The things I am talking about are not special pleading by pointing to unknowable mysticisms. The things I'm talking about are basic ontological schools of thought. Again: Once you start talking about Naraka and Amitabha and the literal reality of reincarnation, yes, you are stepping into territory where the skeptic cannot follow. But the stuff that I'm talking about? The idea of anatta, of the non-existence of the self? That can barely even be considered spiritual. There are multiple secular philosophical lines of thought that are basically entirely compatible with it. You're doing the thing that every philosopher hates about internet-age atheists: Dismissing philosophy out of hand because you think it can be invalidated by waving your hand toward basic science. It's an act which makes sense on its surface, but becomes ludicrous if you take like two seconds to try to actually understand what philosophers are actually saying. Seriously, ask a philosopher - an atheist, western philosopher - if they think that Buddhist conceptions of the self are "special fricking pleading", and they'll almost certainly laugh in your face. /r/askphilosophy is a great place to try your luck with that, if you are so inclined. Edit: And I have to emphasize: I am an atheist. I am not Buddhist. I do not believe in reincarnation, devas, hungry ghosts, or any of the other associated cosmological and supernatural concepts. I have just spent any amount of time engaging with these concepts in good faith, and so am able to recognize that the specific Buddhist concept you're dismissing out of hand is in no way reliant on the supernatural, and is in fact a pretty ordinary way of approaching ontology.

Nothing I've said to you so far has referred to science, so I can mark your question here as a disingenuous, and the statement afterwards as being a lie. Your attempt to claim this shit isn't special pleading fails at literally the first consideration of philosophy. Everything you have to say beyond that point in your double-down just further identifies you as a person willing to say wrong things on purpose.

I invite you to explain in detail how anything I've talked about is special pleading, because thus far you've done a whole lot of ranting and raving about it and not a lot of actual criticism (beyond repeating the phrase a whole lot). I would also like very much if you told the class what your background with Buddhism is. Like, have you actually read about these ideas at all outside of Reddit comments? What, precisely, is your familiarity with the ideas you're getting so angry about?

Since you've demonstrated already that you are willing to lie about the things I've said, I decline your invitation. You do realize once you've done that the game's over, right?

The problem is, the people who make the claim that the soul exists, don't really offer any details on how it actually all works. Where the souls are before life begins, how they are transferred and why we can't detect any proof of existence of a soul or spirit. Which is why the whole concept is not really worthy of any serious debate in my mind.

That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed with ridicule.

If somebody asserts that they have a terrible headache, it would be terribly inconsiderate to ask for evidence and ridicule them if they couldn't produce any.

Except this is one of those cases where testimony actually does count as evidence. It's in the same category as "I like ice cream" and "I think therefore I am". Nice try though. You're right that it would be inconsiderate, though. It would just also be technically wrong to say that no evidence had been produced.

I don't believe in reincarnation, but this is a stupid argument, easily debunked, somewhere around 5.5% of humans that have lived are alive today. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12288594/

That doesn't "debunk" the argument at all. It is in fact even more evidence for it, since that 5.5% is still a large multiple of the number of people who were alive 50,000 years ago. The "stupidity" of the argument lies in its premises, i.e. that ANY aspect of reincarnation is reasonable, rather than in its conclusions or the logic to get there. But those premises are in fact held by lots and lots of people who believe in reincarnation, so it does in fact make sense to show how they lead to absurdity.

Echoing the rest of the comments here in that I'm not a believer in reincarnation but this is a shit argument. Who's to say everyone has to be a reincarnation of someone else? The existence of reincarnation wouldn't mean new souls couldn't also come into existence. Everyone's got to start somewhere. On average, more people are born every minute than die. Maybe when you die, your soul goes into a "queue" and you get slotted into the next available new birth. Whenever there's a new birth with nobody waiting for reincarnation, a brand new soul takes the spot and has their first life. EDIT: Another possibility that I've heard thrown around is that reincarnated souls aren't necessarily bound by linear time. I've even heard some people speculate (although I find this kind of funny) that every living being in the universe shares the same soul. We're basically all one person and that when we die we are reborn as literally anyone anywhere in the past or future, and this repeats endlessly until we've been everyone in the universe.

Special pleading is a fallacy. Any time you resort to it to try to defend a claim, you are not actually defending that claim.

That only applies if we're talking about a universal principle. I've never heard anyone, even believers, say that reincarnation is universal. I'm not arguing there are exceptions, I'm pointing out that nobody even said it was a rule. I've never heard it said that every single human on earth must have had past lives, nor that every human must reincarnate. Heck, the entire Buddhist conception of reincarnation depends upon the idea that the cycle may one day end, because the goal is to attain enlightenment, and in doing so break free from the cycle. After enough lives, if you live properly, you will eventually stop reincarnating and ascend to nirvana.

Special pleading is an informal fallacy wherein one cites something as an exception to a general or universal principle without justifying the special exception. You exemptions are not justified. You are engaging in special pleading, and it is always a fallacy when you do that.

Please explain to me how reincarnation is a general or universal principle. I'm not arguing for special exceptions. I am explaining that there is no rule.

I don't have to explain shit to you, because you're not a representative of the ideas you're dishonestly trying to represent. And lots of the people who believe in reincarnation do in fricking fact believe it is a "general or universal principle". They really don't need you to represent them here. Their ideas are bad enough without you adding your own irrationally fallacious attempts to defend them.

...I mean, you don't have to do anything, nobody's making you. But if we're going to have a civil discussion (which you seem increasingly uninterested in) I'd definitely appreciate slightly more detail than just yelling the phrase "special pleading" at me in bold text over and over again. All I'm trying to do here is point out that reincarnation as a concept is not remotely incompatible with the idea that new souls can come into existence, and I really don't see how that is "special pleading" in any way.

I don't care what you'd appreciate, or what you admit to "seeing". I recognize that what you're trying to do is to dishonestly defend beliefs you do not hold with arguments that you know are not valid. You were done being taken seriously the moment your special pleading was identified and you doubled down on that fact, and all you have in front of you from this moment on is mockery for your continued dishonesty.

...I'm really trying my best to understand where you're coming from. Genuinely. I just cannot for the life of me understand how the fallacy you're citing applies to my comments. You just keep saying "special pleading" over and over like it's some kind of rhetorical trump card. I've read the same definitions as you. They just... don't seem to apply here. I'm not even attempting to defend reincarnation to begin with, I'm just trying to point out a flaw in Ethan's argument from the clip. I'm, frankly, quite baffled by this level of hostility.

I don't believe this is your best. And I don't believe you care about where I'm coming from. And I don't think you're "baffled" by having your dishonesty identified, I think you just find this script useful when you get called out for it. "I'm not even attempting to defend reincarnation." Another lie. You're doing exactly that.

I... just... why? Why would I do that? What a colossal waste of everyone's time that would be, especially my own. The only reason I'm still even commenting is because I really, genuinely had hoped to understand where you were coming from, so that I could correct the record if I had poorly communicated my own opinions. If you're dead-set on believing I'm some kind of devious liar on a mission to... um... defend a set of beliefs I don't hold?? then there's nothing more to be said here. But I hope for your own sake you're not this cynical in regular face-to-face conversations. It must make things very difficult.

For fun? Do you think it is actually a meaningful question to ask why trolls say wrong things on purpose? No, you didn't, because that would be miles beneath a reasonable standard for what would constitute an acceptable level of non-willful, non-performative ignorance. That alone right there condemns your entire performance. And that's the last I'll tolerate. Sadly, by the rules of this sub I have to let you have the last word before I block you.