Reincarnation

[Liz]

Let's all agree that we all have some sort of thingy.

[Caoimhin]

Let's all agree that we all have some sort of thingy.

Liz, truly you are enlightened.

[nickspoon]

Girls have one sort of thingy and boys have a different sort of thingy. This I know.

[likeafox]

I agree with Jack about animals. If people get souls then I can't fathom why animals wouldn't.

And as long as we're supposing the existence of souls, is it much of a stretch to assume that some people may start out without one? Or along those lines, to explain, suppose for a moment that no one is endowed with a soul upon conception, but spiritual energy-material aether coalesces within them from before they are born. This aether could be as finite as the universe is considered to be, and perhaps is floating around freely and readily available in the environment. Or perhaps it has been sapped up for the most part in our local part of the universe and is primarily garnered from other living things, all sharing it amongst eachother with small trickles of aether. It's difficult to start quantifying souls in this case, unless you consider a physical limit to the size a soul can become--perhaps based on what sort of species it is tied to. It would be similar to other phenomena found in physics and biology, like the physical limit to the size of diploid cells. But either way it would seem to imply that souls can decay or break apart and appears to make the idea of reincarnation less useful in the classical sense. But still, I would argue that a soul would be able to retain its identity over very long periods of time, changing gradually as small amounts of aether move in and out of the entity, the way humans themselves are observed to change over long periods of time. A person is never quite the same person they were 50 years ago. So would they be over the span of a few incarnations, just moreso. Also you would have newborns being created predominantly with old souls while to a lesser extent, new souls are also being created. As the human population increases are we really running out of aether? Or does our destruction of animals and nature have a distinct inverse correlation? And what can we say of our net change while Earth travels through the cosmos, perhaps being bombarded on one side by vacuous clouds of this life energy and maybe an invisible comet trail on the reverse? These are just a few ideas.

It's not hard to imagine that, when someone says they lost part of their soul due to a traumatic experience, maybe they really have, and will feel bitter even part way into their next life until they are whole again, through the nurturing of others, sharing their own energy.

[Arloest]

I want to be an eagle.

[sad jazz cantaloupe]

if animals have souls howcome they don't get married?

[Jakkal]

ok, when animals got souls, what is the smallest "animal" who does still have a soul? Do cells having a soul? Insects? Maybe plants?

if animals have souls howcome they don't get married?

marrige is part of a religious act, which does not depent a soul or otherwise

[nickspoon]

If all living beings have souls, then I'm somewhat confused about what a soul actually constitutes. Do insects (even plants?) have higher-level desires as humans do? Furthermore, at what stage in the evolutionary process does life gain a soul? Life begins as a molecule or group of molecules with the ability to self-replicate; does RNA, then, have a soul? A bacterium? A virus?

[Jakkal]

perhaps the fact having emotions is kind of the soul... perhaps

[sad jazz cantaloupe]

only larger insects can feel pain when you kill them; I would imagine that ones like gnats do not have souls (perhaps they used to have them, but realized they couldn't fit and so they sold them to the devil in exchange for flying in peoples noses ears and eyes). Ant and bee colonies I presume share a collective soul that is constantly being updated from body to body, like a decentralized SVN of sorts.

[Comrade K]

only larger insects can feel pain when you kill them; I would imagine that ones like gnats do not have souls (perhaps they used to have them, but realized they couldn't fit and so they sold them to the devil in exchange for flying in peoples noses ears and eyes). Ant and bee colonies I presume share a collective soul that is constantly being updated from body to body, like a decentralized SVN of sorts.

If I wasn't contemplating joining the po, that totally would have been the point where I lit up.

Anyway, if souls exist, I think animals have them. And trees. And grass. Mushrooms. Jellyfish. Amoebas. Plankton. Everything. If it's alive, it has a soul of some kind. But I don't think souls exist. I sometimes use the term metaphorically, but not literally.

[sad jazz cantaloupe]

in that case, you don't think that all of those things really have souls, and so perhaps by the real definition, only some of those things do?

[Tom_Radigan]

if animals have souls howcome they don't get married?

They don't live under laws and don't even have names, so marriage is impossible. They can have emotional attachments though. I have two cats who like only me and nobody else.

[Doc Sigma]

I am a dragon and I don't care

[sad jazz cantaloupe]

if they don't abide by laws and they don't even have names then how can they have souls