seeds wrote: ↑Sat Nov 12, 2022 10:04 pm
Who or what created these many universes and fantastically ordered planets upon which incorporeal souls can carry on the process of diving in-and-out of corporeal bodies?
Was it (is it) some sort of joint effort orchestrated by all souls in existence? How?
Indeed, if such is a possibility,...
It seemed like your post might be intended to rule out the possibility of reincarnation given consequences of certain phenomena, like fertility treatments for women and potential changes in population (and the arguments would apply to changes in population already). I was tossing out some possibilities. Now you seem to be asking me to demonstrate that the scenarios I suggested are the case. My point was that you seemed possibly to be ruling something out, using a kind of deduction, but you can't rule it out that way. I understand the skepticism, but your post doesn't rule anything out. That's all. If it wasn't intended to be taken as ruling things out, well, then
good questions.
Thus, from our current perspective (inside of the bubble), the universe is finite, not infinite.
There's no consensus on this in the scientific community.
Got any guesses as to how new souls are created? If so, I'd love to hear them.
Same response as my first one in this post.
seeds wrote: ↑Sat Nov 05, 2022 6:43 pm
In which case, why would the Buddha (or any other human, for that matter) be allowed to
hog-up so many earthly bodies in consecutive (almost immediate) incarnations when, according to my wild (yet plausible) thought experiment, there could be a near infinity of other souls who also need those bodies in order to advance?
Cause he was a good boy and the universe rewards good boys and girls.[/quote]
Now you're just being silly.
Again, same response as the first one above.
Furthermore, according to the standard take on reincarnation, "good boys and girls" are rewarded with release from the suffering of corporeal existence, and not with endless incarnations back into the fray.
Once they've gone through a long series of incarnations, like the ones you mentioned here, and achieved something. It tends not to focus on the moral aspects of the person, though in Buddhism, at least some of the strands of it, something very close to a moral goodness is included in practices and goals.
I'm not a Buddhist however.
In my initial post in this thread, I created a fanciful thought experiment where in the span of a mere 38 years, humans (via genetic manipulation) caused the need for 352 billion human souls to be drawn (extricated) from what is presumed to be a higher (more important and substantial) context of reality, down into this lower context of materiality and suffering.
In other words, we're talking about a cosmic version of what seems to be the "tail wagging the dog" situation in that those higher (incorporeal) souls would have no choice but to drop whatever they may be doing in that higher context of reality and dive back (en masse) into this nasty lower one.
Or, it's not like that. The process has another form. Or they like coming in, despite the negative qualities. Or it's a kind of automatic process that isn't fair, but is. Or it has some consequences of meaning that we are good at speculating about, or some of us are not.
Clearly, we are both doing a lot of speculating here.
Ok, great. You are speculating and I am speculating. If the post I responded to was simply meant as speculation, great.
I encounter people on the internet who think they can rule things out with arguments similar to the one you made. Yours was present in a questioning form and you did not make any statements like...Thus we can rule out reincarnation. But I have seen lines of argument start that way or be intended as a kind of argument from incredulity. I think, opening the issue up more broadly, that people overestimate deduction. And not just around supernatural type issues. So, I tossed out some possibilities, as you say speculating. Deduction is obviously a very effective tool, but when we have very little information about something, it can be very misleading.
