Oh lordy.

[Binkie The Clown]

8. You know, it doesn't matter if you don't believe in reincarnation. In your next life you will.

Seriously,

Suppose this reality actually is a simulation as some serious physicists and philosophers have suggested. And suppose it's a very advanced, fully immersive, muli-player, virtual reality video game we are all playing. What happens when your game is over? You re-emerge in the "real" reality (some call it an "afterlife&quot and hang out with your friends until you're ready to dive into another fresh round of the game. From within the game itself, as a player, what would you call this fresh game life if not "reincarnation?"

Personally, I'm a staunch atheist, yet I consider reincarnation to be a possibility. Carl Sagan did not believe in reincarnation (as some wrongly claim), but he did believe it deserved more serious study: “There are claims in the parapsychology field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study,” with [one] being “that young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.”

It's easy enough to simply ridicule something and pretend that ridicule is falsification of that which is being ridiculed. But it's not. The problem is that some things that should be taken seriously get lumped in with a load of crap that is utter nonsense. Reincarnation gets lumped with astrology and psychic mediums and numerology and healing crystals and a whole host of outright nonsense and foolishness. As a consequence, it gets painted with the same broad black brush, without being given serious consideration.

I spent a couple years going deeply into the study of astrology, for example, and came to the conclusion, after much investigation, that it is nonsense. The same for several other "paranormal" areas. All nonsense. The exception being that after a careful study of the available academic material (not the mass market paperback bullshit) I was forced to conclude that reincarnation remains a possibility. What I won't do, under any circumstances, is to dismiss out of hand some claim because I think it's fashionable to do so, or because I think it makes me look intelligent or smarter than somebody else. I'm at least willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Mostly it leads to nonsense, but in the case of Dr. Stevenson's work, it leads to the conclusion that it is NOT irrational to believe in reincarnation. That said, however, it is also NOT irrational to disbelieve in reincarnation.