Saturday, July 7, 2012

Why rebirth must be true

The Phoenix bird - courtesy Wikipedia
I had part of this conversation with a friend recently, and thought I should share with others.

The topic of our discussion was rebirth (somehow a lunch conversation veered to this, don't ask me why). 

Some religions support rebirth (Hindu religions) and some do not (christianity, except for Jesus Christ?). My argument for why rebirth must be true, though, is not based on religion or theology, but on the more fundamental principle of natural justice. Whether you believe in a God or not does not matter for our purpose here.

So, here's what I consider is the principle of natural justice:  it is a natural order that pervades our world and everything in it. One that ensures that 'justice' is served 'somehow' and one that at least all humans (except the cynical) believe in. Work hard and one shall get rewarded, commit a crime and while you may get away with it for sometime but will eventually pay somehow, etc. are common beliefs we all hold irrespective of our religious beliefs.

Once we accept the 'principle of natural justice', the argument is fairly straightforward. 

Our life experiences show us a lot of extreme examples, and some not so extreme, of things just not adding up. How many of us have seen people that do not work hard at all getting lucky all the time; criminals living a good life; hard working, honest people suffering and being unlucky all the time; and on and on? The principle of natural justice just doesn't seem to hold in so many examples from our life experiences. We may take solace in believing that a criminal may not be able to sleep peacefully despite all riches, etc., but... we all have worries, and this cannot be a good explanation! At the end of the day we do end up saying 'life is unfair', precisely because the principle of natural justice doesn't seem to hold. That is because we tend to close out a person's 'book' at the end of his life (and start accounting for his/her deeds 'at their birth'; and why should we?

If we allow for rebirth in our belief system, the principle of natural justice will 'balance', somehow. We may not see it happen for an individual across a cycle of births and rebirths, but our belief in a principle of natural justice is not stretched unduly by adding rebirth to the equation. So there..

Additionally, rebirth brings with it a lot of explanations for many other 'injustices' we may observe. All of us wonder why one person may be born into a rich family, while another may be born into a poor family or troubled country. There just can't be an explanation for this without beginning to account for an individual's deeds ab initio, at the start of the cycle (wherever that was). Starting to account for deeds at 'this birth' just gets us nowhere. So there, again..