Past lives and Reincarnation

[ZiraWoods]

Hinduism and Buddhism belive in past lives, Christianity does not.
Both can not be right.
What do you think?
Do we have only one shot to get it right or do we get as many chances as we need?
Keep in mind that even if Hinduism and Buddhism could both be right, Christianity and eather one of them can't both be right.
One way of looking at it is this.
What if there were only one true religion, and all the others are false. (Maybe Christianity is one of the false religions and Hinduism is the one true religion)
There is a god who is trying to get you to choose the true religion and an evil one who doesn't care what one you pick, so long as it isn't the real one.

What if you are in a strange nation that you have never been to before.
During your visit I showed you a table full of coins, each coin is worth the value of a meal.
There is a place to get food nearby, and you are hungry.
The problem is that for every coin on the table there is a person who is telling you that their coin is the only real one on the table and all the others are fake coins.
Each coin looks diffrent, some look very much alike, but yet very diffrent from some of the other coins on the table.
You see someone standing near by, he tells you that it is true that one of the coins is real, and that you may choose any coin that you want and it will be given to you.
He also tells you that if you choose the real coin then you can get a meal, but if you choose one of the false coins then you will be thrown in jail for the rest of your life.

This is why I believe that we must choose very carefully what we choose to believe.

May I humbly ask why both can not be right? Maybe not everyone gets a past life. Maybe it's only for those who live in a certain manner or follow a certain path.
I'm Muslim myself and I always find that the answer depends on who I ask, even those of my own religion. In Islam many do not believe in reincarnation despite the fact that in our Quran (holy book) it mentions, many times, that God will bring us back again and again until we have completely submitted. I've always believed that all religions share the same major edicts as they've all come from the same tree. Moral faith if you will. We know right from wrong, deep down in our subconcious, and that is all that matters as far as I'm concerned. The names, and rules, and the general myths and beliefs of each 'religion' are man-made in an effort to control through GOD's words. Of course this is my own opinion on the matter. I can never grasp why people cling to the differences in an effort to separate when we all were created by and will go back to GOD.

As far as your coin hypothesis is concerned (which was an interesting way of putting it BTW) take them all, mix them up and dare them to find the one that is real.

[Tobias_Marco]

<I'm glad you liked my coin story.>

<I said that both can not be right, by that I meant that reincarnation IS available or IT IS NOT available.>
<Lets say that if I believe in reincarnation then it will be available to me when I die, however if I do not believe that it will be available to me then it will not.>
<As far as I can tell this is what you are saying.>
<It IS available then.>
<If I walk into a McDonald for lunch tomorrow, and a Burger King the next day, and both times I order a Big Mac, one of those places will give it to me, and the other will tell me that it is not available, despite my believing that it is.>
<Today I went to many stores in my city looking for a certain toy. No other toy would do, I wanted a toy of this one particular guy.>
<At each store I went to they had the toy or they did not have the toy, there is no third option.>
<Nobody said to me "Well we have it if you are a Hinduism or a Buddhist, but if your a Christian then we don't have it." If they had I would have gotten upset and asked "Why won't you sell me that toy just because I'm a Christian?".>
<To that the man replied "I'm sorry sir, I looked and we just don't have that toy in stock. Maybe if you had been a Buddhist then I might have had it.">

<Maybe that's going too far. As a Christian I believe that you have a choice right now to believe in my God or not, when you die you will come face-to-face with him and face judgement and in that moment you will believe that he is real, however it will be too late to change your reservation for eternity.>
<Perhaps reincarnation is like that, if so then it makes sense to believe in reincarnation for as many lives as possible until you get it right.>
<However if you only get one chance and you think you get 20 chances then you will be very upset when you find out you only got one shot at it. If only you knew that in the first place you might have tried harder.>

<So if you are right then when I die I will not be able to be reincarnated even though it WAS available, because I didn't believe in it before I died.>
<If this is true then when we die there will be three lines, those that have gone through enough times to get it right and get to move on to whatever is next. The people who aren't quite there yet and need to go back again to learn more, and the line I'll be in.>
"I'm sorry sir, you just aren't good enough to go to the after life yet. Ordinarily you could go back and try again, however I see you checked the box to only get one shot at this, so you get to go somewhere else."
"Wait, somewhere else?" I will ask, "What somewhere else? I thought Hinduism and Buddhism didn't believe in a Hell."
"Oh don't worry, it's not Hell." The man will say, "It just isn't Heaven."

<Please see my topic on Hell and see if any of these sound like where I'll be heading to in THIS view of the afterlife.>

<Once again I'm sorry if I misunderstood anything. If I did please explain it again and I will try to understand it better.>

[ZiraWoods]

Hehe. Three lines. That's a good one.

<Once again I'm sorry if I misunderstood anything. If I did please explain it again and I will try to understand it better.>

I only meant that we can't know and won't know until we're dead although personally I think it would be more like every dead person is given a caseworker, so to speak, who reviews your life and deeds and determines if you're eligible. Anything is possible in a realm where we understand nothing.

"Oh don't worry, it's not Hell." The man will say, "It just isn't Heaven."

For all we know we each may be building our own afterlife by the way we believe. For instance, someone believes in the classic Hell with a pitchfork Devil, Heaven with Pearly Gates, and Limbo and that's what he gets. Another may believe in absolute Nothingness so that's what he gets. And another may believe in a Hall of Heroes, or a place with terrible tortures, or flesh eating creatures, or heck, elves and fairies, and that's what each of them get. We just don't and will never know.
Personally, how do we know that Life isn't a form of Hell? Some cultures believe there are levels to Hell and this might be level 1. Maybe reincarnation is a way of climbing the ladder to the ultimate goal: GOD. And like in school, if you fail you're held back a grade.

Food for thought.

P.S. You are fond of analogies aren't you?

[Tobias_Marco]

Hehe. Three lines. That's a good one.

<Once again I'm sorry if I misunderstood anything. If I did please explain it again and I will try to understand it better.>

I only meant that we can't know and won't know until we're dead although personally I think it would be more like every dead person is given a caseworker, so to speak, who reviews your life and deeds and determines if you're eligible. Anything is possible in a realm where we understand nothing.

<I thought that might be what you meant, my point was that if we don't know if something is true or false that does not change its truth value.>
<If I ask you what color shirt I am wearing you will not know. There is no way for you to know what color shirt I am wearing. I could even lie to you. A month from now if I read this post I will most likely now be able to remember what color shirt I am wearing.>
<Just like you don't know what color shirt I am wearing nobody on Earth REALLY knows for sure what the after life is like.>

P.S. You are fond of analogies aren't you?

<I am fond of analogies.>

[ZiraWoods]

Precisely

[Tobias_Marco]

<Just so we are clear though, we have the chance to be reincarnated or we don't, it can't somehow be both.>
<I don't like that three lines idea, the possibility of being cheated out of something because I didn't believe the right thing is distasteful, yet it is the premise of most religions. You might be "cheated out of Heaven" because you didn't believe the right thing, yet that makes more logical sense to me for some reason than the three lines.>

[sdsnl]

Christianity doesn't say that there is no past life. It just never mentioned past lives. Perhaps it's deemed irrelevant, or it is too complicated for the people in Jesus' time to understand, so it is not discussed whether there are past lives or not. Christianity's preaching point is, God knows all your action and you will be judged upon, so be a good person. Reincarnation preaching is more like, your virtues and karma in this life will affect your destiny in your next life (aka after your death), so be a good person. Essentially they are the same.

I suppose it's kind of like, when you are in middle school, you are taught that matter has three states: solid, liquid, and gas. And at that time you think that's the only three states any matter could be in. But then when you get to university, you learn that there is also plasma, superfluid, and a bunch of other states you haven't heard about before. Depending on what your major is, your teacher may think very differently about how much you need to know about in this particular subject. This is not to say that some religions are fundamentally better than others, it's just that they have different focus points. A science major needs to know more about scientific facts, but that would be quite useless to an English major, who should be more concerned about literature. Either way, as long as they get all the graduation requirements for their majors, they get their college diploma.

Judaism, which is thought to have the same roots as Christianity, has discussed reincarnation. The Buddhism version of the story actually includes heaven and hell. To say it in a simple way, if you are a super good person, then you go to heaven. If you are super bad, you go to hell. If you are somewhere in between, depending on how good you are, there are four other outcomes you could get, one of which is coming back as a person.

You could also think about it this way: Before Jesus came to earth, he had a life in heaven. Then he has another life on earth. On earth, he was born as a baby, and died on the cross. Three days later, he goes back to heaven for a third life. And if he comes back again, that would be a fourth life. Can that not be understood as reincarnating/having past lives?

[mostafahmed]

I think you live again in heaven or hell. According to your actions.

[Tobias_Marco]

<There is a verse that says "it is for a man to die once and face judgement.", in another part of the Holy Bible there is the story of a rich man and a poor man, both die. The poor man goes to Heaven, the rich man goes to Hell. The rich man begs God to send him back to warn his family about Hell. (Jacob warning Scrooge style, only before 100 AD.)
Anyway God tells the rich man "No, they have the words of the prophets in the Holy Bible to warn then about Hell."
"No, no. They will not believe. They need me to vist them."
God looks at the man sadly, "If the words of the prophets are not enough, then they will not believe a spirit that has come back from the dead."
To me this means that we only get one go around.>