Philosophy Discussion Forums

One humorous way to reconcile Christianity with Hinduism might be that reincarnating from a human to animal might seem like a negative to a human but it’d be a positive from an animal’s perspective as if an animal doesn’t want to reincarnate as a human! If humans were the most recent life form in evolutionary history then animals might view themselves as far more entitled. A non-rational animal isn’t tempted to be as evil as a human as if part of an animal’s physical strength is their reluctance to view themselves as evil no matter how evil they might appear. So animal reincarnation isn’t only a punishment but can also be a tantalising reward only if we recognised how much more superior an animal felt to a human where few could be so selfless! For all we know it’s human reincarnation that’s the punishment!

That's an interesting perspective! It suggests that reincarnation as an animal could be viewed as a form of liberation from human complexity, where animals may not experience the same moral dilemmas as humans. It really flips the traditional view of reincarnation as a linear progression.

I disagree. The gap between modern humans and simpler animals is so great that coming back as another species would be a disaster for most of us.

Humans can perceive the passing of time - a whole other dimension of existence. Other animals cannot. They cannot mentally time travel as we do, conjuring up memories or projecting the future at will. Think back to when you were a child. Imagine your own death. Other animals, for all their charm and cleverness, cannot do that. There is simply a gap, just as there is a gap between, say dogs and frogs. Would a dog want to reincarnate as a frog when the the latter is less capable than young puppies?

The fact is, there is progression of potential complexity - within genes. The Earth could undergo another major extinction event, and the new era might be an ostensibly simpler time than many preceding eras. However, the complexity of genes built up from the past would remain, resulting in regrowth being more complex than before. All an extinction event does is slow the level of genetic complexity over time. During "The Boring Billion", when the Earth was only inhabited by microbes for a billion years, without much ostensible change. However, during that time, two revolutions were quietly brewing in the microbial stew - multicellularity and sex. These resulted in sudden, rapid evolutionary leaps in the Cambrian Explosion.

Yes, religions include an element of fiction and overdramatisation (for memorablity), but the ancients were no fools. They knew that they had an extra capacity to understand reality, that what they were doing with civilisation was unprecedented in nature in terms of sophistication.

I do agree that that humans' greater ability to detect the passage of time does also mean a greater capacity for suffering - for more trauma, shame, guilt, regrets and fears. When humans are good, no other life on Earth can be a trustworthy, kind, recent, reasoning and rational, and when humans are bad, no other being can be as cruel, sadistic and destructive.

That's the apple in the Garden of Eden, the burden of mind. That's why, in Terry Pratchett's Discworld, when the Librarian of the Unseen University for wizards was turned into an orangutan in a magical accident, he refused to be turned back into a human.

Being a human is a tough gig, but life in the wild is, on average, harder - parasites, high infant mortality, watching friends and family being eaten alive, bit by bit, or being eaten alive oneself. There's no anaesthetic when you lose a body part, often no treatment.

Personally, I think any existence other than human or pampered pet prior to the advent of general anaesthetic in 1847, is extra hard.

A superficial attempt to reconcile atheism with theism might be in how if your body fully decomposes after death then the memory of you in someone else’s unconscious mind is more real materialistically than your past dead self. So an alternative version of God is to simply rent in other people’s unconscious minds hopping from one person’s dreams to another person’s dreams after your death. Being a ghost haunting others so to speak might ironically have more scientific credibility than an eternal afterlife!

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Lord Voldemort returns - Goblet of Fire

A problem with Machiavellianism is to underestimate how Machiavellian Christianity itself might be in terms of stealth much like the CIA. Hence the trouble with justifying a lesser evil is to think that anyone else was needed to justify evil to knowing how self-sufficient others were meant to be were they involved in evil! So when it comes to the trolley problem in philosophy of whether it’s justified to throw someone over the bridge to stop a train carriage of multiple people crashing and dying then the most tactful perception might be to indeed push the person over but to say sorry while doing so no matter how hypocritical it might appear in order to not promote the cold and calculating perception to less trustworthy people! So much like the thieves who died on the cross with Jesus an evil person might not bear the death penalty but most nonetheless bear the cost of being ethically martyred to not represent an ethical system! No matter how annoying an evasive apology is from a politician it might still be better sometimes than a sarcastic “no comment” if only to not justify how serious the politician might have otherwise appeared to sincere listeners. So in the first scene of the movie below where the guy is sacrificed to tame the zombies it might appear inverted where the woman is lighthearted in nominating him for a human sacrifice only that the sarcasm can be circular relative to the hegemony of Christianity as if many of the group’s (spoiler) later internal deaths are a form of indirect atonement!
Army Of The Dead (2021) Movie I Scott Sacrifice Har Man I

Pantheistic versions of gun control seem only tolerable in America relative to a zombie outbreak as if even nuclear war were an insufficient incentive! Time Loop Theory Explained | Army of the Dead | Netflix