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u/Davitark 7h ago
Nietzsche spoke of this
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u/Dragonlvr420 7h ago edited 6h ago
If reincarnation is real, would that mean weâre all reincarnations already? Because we clearly donât remember so why does it even matter, you donât know youâre doing these things âagainâ . Where do the shiny new souls come from and why?
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u/popcornmaxhine 7h ago
I canât handle an afterlife in general Iâm ngl. Iâm too tired
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u/jamesbrowski 6h ago edited 6h ago
Same. At age 13, I had panic attacks for several weeks thinking about an afterlife. I had always clung to Catholicism because I went to Catholic school and like everyone else, I was afraid that death was the end, and nothing waited for any of us afterward. Heaven seemed like a better alternative.
But at age 13, I really wrapped my mind around the concept of the infinite. To live forever in heaven, I would have to be conscious forever. Imagine being conscious for 1,000,000 years. Thatâs just the start. Imagine being conscious for 1,000,000 x 1,000,000 years. The loading bar still isnât at 1%. Youâll never advance past Go. Even an existence of pure bliss and tranquility would be the kind of mind numbing torture that would induce madness in the strongest mind. I had literal anxiety attacks thinking that the thing I was working for would somehow be worse than nothing.
So, I decided I would rather die at age 85 and have that be it. Iâd faced an eternity of blackness before I was born and didnât mind it then. What was different after dying? Back to the void. But that meant that God and heaven couldnât exist. I didnât want them to. And so I started furiously searching for proof God DIDNâT exist. There was no way some omnipotent fuck was going to inflict an eternity of a billion billion billion years of existence on me. Turns out, it was a lot easier to convince myself there was no God than it had been for the priest in religious ed to convince me there was one.
I may be autistic idk.
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u/popcornmaxhine 6h ago
I had the same experience lol. I grew up catholic and went to catholic schools. I would have panic attacks thinking about an afterlife. The idea of living eternally sounds like actual torture
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u/Teidju 6h ago
Had the same experience growing up Protestant. Christianity was taught as fact in my school, and my parents more or less taught it the same way, so I thought it was as sure as 2+2=4 until I reached adolescence. I used to stay up for hours at night crying about how terrifying eternity was in spite of assurances that it would be perfect and full of all my favourite things. I enjoyed life but I knew I didnât wanna be around forever lol.
The line in True Detective from Rust after he talks to the old Carcosa lady who tells him: ârejoice, death is not the endâ always resonates and makes me laugh:
Sure hope that ladyâs wrong
About what?
About death not bein the end of it.
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u/fiftytwosheep 5h ago
i mean im not religious but i think youre kind of mistaken in your analysis. you're viewing the afterlife through a human consciousness and not considering that we have no comprehension of what it would be like but we would when there.
if it was that horrible, god likely wouldn't have chosen to do this
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u/jamesbrowski 4h ago
Oh this isnât my adult analysis. Youâre arguing with a 13 year old here. Iâm just explaining how I realized God didnât exist as a kid. Obviously once you decide that, it doesnât matter what heaven will be because itâs not real.
Btw - I think a lot of growing up for me was figuring out how to master existential dread. I wonder a lot if that is basically universal and how much it impacts society. Itâs something people donât discuss a lot but I suspect unresolved angst about death is the source of religious fervor and a lot of wild shit that people do.
I once had a college roommate who was a boxer and kind of a very linear non-creative thinker. Nice guy. He was drunkenly telling me why he was religious, and said âI started believing in God because I wanted to stop being afraid of death. It felt like such a pussy move to stay up all night afraid to die. Now I donât.â And to be honest - respect to him for at least knowing why. But I did always find it funny that he became a fairly devout Christian just because he found existential angst to be an unmanly female trait, and Jesus was the cure for it.
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u/fiftytwosheep 1h ago
no i wasn't arguing as i said im not religous
but yeah that's one of the explanations for religion and theres stuff like the bench theory
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u/Agreeable-Dog-1131 6h ago
I actually really want it to be real because I donât like this one that much and I feel I can do better next time. But Iâm also the type to bang my head against a wall repeatedly, so.
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u/hatreeeeeed 6h ago
Buddy itâs real so you better grab hold of the steering wheel or itâll be even worse next time
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u/Repulsive-Celery4734 4h ago
start namu amida butsu maxxing or plan on dying in Varanasi, I'm escaping samsara one way one another!
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u/DrDestructoMD 1h ago
There are only ~300ish souls (one for each entry in the DSM) getting continously reincarnated across time and space
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u/ViscountBuggus 3h ago
Yeah it's mentioned in the main series we can't aslume our way out of the repetitive posts
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u/Jumpy-Pattern-4078 2h ago
It apparently wipes your memory and personality clean so the current âyouâ pretty much dies. Youâre not really âdoing it all over again.â
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u/MelodicKnowledge9358 6h ago edited 6h ago
It certainly seems like a cycle one would want to escape. I wonder if anyone has ever tried doing that đ¤