For starters, hi to everyone, i found this forum a few weeks ago and reading many discussions was extremely interesting. I’m a 36 years old Italian and I would like to share my opinion regarding this topic which has admittedly troubled me sometimes. I came to the conclusion that there can be no compatibility between Christianity and reincarnation, and my motivations are as follow (if I posted this topic in the wrong section I’m sorry, I’m still inexperienced with this forum):
1. Reincarnation would be the deepest and most radical denial of our Lord’s Redemption. Think about it for a moment: reincarnation involves karma, which in turn implies that the life you’re living now is the result of actions committed in past lives. So, for example, if you’re a starving child in Burundi, it means you had bad karma to atone for, while if you’re a Westerner born into a wealthy family, it means you had good karma. This implies self-redemption: I have bad things to atone for so now I get to live a disadvantaged life to make up for it. Where is the need for our Lord and Saviour here? There would be no need for him. You would “save” yourself. It goes without saying that this destroys any meaning in Christ’s death, because if we redeemed ourselves through reincarnation/rebirth, his death would have been pointless.
- Reincarnation makes true empathy and charity absurd (since I would have to assume, for example, that a poor guy who is starving to death or who is disabled is going through all of this because in a past life he was a rapist, a pedophile and/or a very bad person either way, and that therefore what is happening to him is deserved, this is also the concept that provides the theological framework for India’s caste system, explaining one’s birth into a specific social stratum as a consequence of past life actions). Sure, I can still decide to help the less fortunate but this would only be for purposes such as “gaining karmic points for the next life”, but in fact it would be hard to have empathy for those who are less fortunate if one were to truly believe that their situation is due to the faults of past lives and that therefore perhaps a child who is starving is suffering like that because in a previous life he was a Peter Scully kind of guy.
3. It’s not compatible with the final Resurrection, when every human will have a glorious body (even people in Hell will have a body, as written in Daniel 12:2, John 5:29 and Acts 24:15) just like Jesus had after his resurrection (I suppose that at least for the saved this body will be in the prime of life on top of being glorious, I struggle to imagine that someone will be resurrected with a glorious body but in his old or very old years). How could this be true if reincarnation was real? Which one of the countless bodies my soul Inhabited would have the privilege of the Resurrection? It’s absurd to even think that there could be a reconciliation between reincarnation and the final Resurrection. And the teaching on the final Resurrection is not optional, it’s one of the basic and fundamental tenets of Christianity.
4. This is a personal speculation but I believe it’s quite rational and I want to share it with you to know what you think, but I don’t see reincarnation so fundamentally different from death/annihiliation (in the secular sense). I mean, if I was, say, a pirate in a previous life, or a monk, or a criminal, or an hermit, whoever I was, that person now is dead. Right now I would be the person that is typing these words, and this person is completely different from the pirate/monk/hermit/criminal/younameit “i” was in a previous life. Being reincarnated means, for all intents and purposes, that your actual and present self and consciousness and personality will be annihilated, extinguished. This is hardly different from death (as understood in a secular sense). But Christianity is a religion of life, not of death. As a matter of fact, we believe that death has been conquered and defeated.
All in all, I find reincarnation a completely untenable doctrine if you are a Christian, and a deeply unsettling idea in and of itself. Let me know what you think about it. 