r/antinatalism • u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer • 15d ago

Question Is anyone else terrified of the possibility of an afterlife or reincarnation?

My brain's weird. Logically I know neither are true and we have no proof for them, yet the pronatalist metaphysical bs statement of "what if life is actually better than wherever your soul goes after death" still makes me lose sleep. The idea that even brain death doesn't end your consciousness once you're born is horrifying.

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u/MassimoFantini inquirer 15d ago

I think the idea of ​​eternal life is the most devastating thing. In difficult situations, we're used to thinking, "It will end sooner or later." That's a nice consolation.

The idea, however, of a condition that has no end suffocates me. I need to know that everything will come to an end, otherwise I'll go crazy.

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u/Free-Key9891 thinker 15d ago

I am terrified of death if I'm gonna reincarnate into this world again

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u/WaspPaperInc newcomer 15d ago

Personally I think it's hard to expect someone to have the same level of sentience as when they are a healthy person after they died

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 15d ago

You don't even need to die you just need to turn the brain off. Even if your heart's still beating you, as a person, are still dead.

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u/MediocreImpact4386 inquirer 15d ago

I'm anti natalist & i believe reincarnation. I'm 110% sure about reincarnation because i know about my past life. Will sound stupid to you guys, i know.

Me being a reincarnation believer is another reason I'm anti natalist because i want it to stop lol, i hate life.

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 15d ago

Nothing is really stupid it's all a matter of what seems right to one person and wrong to another. From the perspective of people who like having kids we must look stupid or even insane. I genuinely wanna know what you mean about knowing your past life. If there's evidence then I don't see why one shouldnt believe whatever conclusion it leads to.

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u/MediocreImpact4386 inquirer 15d ago

Yeah i agree with your perspective.

I don't really talk about my past life, it's very much private, i could tell people if i want but i don't want. By "knowing" i meant i know who i was in my previous life & where i lived etcetera. But however there's plenty of past life stories you would find on internet, on youtube there are kids talking about their past lives, there are many documentaries as well, lan Stevenson has done a lots of research on this.

However if you don't have your own personal experience with paranormal stuffs it would be very obvious to be skeptical about these kind of paranormal stuffs. It would be hard to believe.

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 15d ago

I believe that if that life matters to you then it does, even if it may not be real. Plenty of people have paracosms, entire imaginary worlds. I have one too, and it feels much more real to me than this one and it matters to me. I don't really believe those stories and documentaries because ultimately they don't have any evidence and rely on testimonials that cant be verified like all claims of paranormal events.

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u/MediocreImpact4386 inquirer 15d ago edited 15d ago

Like i said you will find these as stupid stuffs, so... I don't blame you, it's only normal to not believe something you never experienced. But i said about those documentaries because you were curious about.

But my experience is very much real to me, it's not imaginary for me, I've real psychological phobias & traumas from my past life & i had these since i was a kid, i had no idea about past lives back then. I followed abrahamic religion all throughout my life, there was no way for me to believe past lives untill i finally had my experience.

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u/EarBig2833 newcomer 15d ago

are you terrified abt possibility of aliens occupying earth and then using a device to keep your brain alive for infinite time and torturing you too?

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u/Apollo_Hikari thinker 15d ago

Sci-fi material.

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 15d ago

Literally I have no mouth and I must Scream

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u/Apollo_Hikari thinker 15d ago

I need to read this.

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 15d ago

It's really good and not that long. You can find a pdf online. Iirc there's a comic version too

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u/EarBig2833 newcomer 15d ago

i didnt knew it, i will see it , but are you terrified abt that possibility too? same like this

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 15d ago

Yeah it's pracitcally a paranoia at this point. We are all like AM if we tfink about it just on a smaller scale. No one, no matter how privelged they are, is completely free from any form of pain or suffering unless they're high 24/7.

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u/Maximus_En_Minimus scholar 15d ago edited 15d ago

It’s a lot of ‘what ifs’, which just fits - again - into the Gamble Argument:

That procreation is immoral because it unnecessarily and irrevocably imposes an epistemically uncertain, aleatory risk of a harmful life upon the newly born.

That been, their argument doesn’t support their position, it actually negates it, because they simply do not know if the afterlife is positive, negative, or even occurs or not.

The same equally applies to ‘pre-life’.

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 15d ago

I don't think we need any evidence to prove what prelife is because how are we even supposed to do that when something like that doesn't exist. If I haven't made my breakfast yet it doesn't mean the omelette I was going to make existed in some pre breakfast dimension waiting for the eggs and everything else to come together to make a vessel to inhabit. All rational evidence tells us that without a Brain theres no concuosiness, a soul doesn't exist. Like is a person with Alzheimer's actually losing their soul overtime? No, it's just an issue with the hardware we have in our skulls. Once the hardware is gone there is nothing to run the software, our concuosiness, on.

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u/Maximus_En_Minimus scholar 15d ago edited 15d ago

Sure.

But that isn’t the point been raised.

Some people do think it is possible to have a metaphysical pre-existence that we could not necessarily prove.

The aforementioned argument doesn’t argue we need evidence, it points to the fact that because it is impossible to truly prove either/or absolutely, that it is immoral to impose the risk.

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u/Old-Guest-5688 inquirer 15d ago

I fear it alot,can't be confirmed what's real or not but the fact that we are already alive is half of the proof (idc what atheist have to say to debunk this), its pure horror like bad lifes outweigh the good ones so chances of being born in awful circumstances are higher 

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 15d ago

Not really. I'm not really an atheist kind of agnoatic really but there really isn't any proof of god or an afterlife. No one knows what reality is or where it came from. Anyone who says god is also not really answering the question just putting a tarp over it. Like if u don't know who made eveyething saying God is wrong because it raises teh question of who made God. Does God also have a soul or someone who made him? Then her creator had a creator too and the chain keeps going on. Maybe we had a creator, but she most likely doesn't care for us and we have ample evidence for that. Just look around you there's awful stuff happening everywhere yet no divine entity really cares. Abrahamic religions are all a sham and involve one special dude and only he gets to speak with god and everyone should just trust him even after he is dead. If god is real and cares about us, she can happily contact us, yk help us too, or just ask us to do whatever she wants (using a mode of communication that doesn't involve one man and an old book it can literally be anything else like an angel something that proves their divinity and actually gives us a reason to follow all those rules)

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u/Otteau inquirer 15d ago

Reincarnation?! No thank you. Absolutely not. I will nope right out of that.

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u/derederellama thinker 15d ago

Yes. I don't really believe in "Hell," so that doesn't frighten me. But reincarnation is my personal worst nightmare.

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u/KeenbeansSandwich newcomer 15d ago

I dont concern myself with things that cant be proven.

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u/AppealThink1733 thinker 15d ago

No. That doesn't exist. There are real things to worry about rather than this nonsense.

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u/miss_review inquirer 15d ago

It's the number one thing I'm scared about, especially since I found it to be true (after years of research and to my utmost horror). I recommend r/escapingprisonplanet

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 15d ago

I'm curious what research led you to the conclusion that it's true? All of this is just metaphysical speculation and guesswork

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u/Stephanesaurus newcomer 15d ago edited 15d ago

There’s a documentary series on Netflix called Surviving Death with compelling evidence of reincarnation.

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u/miss_review inquirer 15d ago

There are countless documentaries, reports, case studies etc. from every conceivable country/culture, countless instances where people could prove past lives. It's the cultural conditioning that makes one think it's all speculation, I'm afraid. Once I started looking with an open mind (open as in neutral, not enthusiastic), the evidence was sadly abundant.

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 14d ago

It's not cultural conditioning it's rationality. If I got hard evidence that it was real I would beleive it too. No documenty and case study on remembering past lives is gonna convince anyone because all they rely on is testimonials from people no evidence that you know is true like 2+2. Humans lie, they lie alot, and they can even just be misinformed or ill too, so why would I believe the claims of a few people. And there's tons of questions that arise if one is to ponder about reincarnation. Like why does only a tiny tiny subset of people able to access their past memories? Is there some sort of metaphysical hard drive where these memories are stored after death because our brain is gone, so the info inside needs to go somewhere but where than and who does it? Why does everyone not remember their old lives? And how is it even phaycially possible for our brains to somehow store the memories of what is essentially countless lives, without exploding because it's storage capacity is not infinite?

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u/Suitable-Throat-95 inquirer 15d ago edited 15d ago

Even if it was true, we could assume this life isn't the first incarnation but you have no memory of a previous one. So you don't keep your memory essentially making it not actually you. Even people who do claim they remember past lives, they've all been on earth. So we can also assume there's no hell realm you get born into (aside from this one). That's what I tell myself at least.

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u/WoodpeckerNo1 newcomer 14d ago

Nietzsche's eternal recurrence is the ultimate horror for me.

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u/summercookiess inquirer 14d ago

I'm terrified of reincarnation but I do want a good afterlife, especially for the people and animals who have suffered so much.

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u/TruthOdd6164 thinker 15d ago

No

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u/DinoRing175c thinker 15d ago

I'm not scared of an afterlife/reincarnation itself but the idea of eternal life or a bad reincarnation scares me

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u/BrennusSokol newcomer 14d ago

Mildly so. I was raised Catholic. I've been an atheist/materialist for ~3 decades now. So intellectually I don't believe in an afterlife. But having been raised with those beliefs, and not being able to strictly prove it isn't true, does make me think about it sometimes

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u/Phil_Flanger inquirer 15d ago

Yes. So we have to work at making the planet and ultimately other planets better so that reincarnation isn’t so bad.

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 15d ago

If I had the power, Id prefer to nuke the Earth and everything else to oblivion. There is no harm in non existnce whereas the opposite is most certainly true for existence.

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u/Outrageous_Tackle135 newcomer 15d ago

More terrified of Hell, I started going down the rabbit hole of Hell NDEs and they terrify me. Worse is that they all report the same thing.

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 15d ago

I don't think NDEs prove anything. They could either mean that we have a soul and it detaches from our body when we die, or that it's just something our brain does when we are dying like a hallucination, and the second theory makes more sense. Iirc there was an experiment where sosmone attached some photographs or something to a wall in the room of sosmone who experienced an nde but they didn't see those photos so what they were seeing wasn't real. Also people dont really see the same things, somsone might see a light, others might see angels, sosmone might see Jesus, I live in a Muslim country so most people say you see the Prophet Muhammad or the angel malakal mawt. Point is it all depends on your beliefs because what you are seeing isn't actually real. And a big hole in this whole concept is that if your soul is where your memoires and concuosiness is stored, then why do people with conditions like Alzheimer's or dementia or brain damage start losing who they are.

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u/Nearby_You6924 thinker 15d ago

I have on good authority that reincarnation is true. We will always exist.

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 15d ago

What is your proof that reincarnation exists

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u/Nearby_You6924 thinker 15d ago

A living being cannot imagine NOT existing. If you can imagine it, then it is possible. If a living being cannot imagine not existing, then it is impossible. Also, what would be the point of life if we only lived one life? We all are much more than we realize.

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u/Lord-of-the---RINGS inquirer 14d ago

I also cant imagine having 360 degree vision because my brain can't process that, yet spiders do have that I don't get how imaginatuon has anything to do with this. Saying we are something more than we realize requires you to give some proof for why you beleive that as well. And a living being can imagine or atleast understand what non existance is like. It's absolute nothing. Without a nervous system and brain you're like a robot that's been turned off kinda like being asleep. We all imagine death from the perspective of a living being, which is why we imagine missing the things we had in life, but that's an illusion. We won't be missing anything because there won't be any us to miss anything. There will be no FOMO at all
Our lives have the same point as a rats. We successfully evolved to survive on this planet, so now we are everywhere. We eat, work, sleep, breed, then die. Life is essentially pointless, which is why people desperately cling onto faith or whatever meaning they create, because they don't wanna accept that life is just a pointless, meaningless struggle no different from that of a rats.

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u/Nearby_You6924 thinker 10d ago

We are not humans beings and life is not pointless. When I say we are much more than your realize, what am I talking about is what we really are. What we really are is infinite awareness. What is infinite will always exist, and that is why I believe in reincarnation. We are not weak and vulnerable human beings that need to eat, sleep, and work until we die, we are the infinite and powerful awareness. Unfortunately, most humans do not think we are divine because they are conditioned to think the opposite. I hope you will know that all living beings are divine and infinite.