QUOTE(jessicalawes11 @ Mar 26 2005, 09:20 AM)
Okay, we all know that people belive reincarnation is when the soul moves on to another body when we die. But we all know that the Earth won't go on forever. One day, the sun will go boom and Earth will be fried. So if reincarnation is true, (And I'm not saying it is or isn't) what will happen to the souls then? Will they go to alien lifeforms? Go back in time? End altogether? I just wonder...

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IMHO, it is the spirit which reincarnates, and by that I mean the mind+soul. There are good reasons not only for distinguishing mind from body, but for distinguishing soul from mind. This spirit we inhabit is designed for the species Homo Sapiens, so if the species suddenly went extinct, we (we being souls) would need to discard those minds and find some other adventure to get involved in. So it is essentially the same problem when the Sun becomes a lovely planetary nebulae in 5 or 10 billion years, and first desiccates Earth, and then blows it into interstellar dust particles (many carrying bacterial spores ready to reseed new planets). So once again our souls will need to find some new playground, perhaps a new planet in an early stage of development. As the billions of years go by, the most habitable part of the galaxy steadily moves farther from the center, and so will we, forgetting all about Earth, but possibly taking with us our spiritual evolution, or devolution. Sounds a bit wacko, doesn't it, in today's reductionist worldview?