Comment on I hope hell is like a microwave so if you find the right spot, you're ok

• cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I’m not sure how many people who believe in reincarnation believe that it happens instantly. Some do. I think for a lot of them (I couldn’t put a number or percentage weight on it), it’s a variable time.

  It’s nice to think that the baby who was born down the hall at the moment of your loved one’s death got the soul of your loved one, especially if, as they grow, they exhibit similar traits. Comforting, I mean. Like they will never remember you, but their soul lives on.

  I always had this wild idea when I was a kid that there was a sort of “lobby” that souls waited in for a set amount of time. This idea came about in the early 1980s, long before gaming lobbies, but… same idea. The idea being that in this lobby, there are other things you can do, but the main thing you do is pick a life and live it. Like when you’re a new soul, either one of two things happens. Either you get to pick, and you pick an easy one. Or you don’t get to pick, and you get given a shitty one. As those lives end and you come back, you retain the memories and lessons learned, but they don’t carry through to the next life. But in the lobby, they accumulate. And after a few lives, you start picking more creative ones. Like maybe you want someone who has an epic death. Or someone who is one of the 0.01%. Just for the experience. I dunno. It was a theory I thought of when I was a little kid. Probably nothing to it at all. I don’t actually believe it. I just remember making it up. Might have even pieced it together from movies and TV.

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  • riskable@programming.dev ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yeah it’s a common thought: An afterlife where people gather before going on to the next.

    Usually, people think that the quality of your choices for the next life will be based on whatever criteria they think was most important in life. Someone who went out of their way to be nice will believe that it will be based on how nice you were. Whereas someone who spent their life accumulating money/power will assume it’s based on that.

    For all we know, though, your “afterlife score” could be based on how many different sorts of food you tried, how many buttons you pressed, how far you traveled from where you were born, etc.

    I actually have a novel idea about this concept: Dude dies and gets the red carpet treatment in the afterlife. He’s very happy about it but he doesn’t understand… He never got married and spent most of his life doing data entry and courtroom steganography.

    Turns out, he got the high score in “button pressing.” He’s at the top of the leaderboard and this qualifies him for all sorts of “premium” reincarnation options. Not only that, but the gods intend to put his talents to use right away on “pressing issues.”

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    • cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      I like that idea, that we have no real idea what determines your standings the next time around. I always just figured it was a form of communism (but not in the financial sense, which does not exist in this context) where the goal is to collect all the experiences to “complete” a soul, which then moves onto something else entirely (godhood, perhaps, of another universe or galaxy?). Or maybe if the concept of godhood is hard for one to grasp, the concept of humanity. Maybe we’re not the first step. Maybe you have to go through the lives of various animals and other life. Like you have to have been a good dog a few times. And maybe some plants are even above us, like being a tree. So you would have had to have all these experiences to advance to the next species, or category of species. I dunno.

      I do like the idea of it being something random and unexpected though. Seems a bit Douglas Adams — and I’m totally here for that.

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• DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Or it could be non-linear…

  The Egg by Andy Weir

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