Rebirth and Theistic Afterlife
Let's go straight to the question of Rebirth.
Christians and Buddhists believe in rebirth – they just disagree about the number of times it happens. The former say it occurs once again after natural birth (twice if you count baptism) and the latter says the phenomenon repeats... a lot.
Rebirth is a stumbling block for Westerners looking into Buddhadhamma (i.e., the Buddha's teachings). If someone wants to practice a secular form of Buddhism — one that leaves the "extraordinary" claims to the side – this is understandable but, in my own experience, leads to low energy.
What is the point in claiming multiple lifetimes if you don't remember them or the lessons learned? We want to believe that there is a point to multiple lives and that is only possible if we can recall them. We maybe have a life well-lived and it gets lost between the last breath and the moment a sperm joins with an egg.
According to the Buddha, the number of times you have died is astonishing; if you took the bones from all your past careers, piled them up, they would be as high as the Himalayas. The tears you've cried over lifetimes? Enough to fill the oceans of the earth.
If the bones of a single person
for a single eon were gathered up,
they’d make a pile the size of a mountain:
so said the great seer.
And this is declared to be
as huge as Mount Vepulla,
higher than the Vulture’s Peak
near the Mountainfold of the Magadhans. — Iti 24
From an inconceivable beginning comes the wandering-on. A beginning point is not discernible, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating & wandering on. Long have you thus experienced stress, experienced pain, experienced loss, swelling the cemeteries—enough to become disenchanted with all fabrications, enough to become dispassionate, enough to be released. — SN 15:10
Rebirth is not as severe as the Christian vision of hell, but this doesn't exactly recommend it as part of one's outlook.
A modern take on the Christian hell goes like this: It is eternal, the agony never ending and it's all pointless suffering. An omni-competent Deity creates flawed creatures and then when these flawed beings, compounded from the four elements, act, uh, flawed in fulfilling their intended purpose, they are punished out of all proportion by their maker.
In Catholicism, a jerking off session in the shower followed by a fatal slip lands you in hell. Modern Catholics will push back here and say this is a gross simplification and that moral valuations are very nuanced and that moral theology has come along way, etc. but the fact is that masturbation has always been viewed as sufficient grounds for a one-way trip to the Pit. Most primates masturbate, humans included. Telling a thirteen year old boy not to relieve himself of excess reproductive fluids until the age of thirty, after he's gone to college, attended graduate school, established a career, paid off student loans and found a wife is probably too much.
Any religion that could redefine a particular sin declared from all time as mortal as something mmm, mmmmmm, mm, mmmm nuanced is unserious.
Humans are animals and the animal nature is no respecter of the prolonged education and training required by modern technological society.
The two values – youthful lust and eternal punishment – are completely incommensurable and the doctrine therefore, meaningless, to most moderns. An infinite span of time in hell caused by a programmed limitation in the human biology doesn't sound fair. That's one modern plank against the teaching on hell. Christians always appeal to Free Will against this: When someone masturbates, they are choosing hell over God.
It is too much that a man would be created only for the purpose of eternal punishment. Yet there are schools within Christianity who hold such a view: God's majesty is supreme and his ways so inscrutable that if he wants to condemn billions to eternal torment, who are we to complain? His majesty can in no way be diminished by such a mighty reckoning because he is the very essence of Goodness. Absolute Goodness cannot subtract anything from itself by its decrees. God dispenses and withholds his grace as he wishes.
In the chain of being, hell is better than non-existence because even in hell, the damned are the recipients of God's grace simply by being allowed to exist. The lowest level of hell, where according to Dante Satan chomps on Judas for all eternity, is still a peg up from Absolute Nothingness. Better to be than not to be.
Contra the chain of being argument, the two most recent popes have entertained annihilationism as a middle way between the appalling injustice of hell and the leniency of Universalism. Under this lens, the soul of the impenitent reprobate is destroyed completely after death. No fuss, no muss. Some scholars interpret Jesus as warning of a total destruction of the souls of sinners in the Synoptic Gospels; his later disciples reinterpreted it as an endless state (Rev 14:11). Popes Benedict and Francis are heretical in their opinions by the standard of the Book of Revelations.
Christianity balances punishment against mercy under the broader theme of Divine Justice. Post-mortem judgement in Christianity (and Islam) have to do with the restoration of justice in creation by a supreme lawgiver. Annihilation appears to satisfy the demands of justice and mercy without violating either. The offender no longer can go on offending; he suffers a moment of blinding pain and winks out of existence. Justice is served, cruelty avoided. The notion of a permanent Self was not part of the Hebrew dispensation and came only much later under the influence of the Greeks.
Some will appeal to the Universalist Thesis, which has a very distinguished pedigree in the Latin and Greek Churches. Fr. Kimel has amassed an impressive list of Serious Theologians, canonized saints included, who've maintained the possibility of eventual salvation through Christ for all humans.
Rebirth is a different take altogether. The Buddha acknowledged that life has pleasurable and unpleasant aspects. "Life is suffering" is not a teaching of the Buddha. All life has dukkha, which means disappointment, stress, inconstancy, worry, pain, fear, boredom, sadness, fatigue, ennui.
Whether in heaven or hell, or in the throes of pleasure or death, there is the mark of impermanence because nothing in the cosmos lasts forever. Nothing. The angels and the gods are mortal and will continue to wander throughout the cosmos until Enlightenment, same as the demons who work overtime in hell, dealing out pain to the denizens.
Justice does not appear in the Buddhist understanding of rebirth nor is there a Supreme Judge. We are not punished for having been a serial killer in one life or awarded a heavenly perch in another because of kindness and generosity. On one level, what we get is impersonal because we are processes partaking in a complex chain of cause and effect that defies our sense of temporality. On another, the fruits of karma are about what we do in our thoughts and are therefore, custom tailored, hand crafted though still subject to conditions.
This stands in distinct contrast to Christianity, where identity down to the physical level is guaranteed in any post-mortem career through the rebirth of the soul into a body, newly minted for eternity. If damned, the sin is as permanent as the soul. The causes have ceased but the effects are forever. Nothing like this is seen in the cosmos. It stands outside of natural law. Finite, limited causes do not produce eternal effects. And therein lies the seed of Pre-determinism in Christianity.
For since no ordinary cause can produce an eternal state, then if the eternal state is real, it must have been caused by something capable of producing eternal effects. But only God can create an eternal effect. Ergo, the damned and the saved are so by God's will. Do what you want to do, just don't think it's going to change the outcome.
Dhamma - the Natural Law – says that we plant the seeds for our future conditions, in this life or another, by what we do today. And by do, the Buddha meant by what we think. Thinking comes before doing; this is why he placed such a focus on seeing where our thoughts are anchored at any given moment. People who are aware of their mental states can anticipate the conditions that will lead to either wholesome or unwholesome states. They assume an active role in shaping future states, in this life and in the next.
Think back to April 18th, 1997. If you were not alive then, pick another distant date. Nothing about it is real and it's highly unlikely you remember any details even if it was your birthday. What did you eat? What did you wear? Who did you talk to? Our lives are like that, a blur of days we categorize broadly by life states like marriage, employment or school. Ask me about Aug 8, 2009, I will tell you where I was living and working, but not about what I was thinking, feeling or planning.
Our present life slips quickly into the mists of time. Recall of events from three lifetimes ago? Forget about it.
Hopefully, you see how the narrative you might have about yourself as a stable entity with a start and end date is a construct of the mind. Yes, you can validate with records and photos that you existed on this day, but go far enough back and the entity in those documents is no longer you even physically. The atoms in your body from that period have moved on, replaced by new ones. Your memories have faded and your valuations will have changed, maybe even unbeknownst to you.
It is the nature of our consciousness to feel itself a constant. Everything about existence begins from the basis of awareness and material reality is just a secondary effect of its activity. In the West, this view has gone by the handle Idealism, but it is a small camp even though it's the natural default of rational creatures, in fact the only one they will know for certain. A schizophrenic may experience voices but he does so on the plane of wounded awareness.
