Right. Think of if you take a computer and smash it up with a sledgehammer - the indivdual pieces of the computer still exist, but it isn't going to work as a computer ever again.

It's confusing because you're trying to apply the concept of infinity to the natural universe. That doesn't work because infinity is an abstract that can't exist in any concrete sense. Nothing is infinite.

If there is no connection between the two lives, how is it reincarnation? As far as I know, reincarnation generally takes the form of "The x of person Y becomes the x of person Z after person Y dies", where x can be anything from "soul" to "consciousness".

Actually I very much dislike the idea of reincarnation. Who wants to exist over and over again having to start from scratch every time, never remembering what happened before, and forever clueless as to what happens next? The idea is quite unappealing to me. I don't like having to repeat myself as it is. An infinate chain of repitition on such a scale......*shudder*

Don't get me wrong - like I say, I don't put any stock in it and I hold no particular belief in it. I just probably wouldn't argue someone saying that they might start subjective experience of life again in another form, so long as they didn't try to include baggage such as karma, a soul (which they usually equate with many "lifetimes" of experience leading to "enlightenment" in a continuous and accumulated effort), past-life memories, etc., and so long as they didn't hold it as unequivocal truth. There's no evidence for it, but it's not something I would classify as delusional either. Perhaps I just have a soft spot for Zen.

Personally I just don't know. Most likely we just cease to exist, but I figure physics and neuroscience will probably eventually (although perhaps not in my lifetime) come up with some wild information that will probably not match previous notions Perhaps then religion can be put down for good.

I like to ponder wild ideas sometimes, but that doesn't mean I would hold any of them as actually being true without evidence. My mind abhors a vacuum as much as anyone else's, but I don't deny it's probably all there is. The only thing that I really believe is that it doesn't really matter.

Is there any afterlife concept that actually sounds good? When you put it that way reincarnation does sound not only pointless but nightmarish - being stuck in a loop, making the same mistakes for eternity, but the christian concept seems worse to me. Eternal torture if you didn't live up to some arbitary standard that was never made clear to us in the first place or eternity with no reason to do anything, no challenges to overcome. Heaven sounds boring, I'd almost prefer hell.  

Let the original post serve as notice to Christians especially who think we solely pick on them. A hokie claim is a hokie claim weither it is Loc Ness, ouiji boards, "disimboidied beings", and this.

We do know what atoms are and the atoms that make up our bodies do transfer to various forms from heat loss at death, fuel for bacteria, and the bacteral waste the atoms become after being processed by the bacteria. But that is natural, NOT MAGICAL.

Our brains die and that is it. People who outlive us will remember us. but we do not "come back" and we were not "someone else" or "another animal".

This is just another example of someone saying to themselves, "I like this claim" because they dont want to face the finality of their mortality.

I find it quite comforting that my atoms will be utilized by the environment as part of a natural process. But I dont believe in supertitious claims that somehow my "spirit" or "essense" or "me" will be alive after my bodie dies. I will be dead and that will be it. No need to incert magic when nature is the most logical and reasonable answer.