Originally Posted by Oneironaut
Reincarnation is a nonsense idea. If my "soul" is recycled into another human being, yet that person knows nothing of my life or who I am, what does it mean to say that that person is me? So far as I'm concerned, who I am is based on my experiences and memories, combined with the particular body I find myself inhabiting. Everything I have experienced has had an effect on me, and the sum of all those effects is my personality. A new person with my "soul" but none of my memories would form his own personality based on his own experiences, and would not be related to me in any identifiable way.
Then again, the very idea of a soul is also a nonsense idea. What does it mean to be immaterial? The only immaterial things I can think of are non-existent things. If something is immaterial, i.e. made of nothing, then it doesn't exist. I can't conceive of something that doesn't exist yet exists at the same time, like gods our souls which are supposedly not made of anything yet still somehow in the realm of existence.
If something is "supernatural", it is not part of the natural world, i.e. it cannot be observed or detected. All supernatural entities have no influence on the natural world, otherwise they would be part of the knowable and observable natural world. Souls are claimed to be immaterial and supernatural. How can they possibly affect our world then? How do they not influence physical reality in some measurable way to make our bodies act out our decisions, thereby including themselves in the realm of the natural? They would have to, logically speaking. And then they would not be supernatural entities anymore. They would be some sort of physical reality. A few hundred years ago pretty much everybody believed that the soul was indeed a physical reality, but they imagined it to be kind of a transparent ether-like substance. Now we know that they were partly right. The mind is a physical structure, but it manifests itself as the brain. The brain is your mind, and your mind is your brain. When your brain dies, so does your mind and your consciousness. Unless somebody revives your brain and puts it into a new body, reincarnation just isn't going to happen.