Reincarnation

To be reincarnated means for a human soul to be re-embodied after death and come back to life in another form. In this belief system one will experience life after life, until at last the soul is perfected by purification of the flesh and free to return to the source from which it came. One who believes in reincarnation holds the spiritual belief that each individual soul lives many lives in various physical bodies, whether they are animal or human.

With such thinking a person could have been a dog or cow in a past life experience on earth or even simply another human being. Either way, the kind of material life that a person is born into, and the problems they face is indicative of their “spiritual” condition. The role of soul in the universe plays itself out in a sort of hierarchical spiritual system, indicative of religions of the East such as Hinduism or Buddhism, and it has many variations. It is always associated with divine justice being served in regards to the universal law of Karma, or the law of “cause and effect.”

Inn such a system, if you do well, you move on, you progress; if you do not, you have to relearn the lessons before you can advance. A soul may even have as many progressive lives as needed to gain proper understanding of how they are becoming perfected, or becoming God and have the belief that they are getting better and better over time as they continue on the endless cycle of death and birth over time and eternity.

The poor human creature born into such a religious system is in a condition they themselves are responsible for. It they are in affluence, it is their just rewards, if they are in hardship, this too their just retribution for past deeds, known as karma. Good or bad one's work will incur karma, and life as it is for our is not to be altered, for to do so could incur karma, good or bad, upon one's self. Over many lives and though the passage of time they hope that the soul that they are will get better and better until they become one with "god" the ultimate soul.

The people of the book, both Christians and Jews reject reincarnation. They believe, “it is appointed once for man to die, and then the judgment.” (Hebrews 9:27) They do not believe they will return to the earth as an animal in another life, nor that they have had many lives in the past to bring them to the wonderful stage of “evolution” they now find themselves in.