So I want to try a little thought experiment on all y’all.

We Christians believe that, basically, this life is all you get. You are born with a body, a soul, and a spirit. This trinity is special in Christian doctrine, and with good reason, because it is a type and shadow of the Triune Godhead.

I realise that this requires a little bit of explanation. I cannot pretend that I fully understand it myself, but here is my – probably incorrect, I admit – summary of it.

Your body is your physical shell that allows you to experience the physical realm – and we are right at the top of the heap in that realm. We are the apex predators, the top dogs, the biggest and baddest and toughest species. But, when your body dies, it dies completely. There is no way to get it back. It rots and turns into worm food. “Dust to dust” and all of that.

Your soul is the sum of another trinity – your mind, emotions, and willpower. Your soul controls your body. Animals have souls, as do humans. Our souls control our most base animal urges and help elevate us from the realms of beasts – but our souls are mortal too, and are thus destroyed when we die.

What truly separates you from a beast is your spirit. This is your connection with the Lord, your Creator, and is far more than just your memories and experiences. It is this key component which truly separates you from animals. The thing is, though, that although as a man you are born into the very top of the physical realm, with the latent ability to conquer Nature itself if you choose to do so – you are right at the bottom of the spiritual realm.

It is for this reason, among others, that Christian doctrine really hammers home the notion that it is a very stupid idea to fool around with the occult or to consort with forces in the spiritual realm. As a mere mortal man, you are simply not ready or able to fight in that realm without some serious preparation and training. It truly is warfare, of a kind that even most Christians don’t properly understand.

This trinity, by the way, is reflected in the Crucifixion. A reader was kind enough to explain this to me in some detail and pointed out to me the deeper meaning of this particular passage:

Two others, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left…. One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

— Luke 23:32-43, English Standard Version

That, again, is a type and shadow of the three parts that make up a man. If you read your Bible carefully, it quickly becomes obvious that there is far more to it than a series of stories and fanciful narratives; it is packed full of allegories and meanings that go far deeper than mere human understanding can penetrate.

The flesh is sinful and cannot properly control itself. The soul can rebuke and control the flesh, and is the conduit between the spirit and the flesh itself. But the soul, too, dies eventually and is destroyed.

Only the spirit is immortal, and cannot be destroyed. Only the spirit can connect you with God. And, of all of the creatures on this Earth, only Man is blessed with the spirit.

Next time you want to tie yourself into all sorts of philosophical knots over fascinating ideas, put that in your pipe and smoke it. You’ll keep yourself busy for hours.

Anyway, the reason why I bring all of this up is because I was talking to someone not too long ago about the subject of reincarnation.

She was talking to me about people who went through Diarrhoetic – uh, excuse me, Dianetic – therapy and claimed to be able to remember their past lives. (As you may have surmised by now, my thoughts about Dianetics can charitably be described as “extremely sceptical” – but that’s for another post.) And that got us started on the possibility of reincarnating into different bodies as different creatures.

Several major religions and philosophies around the world – many of them, in fact – hold reincarnation as a given. Hinduism certainly does, and depending on who you talk to, Buddhism either received or gave that idea to Hinduism somewhere along the way – because Buddhism started out as a heresy of Hinduism, and then over time, because of the highly syncretic nature of Hinduism, was absorbed right back into the fold. (Hinduism is kind of weird and unique among pagan religions in this respect.)

So essentially, who you are right now is not who you were. Your previous lives stretch backward behind you through time, and your future lives stretch forward before you into infinity.

Now, if reincarnation holds true, then either your next life is assigned to you by purely random chance, or there is some sort of deterministic mechanism which figures out, somehow, who and what you will become.

If the mechanism is purely random, then your actions in this life don’t matter. Neither do your actions in your past life matter. Nor do your actions in your future life matter. So you might as well do whatever the hell you want – because there are no ultimate consequences.

Even an atheist should be able to figure out reasonably easily that this is not a particularly good basis for an orderly and civilised society.

Which, of course, is precisely why most philosophies that believe in reincarnation, have some sort of moral code embedded within themselves to keep people on the right track. In Hinduism, this is karma – put simply, “what goes around, comes around”. In other words, if you live a good life, you get a better life next time around. And if you live a bad life, you get a worse life next time.

But now we have a bit of a problem.

You see, most pagan religions that subscribe to the OGMG idea – “one God, many gods” – that Hinduism embraces so readily, argue that if you are particularly bad in this life, you will be reincarnated as a lower beast or creature in the next one. So if you were a nasty piece of work in this life (like one of my relatives, let’s say) then you will come back as a bat or snail or chicken, etc.

The problem is that animals don’t have spirits. Nor do they have sentience. So there is no sense of “morality” among animals.

So how, then, does someone who used to be a really bad person, and is then reborn as, let’s say, plankton, and then gets eaten and shat out by a whale, get back to being a human eventually?

On top of that – let’s say you live a good life, do lots of good works, meditate properly, give alms to the poor, and generally act like an upstanding human being. Bully for you. Then you get to come back in the next life as… well, another human being, in a better off situation than you were before.

Except… better off in what way, exactly? Materially? It should be immediately obvious to all of us that being materially well off is no predictor of good behaviour or altruism these days. Spiritually? Well okay, but how does one measure this if there are no final and ultimate consequences for sin? Physically? Fine, but how does that help you get to an even better stage later on?

Buddhists, in particular, aim to get around this whole conundrum by talking about the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment of the Buddha. Hindus have their own version of this too, as far as I know – again, don’t take my word for this, I am no religious scholar and it is extremely likely that I am even more spectacularly ignorant of religious doctrine than I think I am.

But Buddhists can’t even agree on how to get to enlightenment. Some Buddhists argue that you get there by being a good person and doing good things for yourself. Other Buddhists argue that you get there by helping others. And, by the way, Buddhists aren’t half as peaceful and laid-back as they might like you to believe. Go lookup the histories of the Buddhist kingdoms of Siam, Laos, and Burma someday. The amount of straight-up murdering that they did back in their day is astonishing.

To my mind, there is something rather wrong with that whole pagan setup. In denying the existence of Heaven and Hell, at least as it is properly understood by Christians, it seems to me as though pagans who believe in reincarnation have setup a bit of a trap for themselves. Sooner or later, they will have to regress to animal forms – and then there is no way back to being human, which might as well be the same as going to Hell.

But now we have an even more serious problem.

If we are the products of uncounted previous lives, then this implies that every single organism and creature on Earth was at some point human, and that there were an enormous – but finite – number of human souls floating around in the aether at some point in time.

If that is true, and you believe that, then if you have sex with a woman and conceive a child with her – that’s not really your child. It’s actually someone else coming into your child’s body.

And now we have a really big problem, because – in theory – you could morally justify infanticide. After all, that’s not your flesh and blood. It’s not your woman’s flesh and blood. It certainly isn’t a combination of your two spirits.

Even hardcore Hindus would, I think, balk at such a radical notion.

I’m not trying to bash Hinduism or Buddhism here. Yes, I disagree with them, but then they disagree with me too. And that’s fine. We can all have our different points of view about ultimate Truth – but the Truth simply is what it is. It is up to us to decide whether or not we accept it.

I became a Christian because I looked at it for years, originally from a position of extreme scepticism and hostility, and eventually realised that it is true. My personal feelings on the subject have nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not Christianity is true – what matters is whether it works.

If it is true, it must work the way it says it does. If it is false, then eventually it will fail.

And the fact is that Christianity works, while paganism ultimately does not. Seems to me that pagans actually have a hard time figuring out what it is that they themselves believe.

Honestly, of all of the pagan religions, the one that makes the most sense has got to be the Norse one. In Viking mythology, your every action and ultimate fate is predetermined. You have no free will. Your future is mapped out for you in the web spun by the Norns. The Vikings believed that if you die well in battle, knee-deep in the blood of your enemies, you go to Valhalla, where you will fight all day, dying over and over again, and rising up every night to sit at the vast table of Odin the Allfather to feast and drink all night, before starting all over again the next day.

Final release only comes at Ragnarok, the battle at the end of all things, in which the world burns in fire and then drowns in water, and there is nothing left but the vast, yawning, silent emptiness of Ginnungagap, for all eternity.

It’s a very bleak approach to life. But, you have to admit, it’s badass. And it actually makes sense, in its own way.

This whole notion of reincarnation, on the other hand, just… doesn’t.

And that brings me back to where I started with all of this: the very Christian concept of body, soul, and spirit. (It might have started with the Jews, for all I know; I’m not a theologian and would be happy to be corrected by any Jews familiar enough with Scripture to point me in the right direction.)

Christian theology teaches us that we have one chance in life to save our souls. Our path to salvation is through Christ, by acknowledging Him as King and Saviour, accepting that His blood sacrifice redeems each and every one of us – if we choose His way – and reconnects us with God.

It also teaches that those who do not accept this, go straight to Hell. Their bodies are destroyed. Their souls are destroyed. Their spirits go right to The Bad Place and don’t come back.

And it teaches that when you marry a woman, you and she become one flesh. Your souls and especially your spirits become intertwined. And when you conceive a child together, that child is an extension of you both – in body, soul, and spirit. That child is you, in a very real sense – and yet is also its own individual person.

So you tell me: which one makes more sense? The philosophy that teaches that little children are just reincarnated versions of other people who have nothing to do with you, and may in fact have regressed from their previous lives for behaving badly according to some arbitrary and ever-changing moral code?

Or the faith that teaches that a child is everything that is best about you and your woman, combined together to create a new and beautiful life that has a body, soul, and spirit entirely of its own?