The best reason that you will not return after this life is that you are dead.

People who do claim to remember past lives always seem to claim to have been royalty or some other person of great importance. But if this farcical notion had any validity most people would be recalling memories of bleak poverty, disease and drudgery.

Whether you come back or not is fun to debate.

My question is, if you could, would you want to?

Very well put!!

When it comes to religion the Noah’s Ark story was what I began questioning at around age 11, I started asking myself, How did that thing stay afloat all those months (9 according to the Bible) without a functional bilge pump? How did they get all those animals aboard? Not to mention all the food that would have been necessary. It had no rudder, no charts, no ventilation, no depth sounder.

You would have needed approximately 7 or 8 modern cargo ships to ferry all that around. That was the beginning for me, though I did not become Atheist until 16 years later. Breaking away from ingrained conditioning is in many ways more difficult than breaking a drug habit.

We don't know if there is an afterlife. We don't know if you are reborn into a new life.

Yes, your actions have consequences and karma is a system of "doing." It never comes back to bite you in the ass. To believe so is putting an unneeded importance to self. Why do I think you will not return after this life? Show me proof of someone who did. We have no consciousness without the body because out thoughts live in our mind and body. They are not just flying around somewhere.

Whether or not one's consciousness travels to another body does not really matter in an evolutionary genetic way, and in terms of Buddhist philosophy, reincarnation is closer to a theory. Even if it does happen, probably most people have no interest in remembering other lifetimes, which seem a total fantasy to them. Additionally, in this world it would be self-defeating to claim one has the same identity as in a previous life.

Reincarnation lacks an explained connection to science. Consider the elegant partial randomness about how humans mutate, develop new characteristics, adapt, procreate, and evolve in balance with surrounding lifeforms... evolutionary genetics theory.

Most mutation is not random... it is a combination of two opposing forces — the mis-pairing (mutation) during DNA replication and the need to preserve a protein's function... which could explain why evolution occurs much faster than if mutations were, in fact, totally random...

Compare death to entropy (randomness)... The more energy that is lost by a system to its surroundings, the less ordered and more random the system is... Energy disperses, and systems dissolve into chaos... entropy is a measure of the disorder of the universe, on both a macro and a microscopic level. Now compare DNA's chemical reactions and genetic instructions to the predominantly non-random growth of a new human.

Back to the theory of reincarnation... if one wishes to remember a previous life (briefly imagine a scientific parallel to non-random DNA sequence repetition) in order to adapt to random chaos in current life circumstances (draw a parallel to *random chaotic mutation), then who's to prove that reincarnation theory (which might never be scientifically proven) does not make sense as an adaptation that is able to deal with chaos. By the way, real Buddhism is philosophy, not religion.

Whether after death, one becomes nothing, a rock, or a human does not really matter.