Everyone is free to believe what she or he (or they) wants and everyone else is free to agree or disagree.
Life knows no absolute and unchangeable truths, no matter how much we try to capture it in our stories and firm beliefs.
Having said that, I am of the opinion that some people have misunderstood the subject of multiple lives.
You cannot convince me that there will be other lives for me after my death.
Not as a human being and not as another living being, such as a favorite animal.
And it just seems pointless to me if such a next life is all about punishment or reward for the current one.
The shelf life of a living being is finite.
I’m more into science and not into wishful thinking, also where my own life is concerned. When I die, it’s over for me, and that’s fine.
I also don’t like the pseudo-science that would have us believe that our ‘soul’ is a tangible thing that *poof* leaves our body at death and that, weighing about 300 grams, then makes its way to a newborn next living being to live on in and learn new lessons in.
No, I think that, like all other living beings (other animals, plants, fungi, single-cell organisms), I once came into being (was born) and one day will cease to exist (die).
That seems logical to me in the scheme of things and I’m at peace with that.
What I do believe in, although it is of course nonsense to ‘believe’ in things that have been scientifically proven beyond doubt, is that I, like all living, dead and inanimate objects on our planet and in the vast universe, am made up of atoms. Microscopic particles, which in themselves consist of much smaller particles that we cannot yet see, which after my death and decay become part again of other life forms, or even inanimate things such as water, stone, sand and air.
Nothing is lost. The atoms that once made up my body form new connections in the great, almost infinite circle of life on our planet. Until our sun extinguishes, or, before that, all life on Earth ceases to exist. And even then, all the atoms that once made up my body, our planet, and our solar system remain part of the universe, ‘the everything.’
Not I, not my elusive ‘soul’, but my atoms continue to exist.