By Pernickety Mee
Theologies differ vastly on various counts, one of these being their claims about how human (and other) beings came into existence. According to some theologies, there was a time when all beings, including human beings, did not exist. Then, God decided to bring them into being from out of nothing, each at the moment God decided for this to happen. Bringing them into existence from earlier non-existence, God sent them into the world, here to spend a limited period of time.
In contrast to this understanding, some other theologies claim that all beings have existed always, since eternity past, on some plane or the other in the vast universe, including possibly our earthly plane. They have been continually taking birth and dying and then taking birth again in a cycle that is as old as the present universe itself or perhaps even older. In other words, all beings are eternal and there was never a time when none of them existed.
The first set of theologies can be said to represent the ‘one birth theory’, while the second set can be said to represent the ‘rebirth theory’. These sets of theologies make mutually contradictory claims about the possibility of the pre-birth existence of beings. Theologies that champion the one-birth theory flatly deny it, while those that champion the rebirth theory emphatically affirm it. Now, obviously, not both of these claims can be true. There are just two possibilities in this regard: either one of these theories is true, or none of them is.
For many years, I did not give this issue much, if any, attention. I was too deeply immersed in life to disengage from my busyness and try to view life from a distance. Later, I came under the influence of certain theologies that deny pre-birth existence outright, claiming that we have just one life—this short, present one—on the basis of which God will decide to admit us to Paradise or to consign us to Hell, there to possibly spend all eternity to come. I don’t know if I seriously and completely believed all of this, but I suppose I didn’t bother to critically reflect on it enough and might simply have gone along with it because it was the expected thing to do if one was to remain ‘faithful’.
But now I am beginning to intuitively feel that theologies that posit the eternal pre-birth existence, of not just human beings but of all other beings too, might actually have got it right. One reason for this—and for me, perhaps this is the major one—is the question of Divine love and justice or of God being Most Loving and Most Just.
I find that the pre-birth theory resonates with the issue of Divine love and justice in a manner than the one-birth theory does not seem to. Restricting our argument here just to human beings (although the same argument could be used for other beings too), we find that some people are born in very privileged circumstances while some others are born in abject poverty. Some people are born to loving, caring parents, while someone else's parents are cruel, negligent and uncaring. Someone is born as the daughter of the king of a country and someone else is born as a beggar’s son. Some are born with fine features and a sound mind, while some are congenitally ugly and mentally and physically deformed. Some are born in peaceful and prosperous parts of the world, while some take birth in countries that are racked by poverty, violence and disease. And so on.
Clearly, the circumstances in which human beings take birth when they come onto Planet Earth, which play a major role in shaping the course of their life as it begins to unfold, are vastly different and unequal, being unique to each person. What, we might want to know, explains these stark differences and inequalities at birth itself, the starting point for people’s life here? Bringing in the God-factor, we might also ask, “If God, as a being separate from us, exists, and, if, as is said, He is Most Just and Most Loving, why did or does He allow for these differences and inequalities at birth itself? If a good parent treats all their children equally, why is it that God, who is said to be the Great Parent of all and who is much more just and loving than all human parents put together, permits, or perhaps even engineers, such differences and inequalities among His children at birth, which clearly plays a major role in shaping their life-chances, the way their whole life on Earth unfolds and turns out to be? If no just and loving human parent would treat their children like this, why does God do so?”
Theologies that are based on the one-birth theory might respond to these queries by answering that birth-based differences and inequalities among people are simply a Divine decree, the way that God has willed such things to be, and that we mere humans cannot fully fathom the mysterious wisdom behind it. Proponents of these theologies might say that all we can do is to accept this as the Will of God without asking the question “But Why?” Perhaps, they might add for our comfort, when we stand before God on the Day of Judgment in the Hereafter, He will inform us why He created people with such differences and inequalities at birth itself, which might seem to some of us to be something that is patently unfair and unjust and not something that we would expect a loving and just God to do. Till then, however, we need to remain content with not knowing, and not being able to know, the grand mystery behind it all.
While this explanation might seem convincing to adherents of these theologies (many of whom might accept it simply out of inherited faith or convention or out of fear of displeasing God if they were not to do so), it does not quite resonate with me, primarily because it reflects what might seem to be an image of an arbitrary, unfair, unjust and unloving God. I am not a parent, but if I were one, I think I would like to give all my children an equal starting-off point in their life. I would certainly not give one of my children an abundance of good things, like food, clothing and a good education, for no special merit of theirs, while depriving another of such things for no fault of their own. If a fallible and very faulty being like myself would not treat my own children unequally and unfairly by giving them unequal chances at the outset of their lives to live and flourish, because I would consider that as whimsical, unloving, unfair and unjust, could the Great Good, Just and Loving God really do something like that? But this is what theologies based on the one-birth theory can be interpreted to suggest, thus creating an image of a whimsical, unloving, unfair and unjust God, and that is a God that I hesitate to accept.
The rebirth theory provides what I now regard as a much more convincing and sensible response to the fact of birth-based differences and inequalities among human beings (as well as among other beings). According to this theory, it is not a seemingly arbitrary decree of God, but, rather, the remaining stock of our actions (our deliberate thoughts, our words and our physical actions) carried over from our innumerable previous lives that shapes the circumstances of our present birth. These circumstances have thus been created by us, ourselves, in the course of our countless previous births, and not by God. This theory explains birth-based differences and distinctions among human (and other) beings as being a result of their own accumulated past actions that have yet to be redeemed, and not something that has been decided on the basis of some mysterious and seemingly whimsical Divine will.
By thus explaining the circumstances of our birth as well as the birth-based differences and inequalities among human beings as a result of human actions and not the unfathomable decree of God, the rebirth theory seems to me to salvage the image of God from the damage to it caused by the one-birth theory that posits a God who seems incredibly arbitrary, whimsical, unloving, unfair and unjust. This is one major reason why I am coming to intuitively feel that the rebirth theory might well be right.