One year ago today, my Mother-in-law died without Christ as her Saviour. A Buddhist funeral was conducted and rites and chants were performed during the funeral service to assist the dead to induct her way to rebirth. Based on Chinese Buddhist beliefs, the soul would now be in an intermediate state (中阴身) and should reincarnate with 49 days. Every 7 days, the nun will perform some rites to assist her. Before the 49 days is over, the chief nun told my sister-in-law that my mother-in-law came to her in a dream to tell her that she could stop the rites because she was reincarnated.
Like World of Warcraft, Second Life and Maple Story, a whole world was created based on the belief in reincarnation. It makes me wonder what will happen to the dead who do not believe in all these, like the Christians, Muslims and other non-Chinese Buddhist (they built their own reincarnation-based worlds). Are we disadvantaged because no nun perform those rites for us when we die? Or is the other world like this world, divided into different political entities. So when the Buddhists die, they go to the Buddhist immigration counter which will then go through the 49 days procedure. When Christians die, they go to the Christian immigration counter and etc. Then the next question is, do these nether world political entities fight wars like we do on earth? Maybe they do and our religious wars are an extension of these wars.
It is fun to think and imagine about these, but if it is true, it would be so pitiful for mankind. Fortunately, we know that reincarnation is baseless, and all systems built on it are virtual worlds, like our internet computer games. Fortunately, my faith is based on facts that happened on this earth and in this dimension, not something which happened after death and has yet to be proven true.
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