Reincarnation is just one possibility, gnu. Yeah, I think it's probable, but it's just one possibility.

My point was, how does anyone alive now know that death is the "worse alternative". They don't. None of us do, because we haven't experienced it yet. We've seen things die, but we haven't experienced death, and we don't really know what happens to the consciousness of a living being after death...

People just make common assumptions about it, and their assumptions are based on fear of the unknown. You cannot knowledgably state that something is the worse alternative when you don't yet know anything about it.

You can just make a statement based on faith. That's what a person does when they say that death is anything they've decided it is. They make a statement based on faith, not knowledge...whether or not they are "religious".

We do know what happens to physical bodies after death. They become inert and rapidly start to decay. That's easy to observe. But you and I are not just our bodies...we are the living consciousness within our bodies. That consciousness remains in a way "forever young" while the body it resides in ages and finally dies. Maybe the consciousness knows something intuitively that the body-limited awareness does not, if you follow my meaning. The consciousness may be deathless. If so, death may not be such a bad alternative as people think, and it may lead to new life in another body...or in some other state.

I'm not saying I know it does, because I'm not making faith-based statements here....but I'm raising the possibility that it does. Therefore, I do not necessarily assume that death is the worse alternative to staying here indefinitely in an aging body. Remember what happened to Dorian Gray? In the story he wanted immortality in an ageless body. He got it. It did not prove to be the happy experience he had been hoping for, and he finally destroyed himself. His body had became a prison for his consciousness.

In my opinion, the human body is rather like a small, tight shoe and we are the enormous consciousness that's been shoe-horned into it for a brief period. Getting out of that shoe might be a marvelously liberating experience.

We'll all find out presently. ;-D