Reincarnation

When I was growing up, my mother passed away, I was about six or seven at the time. Nobody had talked to me about reincarnation, nobody had really even talked to me about death. I was raised Jewish, and as far as I can tell, they don't talk much about the afterlife, heaven and hell. Well, there is no hell if there is no Satan. There is no messiah either, so you can't absolve yourself of your sins and go to heaven. I suppose it is really just up for personal interpretation.

I decided to interpret death as rebirth. Clearly my mother had been reincarnated as the family schnauzer, Plum (or was it Schnapzie or Bozzie? I can't remember.) It didn't seem to matter that Plum was already far into her adult life, that didn't matter in my newly created dogma.

And now in my adult life I have neither rejected nor accepted the idea of reincarnation, now a bit more fully researched to include things like: when you are born again you must inhabit a new body, people are reincarnated as people not animals, maybe there is an end to the cycle of rebirth, and shouldn't there be a problem with overpopulation...? Oh wait, there is.