Sounds great on the surface

A comment thread on FB brought me to make some very good arguments against a belief that I absolutely detest.

Original FB post I made: "I was brought into the world against my will and I've never been happy about that. Quintessential millennial POV."

A comment I made in response to my own post: "I was brought into the world against my will and I'll be taken out of it against my will, too."

Friend of mine commented: "I don't agree with that pov.
I chose or had to come here for whatever reason.
And I tell my kids the same when they use that..
Nope. You chose to come here. I just gave you a way in..."

My response:

I can only suppose you didn't think through the horrifying implications if your point of view were true. But I've heard that terrible belief before from my mother. It's one of those beliefs that sounds great on the surface, but reveals horrifying implications if you think about it for more than five minutes.

According to your point of view, I chose I be a member of a collective mind whose main occupant is a trans woman, chose to come into the world with autism and ADHD, a world where those conditions make life very difficult and attract bullies? Chose to be born into this collective as the cumulative result of my demon spawn of a younger sister screaming nonstop for hours every fucking goddamned day for years, an activity that kept making me go into meltdowns when I couldn't endure the torture any longer? Do you realize that if I had this life to do over again, and I could remember what happened, that that torment she put me through was so horrible I would drown her in a bathtub the first chance I got in order to keep it from happening again? That I wrote a literal fucking horror story about a family terrorized by a changeling child just like her?

And I suppose black people chose to be born into a world where they're routinely murdered by cops for being black, among other oppressions? And did you stop to think that your POV means that some children choose to be born to parents who abuse or even rape them?

Sorry, but that point of view is one of the kinds of spiritual victim blaming I absolutely abhor and detest in neopaganism and Christianity. Because if it's true, then the soul and the mind have little in common with each other, and every soul that chose a life where they were victims of child abuse or murder based on something they can't control about themselves is as much of a force of malevolent, malignant evil as the Christian god is. If it's true, then those souls are just as evil as would be a god that created Hell to punish people he didn't like. And furthermore, if it's true then it means we really *do* live in Hell, but instead of it being some accident of physics, it was done to us deliberately by something vile, nasty, and horribly evil.

I would rather live in a world where souls don't exist and death is truly the end of existence, a world where the universe is vast and cold and utterly uncaring. As terrifying as that idea is, it pales in comparison to the idea that we're all at the mercy of forces so powerful, evil, and malevolent that they would think it a good idea to subject innocent children to horrible abuse.

Seriously, the *least* terrible version of your point of view being true that I can think of is that souls that choose terrible lives full of abuse, fear, and murder are masochists on the level of the Hellraiser series. Of course that means that the souls that choose to be the perpetrators of such crimes are malevolent sadists. So there really is no redeeming that point of view.

In a second comment I added:

That's not to say reincarnation isn't real. There's too much evidence it's real to dismiss it. It's just that in my interpretation of it, where souls reincarnate to is entirely random (if they choose to incarnate at all), and there is no god or gods or other higher powers behind the process... souls are as much a fluke of physics as our bodies, we and our souls still live in a vast, cold, uncaring universe and we are all at the whims of random chance, in a world where free will is a given because there exists no force great enough to supersede it (apart from the reincarnation lottery, but I believe the soul can choose to not reincarnate). As terrifying as that thought may be, it's still far more fair and just and kind than your POV, or POVs that involve fate or being at the mercy of higher powers.

A vast, cold, uncaring universe where all inhabitants are flukes of random chance and at the mercy of random chance is comforting to me because it is the least horrible option.