Now, it is true to say that at death, the atoms of my body are recycled into other beings. Our atoms have seen the birth of the universe, have seen a million lives and a million deaths, have sailed the seas and the air. We eat the bodies of our countless ancestors, breathe their air and drink what they drank. This is a very profound truth, but this form of "naturalist reincarnation" has nothing to do with the supposed reincarnation of the self.
The mind is a specific structure of matter that can only arise at birth. As such, it is nothing but a particularly narrow possibility, which depends on the more general possibility of the body.
Reincarnation, on the other hand, is based on the premise that the human mind is special, that it can persist regardless of the destruction of life and body. Why do we believe that the mind must reincarnate, instead of something simpler like an arm or a foot? Because we identify with our minds, of course. This is little more than anti-spiritual wishful thinking.
Death, therefore, is an inevitability. This is perhaps not as bad as we would tend to think. As the ultimate limit of human life, death is our fundamental source of morality and meaning.
This may seem counter-intuitive to someone still in a reactionary mindset. After all, most believers hold firmly that life can only have meaning if it persists for eternity.
But they really have it backwards, as usual. If our life does not end, then why should we act in a certain way? What actions could possibly be "good" to a being which cannot be permanently hurt? Such a being would have no necessary need to be good to other people or to take care not to hurt himself: as we just said, nothing can really hurt him. He will simply continue doing whatever he feels like. Why would an evil theist fear retribution from his peers, if he is simply going to come back in another form?
This also nullifies meaning since a being with no necessity or needs cannot have any drive, any reason to act in any given way. At best, such a being could have temporary passions, but in an eternity of idle contemplation, such passions become infinitely irrelevant. Likewise, life becomes worthless, since it is in infinite supply. Without limits, there is no value, meaning or growth possible.
