Reincarnation And Resurrection

All concepts of an afterlife have to involve mental life after the death of the body.  Beyond this, and of course other than each possibility being consistent with the laws of logic even if they do not turn out to be true, there is great diversity in the form they could take.  As much as they might initially appear to overlap, reincarnation and resurrection have vital differences.  This post is not to explore which particular religious or non-religious philosophies allow or require an afterlife, which resurrection and reincarnation would be independent examples of.  The purpose here is not to delve into the specifics of, say, the Buddhist system of reincarnation or the Christian afterlife of resurrection to eternal life or eventual annihilation.  The nature of what each of these general categories of afterlife is must be grasped to realize where one differs from the other.

Reincarnation entails the migration, perhaps repeated many times across aeons, of a soul to a new body, one that might have a disability where there was none before, skin and hair of a different color, different natural strength or genetic circumstances, and so on.  While the mind that is reincarnated is the same (otherwise it would really just be new people being brought into the world), although it could hypothetically forget its past lives forever or until the memories are induced, one body is exchanged for another with every single death and rebirth.  It would be logically possible for this to happen across multiple regions of the same world or even across numerous planets or dimensions.  Either way, this is how reincarnation would involve multiple lives.

Resurrection is in sharp contrast with this because the same body from the previous life is restored.  What has died is brought back to life.  The mind and the physical form that it resided in are both returned to a living state together in the case of soul sleep or temporary phenomenological annihilation, or, in another version of metaphysical resurrection, a consciousness might exist without its living body after biological death and yet it at some point gets reunited with the very same body it already lived in.  The state of the body after it is given life again would also vary from one logically possible variation of resurrection to another.  For instance, it could be decayed yet reanimated, physically perfected in health and beauty, or reset to the same appearance and condition as at its death.

Still, it is not a novel body from another country, continent, or planet that one would be resurrected to.  One's own body from before would have to either somehow be preserved until resurrection or reformed to some extent after whatever disintegration has occured.  With reincarnation, one could even experience a new life as a very different physical creature altogether, with one's immaterial consciousness being confined to it as punishment or reward--or as part of an amoral, unguided process.  The word reincarnation means to be embodied again, and even though this would be the case with any resurrection, the word is also used to specifically refer to a consecutive set of lives where a person (or non-human animal) receives a body distinct from the last one each time.

Many afterlives are logically possible because they do not contradict logical axioms.  Among these are multiple forms of reincarnation and resurrection.  Whether any of them or some other kind of afterlife await one or all of us is uncertain, but what a given type of afterlife is and is not by logical necessity, and its metaphysical ramifications, can be known.  Thanks to reason, it is possible to know that a consciousness inhabiting distinct body after body and having its singular body restored to life, even if it means recalling its dispersed particles together, are not the same thing.  They have great similarities since both would be afterlives that feature bodily confinement in addition to some sort of continuation of consciousness (though there could be periods of unconsciousness between death and the next life).  They are also by no means overwhelmingly similar.