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AGAINST REINCARNATION: If man was wholly rational he wouldn't have evolved and, in many cases, actually believed in the theory of reincarnation. For reincarnation is patently a superstition, and one, moreover, which would seem to presuppose that, once having left the body of a dead person, a highly-developed and self-motivated 'live' soul will eventually find its way back to the world via the vagina of a mother-to-be and, in forcing its way into her womb, somehow manage to link-up with the incipient foetus there only to reappear, some nine months later, in the guise of a new-born infant! Fantastic as that is, one has then got to stomach the even more fantastic outcome of the parents of this child eventually being able to recognize it as their own, to discern within and upon its face various traits of their respective physical and spiritual characteristics, and to thereupon consider it a legitimate extension of themselves.

Now if, as we were led to suppose, the child's soul initially came from elsewhere, the basic composition of this soul must surely be different from that of the parents' souls either taken separately or in combination - in fact, so different as to create a largely incongruous human being the heredity of which the parents would have considerable difficulty in claiming responsibility for.

But, of course, all this is absolute nonsense, the sort of intellectual nonsense so adroitly exposed by Bertrand Russell, and generally promulgated with the assistance of such pompous-sounding terms as metempsychosis and reincarnation, to the lasting detriment of reason! That mankind must ever succumb to illusions of one sort or another, we know only too well. But they must be illusions that fool even the philosophical inquisitors, not ones so well-worn and obviously vulnerable to rational criticism that we have no choice but to obey our intellectual conscience and sweep them aside in the interests of new truths.