Commenting on my letter in THE ISLAND of 24th July, reader Jagath Fernando in his letter on 9th Sept. says; ‘the tainted mind of Stanley speaks of only the misdeeds of the previous life’. I mentioned that, ‘it is unjustifiable for someone else to pay for my sins’, only to elucidate my point on the subject of retribution for sins of the previous birth. My belief in retribution is that, it should come within one’s life span, action and reaction being effected logically to the same person, without transferring to some unknown party, after death.

He says; ‘The person reborn will be yourself, in another form’, which, means that, ‘another form’ (someone else) will be born to fill my void. The ‘another form’ he speaks of, will pay for my sins or inherit my meritorious deeds, as the case may be, (the latter being like winning a lottery ticket). However, he had failed to answer my query: being obvious that I will not be born again, if it is in ‘another form’ that is born again, whether it is justifiable for that ‘another form’ (someone else) to be made payable for my sins, or acquire my meritorious deeds, for that matter.

Out of context, he mentions the case of ‘persons born deaf dumb or blind’, ‘which is the work of almighty God. He quotes a Christian priest having said that such persons are born ‘due to the sins of the father’. Here, the theory of the ‘previous birth’ does not come into play, ‘the sins of the father’ being reflected upon the hapless beings. It is seen that, the writer has one leg in Buddhism and the other in Christianity (that does not believe in rebirth), in his frail attempt to counter my arguments.

For my query, ‘if it is the persons who die that are reborn, how could one account for the increase in population’, he says that, ‘animals or ‘other spirits’ can be reborn as human beings’. According to his theory, one fine day, we will find that the entire animal population being wiped out, to accommodate the increasing human population, which is against the natural phenomena of life on the earth.

Buddhism is not a dogmatic religion, but a philosophy, a way of life, where one should be able to reason out and clarify ambiguous points. However, apart from personal brickbats, the writer had miserably failed to counter any of my arguments.