As you probably know by reading this site, I have some regard for Buddha, but not total acceptance of all he said or did.

Buddhism is generally associated with a similar spiritual view to Hinduism in that life is an endless cycle of reincarnation. It may surprise you that as a rationalist who sees this cannot exactly be true if referring only to this material world because it will eventually die. where will all the souls seeking reincarnation be then?

What I have come to see is the reincarnation is not all that incomprehensible or unlikely. Going back to what I have said elsewhere in the site, the human brain is a neural network which in our early years we begin to train. some of our brain may even learn in a self-organising way like, the software neural network developed by Kohonen. That is instinctively the genetic make-up we are born with begins to develop us without our control, (this indeed may explain how some creatures appear to behave the same as all others of their species without ever coming into contact with parents or siblings to learn from).

Thus reincarnation, regardless of your past life you are conscious of in the dream world of non-existence or death before reincarantion, may be strangely distracting because you enter, in any re-birth, a completely blank neural network which may follow genetically determined paths or have free will but be so blank that any memory of the after-life or a previous life is lost in the inordinately pressing task of learning how to comprehend the world around you in this new neural network.

As I have pointed out elsewhere in this site, God, gods or devils may also be hoping you do not sense anything else except your current new blank neural network ad the existence which it pursues

CONCLUSION: I used to be totally skeptical but now I acknowledge it is possibly less bizarre than many other faiths. It sounds absurd until you think that you enter a blank neural network and have to learn to master it. Easily inhibited you may never get a sense of a spiritual world, let alone that you had lived before.