Indian Samurai इंडियन सामुराई

Helen, my son’s nanny, displayed her hunting skills the other day: she killed a huge fly, two or three times the size of a bumblebee, probably harmless but, when in doubt... PAF!

• My mother-in-law got a little upset: “But Helen, why did you kill this poor thing, it may have been a human being in a previous life.”
• Helen almost did another strike: “But what BULLSHIT (she is not scared of words this one)! What all do I have to hear? Humans reincarnated into flies? And what about ants then? You don’t crush them when they invade your kitchen? Besides, it is not possible that those billions of ants get all reincarnated into humans, otherwise we would be many more. In my religion (Catholic), we don’t get reincarnated, but if we were – who knows – we would reincarnate only into a human not in beetle... »
• My mother-in-law yet didn’t give up: “But there are more people who die that people who are born, so where do their souls go?”
• Helen ended the conversation with her legendary tact: “Nowhere.”
  

I had to check the argument of my mother-in-law’s argument, as it sounded weird to me. And indeed: 55 million deaths per year for 131 million births worldwide. If all the humans get reincarnated (the number of saints remaining still really really small), and into humans (let's leave aside the theory of karma which increases the probability of return on Earth as a frog if you behave badly), it leaves 76 million babies of unknown origin. So when you kill a mosquito, you have less chances of taking the life of a reincarnated human than of a future reincarnation as a human. And there again, the chances are very small - no one seems to have counted the mosquitoes (I tried anyway, in case where) but there are thousands of billions it's course. Their chances to get reincarnated beings humans are so infinitesimal. On the other hand, they do at least 750 000 victims a year.