SuttaCentral
I’m not a physicist, but I’ll chime in anyway. The best way to understand a concept is to start with a definition. There is a great definition of time in the first sentence of Wikipedia entry:
Time in physics is defined by its measurement: time is what a clock reads.
As I suspected, time was invented by Big Clock to sell more watches… 
Sometimes I think Buddhists get way too philosophical about the rebirth thing. The actual mechanism, substance, or processes are not described in detail by the EBT’s, but the texts are also not nearly as evasive as some people are about it.
There are hundreds of mentions of rebirth, all across the canon. Then there are all the mentions of other realms of existence like heavens and hells, and beings such as ghosts, devas, asuras, etc. That’s just the standard worldview of Buddhism.
In the EBT’s, there are people who do not believe in rebirth, but they are the non-Buddhists.
Finally, a conspiracy worth believing!
I agree. I think perhaps the best way of framing it is to say that the suttas provide a general hypothesis for understanding (i.e. in terms of causal processes rather than substance) and a method for testing the hypothesis: deep meditation and realization. If you don’t find the hypothesis plausible, then there’s probably a limit to how far reason can take you. And sometimes it’s okay to just accept that, shelve it on the “maybe!” list, and get on with things that matter to you.
I heard Ven. Bodhi say this, sounded legit but @Martin got me thinking with this (~same problem):
I spent some time last night reading up (Buddhist thoughts) on Choices, then remembered that free will vs. predestination is one of the most tedious debates known to humanity. It’ll all work out in the end.
Thanks for this reflection, Bhante. Everytime I hear about discussions concerning “rebirth”, I stuggle whether the translation of “Jati” and “Jatipi” into “Rebirth” is right. Can we be “born again”? Who is “born again”? Would it not be better to describe “jatipi” as “becoming”, then these debates do not arise?
Welcome to the forum @Don and thanks for joining in the conversation!
One quick thought I have is that it seems very certain that the Buddha and many (not all) of the enlightened (and not!) Disciples were able to see “their” past lives. So it seems to me the debate would arise regardless of how one translated.
OK. Thanks. Leaving aside the debate. Doesn’t “Jati” or “Jatipi” means just “becoming”, instead of being tied to “being re-born”. How can “you" be “reborn” when the Buddha said that all conditions are subject to change? Birth, death, birth is “becoming”, surely. How can “you" be “re-born”?
I guess that’s right. The only ones who haven’t got (even a subtle) sense of self (i.e. actually believe in anatta) are the arahants, and for them rebirth is ended. For the rest of us, we still harbor some delusion of soul and are hence reborn 
I recently started learning about Gnosticism, which was an ancient variant of Christianity that disappeared when the Catholics began defining various heresies and eliminating them from the Western Roman Empire. The Gnostics are pretty interesting to me, however, because they were part of the Hellenistic world, which at the time (1st-2nd c. CE) straddled the west and the east as a result of Alexander’s previous conquests. It’s plausible to me then that there may have been cultural exchange and influence on religious ideas in the Near East during the heyday of Buddhism in what’s today Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were at the time ruled by Hellenized local kings or by a Greek-ruled empire that spanned Persia.
Anyway, what made the Gnostics heretics was that they rejected the god of the Old Testament as a malicious tyrant who had created this world as a flawed and evil place. Basically, the God of Genesis to the Gnostics was akin to Mara to Buddhists. And like Buddhists and other Indian ascetic traditions, they considered this world with all its arbitrary evils and sufferings something to escape. Where? Well, they created an elaborate mythology describing a pure spiritual realm where the true God resided, who was the one who actually sent Christ to save us from the malevolent Old Testament God.
The Buddhists and Indian ascetics very much saw the situation in that light. The difference was that they skipped creating rationalizations like an abstract higher god or heaven that exists outside of this world. They were pretty unique in refusing to do that. They just said, “There’s an exit, take it. Don’t ask about it, you’ll just get confused.”
The concept of rebirth ties into this worldview by refusing to give us a natural exit. Materialists claimed that people just disappeared at death, and that was it, which would be exactly the same as escaping this world, wouldn’t it? Buddhists refused to believe such a thing was possible without spiritual transformation, so rebirth made sense to them on a deeper level than philosophy and rationalization. Thus, there’s no attempt to create such rationalizations until later on in history. We do see later Buddhists asserting mechanisms of rebirth, but not in the early texts.
In any case, I think it’s pretty difficult to replicate the way Buddhists saw the world without the tacit assumption of rebirth. The world is a place to escape, but what need is there to do anything if you automatically escape at death? For materialists, this isn’t a problem because they don’t see the world that way. It’s just what it is.
This has support in the suttas, though I’m unable to recall the exact sutta. The Buddha goes through the whole list of form & formless meditations, ascribing clinging to each with a particular plane of Rebirth. At the end Ananda asks about the rebirth of one who clings to Nibbana…such a one is reborn in the highest plane of neither perception nor non perception. But the one who has no clinging whatsoever is freed, he is not reborn and so achieves Nibbana.
middle of the night in my timezone…I’ll try n track down the sutta tomorrow. Or if it strikes a bell, I’d be grateful if someone would post the reference. 
Sadhu Sadhu Sadhu! Thank you so much, Bhante @sujato , for this amazing dose of Dhamma Sukha today 
By that same logic: There’s nothing about the word “soul” that makes it un-Buddhist or incompatible with the the normal teaching of dependent origination. It just means “the non-physical mind that reincatnates” which is pretty much how it’s described in the suttas. Historically, in the early 21th century, Amwrican and Australian writers tended to pretend that we live in ancient India and that the Hindu atman theory is rhe Western notion behind the English word “soul,” but it of course is not as no Western notion of “soul” has ever suggested that souls are unchanging or are “mere witness” that doesn’t participate in the deeds of the body.
Gnosticism borrows from Platonism (Plato taught reincarnation in the Phaedo dialogue) and Neo Platonism which is like Vedanta but explained a lot better as Greeks were better writers than Indians, tbh.
Intellectually, this make perfect sense to me.
The Buddha did teach rebirth.
But I’ve given up trying to understand intellectually what gets reborn.
Unless I practice exceedingly well in a future life, I may never see the evidence for myself.
What a mystery!
You mention a “non-physical mind that reincarnates”.
Where exactly is that described in the suttas?
What stops you from practicing exceedingly well in this life? 
Not much of this one left 
Is there a need to “believe” in “rebirth”? Since when did we have to “believe” in anything in Buddhism? I accept “rebirth” looking at the evidence that is available, particularly done by the University of Virginia.
You’ve got me, I concede. That’s the one answer I didn’t anticipate. I hope you will be able to use your time the best way possible 