Maybe we should have started with a definition of God. smiley face.

Hehehe, indeed. Have you looked up "ignostic" ? =) You might find you'd fit quite nicely into what I used to call myself: a "spiritually inclined ignostic".

Yes, we are all energy and it is never destroyed or created, only transformed, quite right. The question is the arrangement of the energy. Complexity is the key. Our brain is the most complex thing in the known universe, and consciousness emerges as a property because of this complexity. When we die, our brains deteriorate and all that complexity dissolves... The relatively small amount of electrical energy that is required to run the brain dissipates and the biochemical reactions of our physical cells/atoms release energy in various forms as the body shuts down and begins to decompose. No energy is destroyed.

So that's the crux: You seem to see consciousness itself as some form of energy, when there's no evidence for this. What consciousness IS, is a famously hard question, but it might not be any thing at all. Just, like I said, an emergent property of complexity. It's like asking "What is red?" .. We all know the colour red when we see it but we know from science that things don't actually have colour. Or rather, colours aren't things that are somehow attached to their corresponding objects. Colours are a property of how our eyes interpret wavelengths of light.

As for the children remembering past lives, two things come to mind: Anecdotal evidence combined with confirmation bias.

Here's two paragraphs from this article:

The research into past life remembrance is surprisingly thorough. Stevenson spent half a century researching the matter through DOPS and several popular books. But like the work of Tucker, they immediately jump to a supernatural conclusion when so many other possibilities exist. Like a character in a Dan Brown novel, they never assess the evidence against their theories and mostly seem to follow their own beliefs to the wrong conclusions.
 
This is precisely the problem that pseudoscience feeds upon. When an anti-vaxxer sees that autism diagnoses have risen alongside distribution rates of the MMR vaccine, they skip mere correlation and jump right to causation. The dubious “confirmation” of Tucker and Stevenson before him not only lacks non-anecdotal evidence, but verges on wish fulfillment of two researchers desperate to prove something that would change how we view life, death, and the core theories that make up modern science.

But here's the thing: If reincarnation in some form is true, then science will possibly one day be able to explain it. But to simply believe in it because one likes the idea is, to me, silly.